Translation into English
When we were kids, we didn’t take melatonin to sleep. We left the house in the morning, and we only came back to have lunch, to then go back off to play again in the afternoon. We slept like logs after so much play that we didn’t even have any energy left to get up to mischief!! There was no homework, and all TV programmes were censured so we spent little time in front of the Google Box. My best childhood memories are when I played outdoors. It didn’t matter if it was five below zero – I still remember the intense cold of the wood that I went into alone, with the naked trees covered only by frost, and how my fingers froze; or the days of intense fog, playing hide and seek with my village friends; or the summer days, when I rode my bicycle for hours with my best friend, taking nothing but the clothes on my back and my bike. I didn’t have my mum reminding me to take water – when I got back, I would drink water or milk and a whole bottle if necessary, and I still remember the exquisite taste of that milk, so cool and healing, and so craved after many hours of thirst. We didn’t wear helmets, nor knee pads, nor elbow pads nor anything like it, and I still remember the incredible speeds that we reached, going down slopes without even putting our hands on the handlebar. I used to walk on two-metre fences and if I fell down into the nettles below it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, but nobody told me off, and I used to climb the three-metre wall at my house to lie down there to read, because my Mum, with five kids, didn’t know where we were most of the time, but the fact of the matter is that, nowadays, children hardly scale walls or climb fences or read. They were other times and, unfortunately, they will never return.
I think as parents, we commit the usual mistake of wanting our children to have the same childhood as we had, but that is impossible, because we live in a world of constant evolution. Children no longer read Enid Blyton and they couldn’t care less about ginger beer, gallivanting around in the sunshine, pirates or secret hideouts. Nowadays, they only want Harry Potter, whose scenes virtually all unfold in dark, sombre schools and castles, in which the leading characters scarcely see the light of day, and that is if they read the book, because most of them only watch the film, but it is an example of the growing trend of children to spend more time at home than outdoors. Now there are parents that tell me that their children have been diagnosed with Vitamin D deficiency and I ask “How is that possible in the country of sunshine?? Because today’s kids scarcely set a foot outdoors. Nowadays there are iPads, tablets and mobile telephones without any censorship, and it has been demonstrated that screens cause the same level of serotonin in a child’s brain as drugs do, and most of our children use their devices for longer than recommended. Screen use causes overstimulation of the brain, leading other activities to seem dull in comparison, and an increasing number of studies are linking early and excessive screen use to attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and autism, since the overstimulation of the brain caused by screen abuse directly affects a child’s ability to concentrate on more mundane tasks that provide them with less stimulation. This is why our children seem stunned and dazed, a little bit like the zombies of the fentanyl epidemic, slow and with difficulty to react, with their head lowered and their body bent, with their gaze almost always on their mobile phone.
Not to mention the horrific, devastating and incalculable effect of pornography on our youngsters, with some beginning to see rapes and paedophilia as early as eight years old. The Government fails to censor the networks because there is a multi-billion-euro business behind the content viewed by our offspring, so parents must censure screens because our children haven’t got the ability to process such disturbing images and our society is becoming sick and corrupted. Faced with our irresponsible governments, parents must place controls to block inappropriate content and limit usage time, and if they do not, they must face the consequences if their child is involved in a gang rape, because today’s youngsters are now struggling to understand what a healthy sexual relationship is when they are bombarded by pornography all day long. According to the studies, 10% of the population is addicted to pornography and our children could be among that 10% if we do not take measures. Soon people will be able to make love with robots and each advancement is a step backwards in our mental health, only bringing more loneliness and isolation.
