Time to tackle techs exploitative relationship with our children
I always suspected that Id be one of those “cool” mums.
My children would be articulate and confident, and together with my husband we would empower them to be the best versions of themselves.
Then I actually had children.
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The reality is that I spend a lot of my time worrying and suspecting that everyone else is doing a better job with their little ones. One aspect Im increasingly worried about is screen time. Swing by my home and youre likely to see my children gazing at YouTube or Netflix while I read work emails and “1 click” stuff from Amazon.
Its small comfort to know that Im not alone. Over 80 per cent of two and three year olds have access to a tablet, and one third of parents with children aged five to 15 struggle to manage their childs screen time. Like many parents, I have mixed feelings about my kids relationship with tech – proud when they expertly navigate the iPad like the next Steve Jobs or Angela Ahrendts, but panicked at headlines screaming about bullying and grooming.
Through my work with the childrens charity 5Rights Foundation, I now appreciate that struggles between parents and children over screens are the result of a far deeper conflict between a system designed to be compulsive – worth billions to shareholders – and the rights and requirements of the young.
With 5Rights founder Baroness Kidron, I started discussing the legality of the strategies used by tech firms to keep us and our children glued to screens. We felt it was important that more parents are made aware of them.
Little tricks like the speech bubbles that appear when someone is typing make it hard to put down our phones as we anticipate their response. Notifications tap into our human instinct to respond to noise and light, a legacy from our hunter-gatherer days when we needed to quickly react to changes in our surroundings.
That is why last week we published our Disrupted Childhood report. It pulls together, for the first time, the wide-ranging research about these “persuasive design strategies”. It spells out the commercial imperative and considers the impact this is having on childrens mental and physical development. It delivers recommendations for the tech sector, the government, investors, and parents to help address this growing public health issue.
Thankfully, we are not alone. Only last weekend, the World Health Organisation listed computer gaming addiction as a mental health disorder, and a number of tech-insiders are now openly discussing their unease.
Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, has said of the site: “The whole thought process that went into building these platforms… was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?. God only knows what its doing to our childrens brains.”
The UK government has wised up too, and introduced a requirement in the Data Protection Act for the information commissioner to create an “age-appropriate design code”.
The code will take into account childrens development milestones and require the information commissioner to prioritise the “best interests” of children when considering what constitutes adequate data protection.
We hope that our report will join the growing body of voices agitating for change. No longer can tech companies continue to use these strategies on our children without proper transparency and awareness of what is going on.
Im going to try to have a healthier relationship with tech at home. Im switching off as many of the persuasive design features that I can. Ive turned off auto-play on YouTube, so the next video doesnt automatically appear. Ive also limited auto-suggestions so my children arent constantly being shown snippets of more content they are likely to want to watch.
And most importantly, Im trying to pick up my phone less.
Hopefully the result will be less tech tantrums – or should that be fewer? Yet another thing to worry about.
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