Children and screentime: Let’s get some perspective

Another week, another warning about screentime eroding children’s love of the outdoors, their sleeping and eating habits.

But is this really accurate? Are we really heading for a Wall-E world of blobby kids frightened of sunlight, hoovering up junk food and engaging only through chat apps?

No, I promise you, we’re really not.

For a start, groups like Woodland Folk are thriving, Scouts is holding strong.

But most importantly, we come back to that ongoing issue of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, doing nothing but staring goggle-eyed at the screen is a horrible limbo of a life. Dismal for adults, and way worse for children who are still developing their expectations and understanding of entertainment, interaction and learning to delay gratification and work for reward.

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And there are always extreme cases, but I firmly believe that most people provide their kids with a variety of experiences. Sometimes, and I include myself in this, we could do with a little more fresh air and a little less iPad Air, but there’s a sweet spot between screentime and the great outdoors.

There’s geocaching, which is tremendously popular worldwide and gaining fans all the time. It’s essentially a global treasure hunt, aided by GPS devices, that leads you to find little containers (caches) with things inside... There’s a great community spirit around people who take part, and some geocachers have played hide and seek across the world... but you can start easily in your local area by looking up a local cache on http://www.geocaching.com.

My youngest son would be permanently glued to his iPad if I let him, but he’s also incredibly interested in nature, little creatures, where things grow, why there are birds’ eggs on the floor sometime, their little zig zags evidence of a tiny chick bursting out.

We do nature walks, we spot things, we collect where appropriate (I have bags of chestnuts if anyone wants to make some stuffing...) and we identify. There are a couple of great apps that were recommended to me by a Quibly expert that I now use regularly and my son loves.

Flowerpedia (iOS) is £2.99 and means we can identify any flower we find. It’s like a reverse treasure hunt, and I love that he’s at an age where he can openly admit to how pretty a flower can be.

Bird Egg Identification Guide (iOS) is £1.49 and helps identify the discarded shells. We have A LOT of Song Thrushes around our way, I now know.

Screentime is certainly something most of us agonise over, just a quick scan of the screentime tag on Quibly reveals that all of us, even the most tech-head parents, want to get a balance.

But it’s not zero-sum. I’d rather my kids were learning skills like coding, making their own little films, writing stories in Scrivener and many more enriching, exciting and positive ‘screen’ activities than many less-than-savoury offline doings.

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I also feel that sometimes, snuggled up on the sofa, not a book or a leaf in sight, eating popcorn and watching Back To The Future is a pretty good way to spend an afternoon as a family. Let’s not make screentime a dirty word, let’s just make sure we pull on our wellies plenty of times too.