Jayne Dowle: Limiting the time your children spent online is counter-productive to their future

DO you know what coding is? My daughter, Lizzie, who starts secondary school in September, certainly does. What's more, she knows how to do it. I overheard her telling her older brother, with a certain sense of glee. I hope those teachers are ready for her.
Limiting time online is counter-productiveLimiting time online is counter-productive
Limiting time online is counter-productive

I’m very proud, to be honest. Coding is basically the building blocks of computer language. Being able to write code gives an individual power to unlock, understand and shape the internet. It was an obsession of Michael Gove. When he was Education Secretary, he was determined to put the subject on the primary school curriculum. He was right to do so.

I’m not surprised that Lizzie has such an interest. All those hours my daughter has spent on the internet since toddlerhood have not been wasted. Her fascination with surfing everything from the building blocks game Minecraft to American shopping sites has gifted her with a thorough grounding in the ways of the web.

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Yes, I am that bad parent who allows free rein. In fact, as I write, Lizzie is searching YouTube for music to choreograph a dance to and her brother, Jack, is on his PlayStation setting up his FIFA 17 teams and expanding his unsurpassable knowledge of international flags and football strips.

Hesitate before you criticise. If anyone can come up with a more interesting way for either of them to pass a few hours on a rainy morning in the middle of the summer holidays while their mother works, I’ll be keen to hear it.

I’ve always argued that technology empowers my children to turn their dreams into reality. Indeed, I wish it had been around when I was young. It would have made growing up in a small town with not much money and one record shop a lot more exciting.

I’ve never set any boundaries or time limits, except putting in place a parental control to ensure that neither of my two can access any websites with dangerous or disturbing content.

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Therefore I’m certainly not going to be subscribing to the new “Digital 5 A Day” campaign launched by Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, who is on the warpath to control the amount of time young people spend online.

Her aims are fair, to be honest, but her campaign misses the point entirely. She compares developing digital skills to indulging in sweets and junk food. May I say that this is a typically English attitude, riddled with guilt and driven by fear.

Here’s a thing which, by its very nature, has no boundaries. The internet is limitless, its possibilities infinite. It is wrong, philosophically, to tell children that it must only be sampled in short bursts at a time or in certain ways. This approach is counter-productive and restricts their curiosity.

Rather, I’m going to become a cheerleader for Robert Hannigan, the former head of Britain’s electronic surveillance agency at GCHQ. He’s making me feel a whole lot better about my poor parenting skills, for a start.

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And he’s also making a very serious point when he says that modern children must develop a symbiotic relationship with the digital world. As he puts it: “If you are spending a disproportionate amount of your holiday unsuccessfully attempting to separate your children from wi-fi or their digital devices, do not despair. Your poor parenting may be helping them and saving the country.”

He laments the limitations the British impose on their offspring through misunderstanding. He also questions where the next generation of engineers and computer scientists is going to come from when parents are so frightened of a cheeky clip of a celebrity on Facebook they panic and impose a blanket ban on all technology.

He’s right when he says we have to encourage our children to learn how to explore and take things apart. This is the way that they learn. And having cyber skills doesn’t preclude taking what’s learned online outdoors into the fresh air. Have you ever seen a group of youngsters making a film on an iPad and revelling in the creativity of it all?

As the mother of a digitally-savvy girl, I’d also add that we need to challenge the geeky, swotty stereotypes which still surround the world of technology. Is it any wonder then universities struggle to reach their targets to recruit young women to science, technology, engineering and maths degree courses when the whole area remains characterised by embarrassment and excuses?

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Not every teenager with their head currently stuck in Instagram is going to grow up to become a techno-hero at GCHQ. However, I can guarantee that they will all grow up into a world in which it is impossible to apply for a driving licence, pay taxes or register to vote in a General Election without knowledge of how to navigate the internet confidently.

Do you really want your own child to be left behind while you fiddle about with the egg-timer?