Children in England growing up 'sedentary, scrolling and alone', say experts
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Regardless, I feel that it the debate needs to be about what children are doing. Probably like many here I spent a lot of my childhood devouring technical content on the internet, which I would say has given me the chance to work on incredibly interesting projects (and make friends with people across the world). If I had been time restricted on my computer (and a lot of my friends were) it would have significantly altered my career trajectory.
If you are scrolling endless garbage tiktok or YouTube videos for hours a day, yes the utility is pretty low (though again, watching hours of trashy cable TV back in the day doesn't feel that different to me).
That doesn't mean that many won't learn and find out about their passions in a way that was unthinkable a few decades ago.
Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.
A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.
On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)
We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
I'd agree that (younger) children should have limits on social media - that's obvious for many reasons. But why smartphones in general? If they're reading a book or similar on it, what's the harm in that? My main point is it's not really the medium, it's the content.
I think it's the constantly available Internet in your pocket.
If you have a smartphone without internet and put 10 ebooks on it, that won't cause this kind of thing.
Though there are also much more addictive mobile games now, compared to grays ale snake we grew up with. The visual flashes and dings...
[0] https://washingtonmorning.com/2025/06/19/how-differently-tik...
I see plenty of parents (even amongst Chinese families) handing a smartphone to their kids to essentially sedate them instead of engaging with them.
Honor of Kings, Arena of Valor, and MLBB have similar dopamine rush cycles.
Heck, even a bland, aggravating, obnoxious, and stick-up-their-butt social media site like HN can induce similar cycles.
Smartphones are extremely powerful, but I strongly feel they shouldn't be in the hands of children at least until their adolescence - that way some amount of creativity is forced.
Ironically, Steve Jobs was himself a major proponent of how boredom begets curiosity and creativity.
The subcultures have already formed, died out, and formed into new subcultures multiple times already.
It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.
So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires.
Couldn't be more false.
it takes willpower, but it is possible to change. what makes changing difficult is lack of experience. it is difficult to choose what we don't know, and negative experiences push you away from trying something that everyone says is good but that you only had bad experiences with.
like if you had a bad experience making friends growing up then you will shy away from trying to make friends until you either push yourself to try anyways, or you make some friends by chance and realize that it is a good experience after all. the same goes for food, social media, and everything else.
Do you know how advertising works? McDonald's have spent an unimaginable amount of money to sway people's choices and absolutely need to share in the blame for the result of those actions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Forty-Three_G...
That's when kids start to do things without their parents, but don't have the means to engage in most activities. There are plenty of parks and public spaces in the UK, but there is only so much football one can do before getting bored. Most of them can't afford activities, and they are unable to partake in the British national sport (going to the pub). The only thing left is to roam around and be up to no good. In the end, staying indoors and exploring the digital world is the only way for them to experience the world on an equal footing.
It's a tough world for teens.
I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.
I would argue that that "antisocial behavior" is actually important for most people to be able to form and navigate authentic social relationships.
I don't think all the kids in my generation (X) were involved in tons of "sport, drama or other artistic or social endeavors", but at the very least they were "hanging out at the mall". Sure, some of that was getting into trouble, but I'm astounded by how much adolescence has changed since I was a kid. Like I see a lot of kids that very rarely "hang out", and I'd argue that social media/text communication is a very poor substitute for in-person hanging out.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants - the idea of state-wide mandated education was to ensure the Bible was taught and spread.
Education and public schooling are different things.
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
Sources:
- Public education rates worldwide: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.PRIV.ZS?most_rec... (okay, that's percent private, but subtract from 100 to get percent public)
- Australia historical religious affiliation statistics: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#By_countr...
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
Please tell us what country anywhere in the world in the past 200 years had an education system that was good, instead of bad. Please explain what the differences were.
Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?
* One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful.
* The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue.
* Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil.
