WHEN I was a child, the only screen time we got was 45 minutes of kids’ telly after school each day. That was our lot.
The rest of the time we spent outdoors with our mates, eating around the dinner table with our families then being packed off to bed with a book.
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Childhood today is a very different experience. And not in a good way.
Kids now routinely go from dawn to dusk — and often into the early hours of the morning — with their eyes glued to a digital world on a small rectangular screen in their hands, instead of playing outdoors and interacting with other human beings in real life.
When they’re not watching silly antics on YouTube, or being exposed to the darkest porn and violence, they’re scrolling through social media desperate for “likes” and being inundated with damaging messages about self-harm, suicide, anorexia and trans ideology.
Instead of watching Blue Peter, our girls are told that selling their bodies for sex is empowering and our boys are listening to the misogynistic hate pedalled by Andrew Tate.
READ MORE JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER
So, is it any wonder that parents are calling on politicians to do something about the scourge of mobile phones and, in particular, social media platforms to prevent harm to the nation’s children?
Now Peter Kyle, the Digital Secretary, has said he is considering bringing in the online equivalent of the 9pm TV watershed for children to tackle online addiction, with an evening curfew imposed on child accounts.
This follows on from the Online Safety Act which requires tech firms to carry out robust age checks and block algorithms that direct harmful content to children.
That is all well and good but there are plenty of tech-savvy kids who will find their way round those rules and the billionaire owners of social media platforms are not going away any time soon.
Of course parents can’t stand over their kids 24 hours a day to check what they are looking at online.
And only the coldest-hearted could ignore the pleas of the parents who have lost their children to suicide thanks to evil social media algorithms that value clicks above child safety.
Yet while we all agree that Something Must Be Done, the question still remains as to who should be doing it.
Is it the social media companies who must change their algorithms and stop pushing harmful content on to our kids?
Is it the Government who should bring in laws to force the likes of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook to change their ways or face multimillion- pound fines?
Or should ministers prohibit social media for under-16s, or even ban smartphones for children altogether?
Harmful content
Is it the schools who should be responsible for educating youngsters about the risks posed by their phones?
After all, we have outsourced feeding our kids breakfast and cleaning their teeth to teachers, so why not everything else?
Or does the job of protecting our children ultimately come down to us, the parents?
Shouldn’t mums and dads step up and, well, do their job of parenting?
When social media first launched, no one knew just how addictive it would be.
But now we do know just how harmful it can be, is there really any excuse for failing to take action to protect our kids’ young brains?
There are no seven-year-olds who go out and buy their own iPhones. It’s parents who choose to give their kids screens not books.
Stop blaming the social media billionaires, the influencers and MPs.
Julia Hartley-Brewer
And while it is hard for parents to impose strict rules on social media use when their child’s friends are left — quite literally — to their own devices, that can’t always be the excuse.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a family sit down at a restaurant table only for both parents and young kids to get out their phones and sit in silence through the entire meal.
Shouldn’t that be seen as something as shameful as handing your child a shot of vodka or a cigarette? After all, it’s probably about as damaging.
Parents, and politicians, who think that social media is the problem are missing the point. The problem is less about what is on our children’s phones than the phones themselves.
They have become electronic babysitters for parents too tired, stressed or lazy to spend time with their own children.
Stop blaming the social media billionaires, the influencers and MPs.
The solution to this problem is in our own hands.
Parents need to turn off their kids’ phones and start parenting again.
ALWAYS PROUD TO FLY THE FLAG
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I’VE never met a politician who doesn’t love a flag.
But it was a surprise to discover that Sir Keir Starmer is such a big fan of the St George’s Cross as he urged us to reclaim and unite around the England flag on St George’s Day.
This is, after all, a man who is embarrassed by our nation’s past, ashamed of our present and believes our future is only worthwhile if we abandon our own culture and open our doors to the rest of the world.
A Prime Minister who has removed the portraits of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and Gladstone from 10 Downing Street is not a man who is proud of what his flag stands for.
I suspect that Starmer, like his Islington dinner party chums, would be much happier waving the blue and yellow stars of the EU or the Pride rainbow flag than the symbol of his own nation.
Unlike the PM, most of us are proud patriots who understand the unique value of our nation’s history, our culture and our values both past and present.
The English don’t need to reclaim the England flag, because we never lost it in the first place.
AFTER six days of silence, the PM finally told us that he welcomed the Supreme Court ruling that a woman is defined by her biology so a trans woman is NOT a woman.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked Sir Keir Starmer to apologise for his stance on trans issues at PMQs, and asked him to accept that he was wrong to have said, only a few years ago, that trans women (ie. men) are women and that 99.9 per cent of women didn’t have a penis (which meant that 0.1 per cent of us DID).
He wouldn’t say sorry but he apparently now accepts that those statements are not true.
The one question no one has asked the PM is WHY he has changed his stance? Why would the Supreme Court judgment change his mind on such questions?
Did he EVER really believe that? And if he didn’t, why did he tell us he did?
Anyone who claims that trans-identifying men are women is clearly either delusional, stupid or a liar. So my question to you, Prime Minister, is this: which one are you?