Áilín Quinlan: Swap kids’ phones for books... their wellbeing depends on it

Now here’s a really great idea.

It’s infuriating the way Ireland and the Irish government can slavishly follow unsuccessful or even downright crazy trends from Britain and the USA (one example is the push to make school toilets gender neutral, despite this policy’s glaring lack of success for glaringly obvious reasons).

But there’s a really fantastic British initiative which we would do well to emulate, because it’s driven by a frightening situation which - there can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever - is being faithfully replicated in this country every day.

Medical experts in the UK have declared a ‘public health emergency’ over the negative effects that screen time and damaging online content is having on children.

They say hospital emergency departments are dealing with some horrific cases of sexual injuries - primarily because of what children are reading online.

We can take it as read that if the impact of phones on the children of Britain is so dreadful that it warrants being declared a public health emergency, it’s the same here.

Now here’s the thing.

A short time ago, a UK newspaper launched a ‘Get Britain Reading’ initiative which aims to combat declining literacy by encouraging people to commit to, for example, reading for 10 minutes a day every day for six weeks.

The campaign is supported by famous people, like the authors JK Rowling, Lee Child and Quentin Blake, by Mick Jagger - and also by the British government, which, in response to revelations arising from the drive, has allocated extra funding for libraries in second-level schools.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has thrown his weight behind it, as have the likes of authors Jacqueline Wilson, Marian Keyes, and Philip Pullman.

You’d have to be hidden in a cupboard with a duvet over your head not to realise the devastating effects that technology is having on everything, from children’s attention spans and empathy levels, to their imagination, creativity and stickability where tasks are concerned.

Not to mention the negative effect on their mood and their world perspective.

Research shows a significant drop in the number of children reading for pleasure or, even, owning books and there’s talk of how the growing normalisation of the ‘easy’ digital entertainment offered by social media and online games is competing with traditional ‘deep reading’, which will potentially bring us into a ‘post-literate society’.

We need a really big national campaign like this here in Ireland. We need a strong drive to bring reading and books back into the heart of the Irish home.

We need a drive that will clearly show parents how important it is to read to children, and then to encourage them to read, not just when they are little, but all the way up into the senior classes of primary school and beyond.

We need to explain to parents the value and benefits to children of reading books, and outline to them the very real harms involved in handing children over to the easy entertainment offered by technology.

Such a campaign needs to be focused. It needs to be community- based. It needs to be national. It needs to be funded. And, yes, it needs to talk directly to parents.

There can be no copping out by handing the responsibility for this over to the schools or the HSE. It’s parents who need to take this on board in the home.

There are lots of supports out there for reading already. Ireland has a great network of libraries with fantastic, really committed Children’s Librarians. We have Children’s Books Ireland. We have book gifting schemes. We have Ireland Reads.

A study led by DCU- has found that early reading to children and the availability of books at home are linked with reading success in primary school six years later.

Research also tells us that children who read for pleasure do better in school, do better in life, and are, by and large, happier than those who don’t.

But the number of children and adults reading for pleasure here is still dropping. Book ownership here is falling.

More than one in five Irish children under the age of four are not being read to.

More than one-fifth of parents in Ireland with children under the age of four have indicated to researchers that they do not read to their children. Nearly a quarter of all teenagers aged 13 to 18 don’t read for pleasure any more.

We need to bring all of these schemes together, along with community-based information sessions for parents in one big government-backed and funded initiative to Get Ireland Reading Again.

We need to emulate the UK in this laser focus on reading for pleasure.

We need a campaign which is visibly supported by the government to drive the importance of children reading for pleasure in the home and of parents reading to their children.

We need to get through to parents about the real, hard benefits of reading, and the real, hard harms involved in too much time spent online.

We need to encourage them to start cutting back on their children’s access to technology.

As a society, we need to take those phones and devices away from children more - and, above all, we also need to acknowledge the importance of giving good example - so yes, we need to start reading more ourselves.

If we don’t, we’ll be the worse off for it.