That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.
how are you in finding friends? this sort of experience really ruins your trust in others. for you it's probably worse than for me.
i don't trust people to be supportive which limits most friendships to the level of friendly acquaintance. i always hope for the best but when they let me down then i just shrug it off as if i had expected it. that's the self defense mechanism i developed. (btw feel free to contact me at the email in my profile if you prefer to talk in private)
> As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life.
No. I can see you don't want to discuss in good faith, so I'll leave you to wallowing in self-pity. I was bullied at school too.
More than 400 playgrounds closed in England from 2012 to 2022 and annual park budgets have fallen
Why are they bouncing balls near/against a house? Probably because there aren't enough affordable, easy to access sports centres/playgrounds etc nearby. Plus helicopter parents afraid of letting kids out of their sight
Bouncing balls are low frequency noises and can drive someone insane and completely ruin the quiet enjoyment of their home. Those signs are perfectly valid to prevent anti-social noise pollution and prevent damage to property
Let's undo the austerity cuts instead of forcing people's property exteriors into make-do ball courts
Is that so easy to do? The economy that fed the investment governments isn't there anymore.
That still doesn't make it ok to drive people crazy in their homes. We do still have plenty of playing fields etc where they can take their balls - it's on the parents
Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
And screens are easy.
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
Huge improvement all in all
That's not an improvement at a societal scale, that's the thing. Without those in working age actually working and generating economic activity, the system becomes nothing more than a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Capitalism, especially modern rabid capitalism, depends on the illusion of infinite growth - an illusion that can only fail, given modern demographic trends and resource scarcity. And it is completely unsuited for the coming era when a lot of work will be done outright by machines.
Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?
Because continental philosophy in the wake of the world wars has alerted us to the fungibility of every asset class regardless of abstraction, all kinds of religiosity and spirituality have declined. Schumpeter, Buffett, Fisher and Derrida are all in agreement that this is all there is and all there ever will be. This has produced an antithesis in the public mind to value quality over quantity.
In our rapidly changing economy, however, quality over quantity approaches lead to a lot of wait-and-see outcomes. If you can conceive of reproduction by people as a capital good produced by a business then you'll be shocked at how well the notion of a capital strike fits the outcomes.
Basically, up until a few decades ago, it was the norm to have a lot of children - there was a lack of contraceptive options, access to abortions was highly questionable (and deadly on top of it, given the circumstances of back-alley "angel makers"), and most importantly it was the norm that quite a lot of these children would die from some sort of accident, pest or war.
Nowadays, financial and housing insecurity plus the demands of modern capitalism (aka, have a full school education plus an academic degree, so you enter the workforce at 25, not 15, any more) drive people to start later and later with finding partners, much less having children, so the "room for errors" is much less than it used to be.
And on top of that you got the horror stories of "child snatchers", pedophile gangs and knife-wielding immigrants that now make national headlines out of very individual crimes. It's hard to attempt to raise your child in the open when every newspaper shouts at you that THEY are out there to GET YOUR CHILD. The rabid fearmongering has gone completely out of control.
Really? I grew up smashing rocks with hammers, throwing rocks, putting insects in boxes and watching them interact, digging holes, climbing anything climbable. Perhaps the screens are just killing imagination and offering too good an alternative.
There is no outside.
And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.
Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.
People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
It may be worse for a rural kid. All that countryside that surrounds you is private farmland. Of course, now and again, you trespass and earn stories of being chased off by dogs and puce-faced-shotgun-wielding arses but it's not your daily hang-out.
Truly public land (not just a public pathway) will be concentrated in nature-reserves and odds are it will be out of reach except for special adventures.
The village-kid hang-out is typically "The Village Rec" (recreation ground) but if you live in something less than a village, i.e. random splats of houses between villages, you end up living half your life at a bus stop waiting for the mercurial 2-hourly bus service before you can even see another human face.
Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years.
(A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.)
To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
I'm not going to do that, unless they explicitly ask. Would rather multi-sport and have them try other things including music.
Even if there is a motorway in the way there is often a bridge or some kind of underpass.
In urban areas there is usually a park/playing field 5-15 minutes away
Also, obesity is apparently the new norm, and I guess we got used to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have huge negative impacts.