Pressure put on the young ‘eroding childhood’

CHILDREN are being forced to grow up too quickly due to a combination of early testing in school, advertising, bad childcare, and a reliance on computers and television, experts warned yesterday.

The group of more than 200 teachers, academics, authors, charity leaders and other experts have called for people to come together to “interrupt the erosion of childhood”.

The group includes novelist Philip Pullman, Oxford University neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, and emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics Lord Layard.

“Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in outdoor activity,” they wrote.

“We call on all organisations and individuals concerned about the erosion of childhood to come together to achieve the following: public information campaigns about children’s developmental needs, what constitutes ‘quality childcare’, and the dangers of a consumerist screen-based lifestyle; the establishment of a genuinely play-based curriculum in nurseries and primary schools up to the age of six, free from the downward pressure of formal learning, tests and targets; community-based initiatives to ensure that children’s outdoor play and connection to nature are encouraged, supported and resourced, and the banning of all forms of marketing directed at children up to at least age seven.”

The letter, to the Daily Telegraph, comes five years after many of the same experts urged the government to stop children being poisoned by the modern world, leading to a Children’s Society inquiry into the state of childhood, which found rising levels of depression among youngsters in the UK.