Early childhood has moved online. SEL maybe our best response.
by Nicholas Carlisle
Childhood is undergoing its most significant transformation since the industrial revolution. The advent of affordable digital devices and the connectivity provided by the Internet have resulted in children spending increasing amounts of the day in front of a screen. During this past year, childhood appears to have reached a tipping point. Before Covid-19, in more developed countries, 8- to 12-year-olds averaged five hours of screen time every day. By many estimates, as school went online to contain the pandemic, those numbers have doubled. The majority of the world’s children now spend the greater part of their waking hours interacting with a screen.
The surge in children’s screen time has been happening incrementally since the 1960’s. It is easy to be the frog in the pot of increasingly hot water that becomes increasingly discomforted but does nothing in response. (Legend has it that if you were to place the frog in already hot water it would immediately try to escape.) However, many of us at Karanga, especially those who work for children, are concerned at the unintended consequences of childhood transformed and taking it upon ourselves to ask the hard questions.
What happens when you put a child in front of a screen for hour upon hour every day?
Anything that you spend hours doing each day is going to have significant impact upon your life. Young children whose brains and bodies are still developing are even more susceptible to environmental influences than older children and adults. One of the most influential reports on the effect of screen time on children’s psychological well-being is a study by Jean Twenge (2018). This suggests that screen time beyond an hour a day is associated with reduced psychological well-being in children, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.
As parents, educators and policy makers what do we need to do to ensure children’s well-being in an online world?
Three years ago I invited twenty-five of my colleagues from the United Nations agencies responsible for children, from big tech companies and from NGOs around the world to join me in answering this question. We saw the extraordinary potential of the Internet for creativity, connectivity and learning. At the same time we recognized that it exposes children to the risk of disturbing content, unwanted contact and commercial exploitation. We met together in London for a two-day design session. We examined this question from many different angles, from regulation through to education. We recognized that the migration to online is not something that we have the power to reverse. We also acknowledged the need to address a digital divide in which 47 % of primary and secondary children do not have an Internet connection in their home.
Our recommendations were directed to the areas where we could create impact. (1) Reach children before the age of eight, when their online journey is beginning and when they are most responsive to learning. (2) Ensure that every young child learns the social and emotional skills they need for a connected world.
The launch of the Power of Zero campaign
Our London summit motivated us to launch a global initiative to address this issue. We formed a steering committee, comprising representatives from our founding partners: UNESCO, UNICEF, Hasbro, Facebook, and Microsoft together with NGOs from around the world. We named the campaign Power of Zero because the heart of our mission is teaching children to use their power well, with zero violence, zero hate and zero bullying. We set an ambitious goal of providing early educators and families across the world with learning materials, videos, books, and games to teach young children the skills and values they will need for this new decade. This truly is a collaborative campaign. Our success depends upon us all coming together to reshape early learning for a connected world.
Nicholas Carlisle is a member of the Karanga steering committee. He is a former barrister, child therapist, founder of No Bully and now CEO of Power of Zero. He can be reached at Nicholas@powerof0.org.