Today is World Book Day in the United Kingdom. The other day I saw a child under one year old in a buggy clutching a phone and glued to on-screen entertainment; it sounded like something from Disney. His mother was chatting to another nearby in the parents’ queue.
This raises the very topical questions: how much screen time to allow very young children? In France, they say no screen time for children under 2. On Mumsnet, there is much AIBU (Am I being unreasonable?) discussion about various family rules on screen time, which includes, of course, TV, computer, tablet or phone.
Screen time or reading time?
Families have been controlling TV time for children for over 50 years now. It was easy when the programmes were scheduled around expected family times: toddler time with Mum after lunch, then programmes for school children from 4–5.30. “Grange Hill” for example, the most popular series ever about life in school, ran for 20 minutes at 5pm every Monday. “Blue Peter”, the longest running series for children in the world since 1958, airs at 5pm on Fridays and with two weekend repeats. “In the Night Garden” aired by CBeebies is enormously popular internationally (as a good way of getting toddlers sleepy!). Families could easily schedule TV time for children: earlier in the day the TV screen was on test screen mode anyway.
Digital streaming is ousting traditional television
But then digital streaming enabled 24-hour screen time. Disney+ and Netflix, both subscription channels, are now often the preferred choice of children in the Anglosphere. Disney (which also has a basic subscription rate which includes advertising) has 100 million subscribers, while Netflix (which does not do advertising but has various add-on premium subscriptions) has 221.1 million subscribers. Many of these will be family subscriptions enabling their children to watch on tablets. This is what is now of concern to parents and teachers.
When screen time was only TV programmes, it was easier for care-givers to monitor what children were watching and interact with them while they were watching. This is not so easy now a child can hide under the bedclothes and watch anything they choose, controlled, maybe, only by the automatic settings keyed in by a vigilant parent.
Children’s programming victim of licence fee freeze
Now the BBC has announced that it is planning to close down CBBC by 2025 as part of the cost savings necessary because of the Government’s decision to freeze the licence fee. This means that the production of world-winning programmes, like Blue Peter and In the Night Garden, will cease to be made in the UK. The BBC says it wants to concentrate instead on digital content, presumably easier to sell on to subscription companies under licence.
Forget junk food; now it could be junk tv
This means that poorer families who cannot afford digital subscriptions will be deprived of high-quality British-made programmes. And those who can afford the subscriptions will find their children hooked on to US-made programmes, at worst with Barbie doll type heroines, and Rambo-style heroes. Just as the internationalisation of eateries (MacDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken) in fact means standardising the offerings to what sells most, the handing over of media to multinational companies probably means a take-over by North American cultural norms.
There are cultural reasons why some public subsidy for local media is important. It is not only a matter of saving jobs in the local creative industries; it is also a matter of ensuring a nation’s children are learning about their environment in their own language.
Quality, home-grown children’s tv in eleven languages
In the 1990s in South Africa, I admired the output of SABC for children’s programming, in several of the 11 local languages. On TV, even the children’s programmes, especially those in Afrikaans, often had excellent output that featured the local environment – the coasts, the deserts, the mountains, the trees and flowers specific to South Africa (which is, bear in mind, unique as the sixth botanical region of the world!). One wonders whether these wonderful national media offerings will now be swamped by the “internationalised” (aka American) digital content that children are now watching.
Back to the question of how much screen time children should have. There is an argument that it is actually easier for children over five to find age-appropriate programmes if they each own their own tablet, as opposed to younger children being forced to watch the programme preferred by an older sibling. Concerned care-givers can use parental controls to block off the inappropriate content, and can variously enforce total screen-time. On Mumsnet there are stories about how too much screen-time causes worse behaviour. For toddlers, too much stimulating watching near to bedtime results in difficulty getting to sleep.
Together time better than screen time
Much better for the pre-school child is for some interactive time with the care-giver. Reading a carefully chosen book together provides this. There can be page by page discussion, with the child learning language (and later reading) by following the story. It is not so easy to do this with material streamed on screen. In fact, I have never tried or seen anyone else do so with a small child.
So, on World Book day, celebrated in UK on 2 March, it is important to be grateful that the UK still has a network of excellent public libraries which provide for free the books that children need for their development. I just hope not too many families are negligently giving the library a miss while they allow even their toddlers screen-time while still in a buggy! I did not dare say so to the parent of the toddler I saw poring over her phone, but I actually think her child would be better off “bored” in the school queue, thereby forced to look around and see the actual interaction going on.
