sheer boredom, I would often end up picking up a book. For today’s children, there’s really no need to develop a love of reading, because if streamed TV doesn’t provide constant entertainment enough, there are a host of other screenbased distractions to choose, from the compulsive pleasures that are Snapchat and Instagram, to online gaming.
We’re all addicted to our screens, said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. I can lose hours browsing the John Lewis website and I know people who won’t book a campsite if it doesn’t have a signal. Teenagers stay up until the small hours, “liking” their friends’ carefully curated social media pages; and even when they’re having dinner together, they’re on their phones, “each wordlessly messaging someone else, laughing at different jokes”. Of course, parents should restrict their children’s screen time, but it’s not easy. To limit their access to the internet is to cut them off from their peers – and risk a fight of epic proportions. It won’t even always solve the problem. A friend refused to give her 12-year-old son a smartphone – “so his best mate kindly showed him violent porn on his”.
Gaming is the new battleground, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. If you have children, you will have heard, for instance, of the Fortnite games (and if you don’t, you may have seen children doing
The Floss, the frenetic dance move performed by its avatars). An adrenalinepumping survival game,
Fortnite is very violent (you are parachuted onto a cartoon island, where you must kill everyone you meet), but it has been stripped of gore, to win a 12+ rating. It’s free to download and is clearly designed to appeal to children, yet has a host of habit-forming features. You can play in a team with friends, talking to them over a mic, and the action unfolds live, in fast-moving contests involving up to 100 players. With an element of luck involved, the temptation to keep playing, in the hopes of a win next time, can be intense.
Stories of children sneaking out of bed to play all night are legion; one nine-year-old reportedly wet herself rather than stop playing to go to the toilet. Cases of serious addiction are rare, said Lisa Damour in The New York Times. But even among apparently unharmed children, there is a risk that once they have experienced a digital world as exciting and engrossing as Fortnite’s, their real lives seem dull by comparison.