Nowadays, when you observe a group of adolescents in the street, they scarcely interact, rather most of them are on their phones, and society is becoming more individualist due to technology. Young people are meeting up less often and are socialising more through online games or Instagram calls, because schools are giving increased homework, so they do not have time to meet up physically. In today’s world, children scarcely have any siblings, with one in three being only children, and the time children physically spend with their peers has fallen substantially, leading to a lack of social support, and the number of child suicides only continues to rise… Their iPad or their tablet has almost become their best friend, increasingly hooked on technology and disconnected from reality. Not to mention the dangers of the TikTok challenges, which have claimed many lives, cyberbullying, haters that flood pages with toxicity, and you only have to read the comments of your child’s class WhatsApp group to ask what has failed in our society and the way in which the children talk to each other, with swear words, insults, talking about raping a classmate’s mother and the child of the mother in question failing to react or become offended because they have normalised such toxic conversations. Moreover, there are minors creating WhatsApp groups with pornographic content, including classmates without their consent, and we are progressing towards a more violent and disturbed society, and many parents continue not to react. Even at school meetings, teachers talk to parents about how children are trivialising violence yet, even so, most children continue to have access to very harsh images that desensitise them more and more.
Parents are responsible for controlling their kid’s screen use but very few do so. When you go to the doctor, you see parents holding their mobile phone so that their baby can watch a film, forcing their sight with such a small screen, and their parent’s arm hurts from holding the phone for their child but, for whatever reason, they prefer that to having to interact with them or to read them a story. Or you even see babies or small children in their pushchairs, holding their parent’s mobile phone and I simply do not understand why. At hotels, instead of talking together and enjoying family time with each other, many children are eating in front of their tablets, and I simply do not understand why. And although my son and his friends play a lot with my young daughter, as soon as they receive a message on their phone, they suddenly forget about her existence and, needless to say, my daughter has fallen off the sofa and in other times, we need to ask if this would have happened…
Currently, social services are treating more cases of screen addictions than drug addictions. So what? Should we be grateful? In my opinion no, rather censorship and usage limits should be the order of the day, and many of them… Only China gets it right in my opinion. In the Asian giant, youngsters aged between 16 and 18 can only access Internet on their mobile telephones for two hours a day. Those aged between 8 and 15 are authorised to browse for one hour a day, and children under 8 years old, 40 minutes. Children do not control use alone and parents scarcely limit the number of hours their offspring devote to technology, or the content that they see, and our society is failing to respond to this problem. A lost generation, whose IQ is the lowest of all times because children scarcely read anymore and, yet, people continue not to react…
Furthermore, the incidence of cancer among young people is rising substantially. They say it is because their diet is increasingly Anglo-Saxon, but the Anglo-Saxons have always eaten badly, so we need to consider other factors to explain this trend, and one of them is that nowadays young people are doing a lot less exercise than before…
Today’s adolescents have become extremely sedentary and now their main activity is gawking at devices and, like any addiction, the more they have, the more they crave. A long weekend draws near in October and we talk to the kids about going to the beach in Valencia and about how marvellous the Valencia Science Museum is to visit and all we hear is: “But what do we care, we couldn’t care less about the Oceanographic”, as though it was another imposition and, needless to say, we decide to save the hotel and petrol costs because why are we going to spend money in times of crises only to hear our kids complain about how hard their lives are for having to spend a long weekend at the beach…
And moreover, an increasing number of laws protect children’s rights in this regard: that parents cannot fight with their kids to remove their phones, that they cannot look at their messages, giving more power to children in an area that they do not control, and increasingly taking away authority from parents in the snowflake generation, in which everything is done to overprotect children, and in which everybody makes me seem like a monster for removing my son’s phone in cases of bad use. “Don’t do it,” they say, “you’ll turn him into your enemy.” “Don’t do it,” they say, “they need it to contact their friends.” But he sees them every day and we lived without mobile phones and were perfectly happy! As this entire phenomenon is so new, psychologists are divided on the matter. All I know is that many kids get violent when their parents try to remove their phones, but not because they need them, rather because they are addicted, and an addict will protect the object of their craving with their lives. A study by King’sCollege London, conducted by psychiatrists, states that almost a fourth of young people depend on their mobile telephones to such an extent that it has set off alarm bells. The report explains that if they are denied access to their phones they may exhibit “violent” conduct or become “terrified”, just like an addict that is deprived of something on which they have a psychological dependence. The study also warns that this addiction has profound consequences for their mental health, informs the BBC. Some psychologists state that you should not remove their electronic devices while others say that parents must limit use time and contents to avoid addictions, hearing, sight and concentration issues, recommending that children have a maximum of two hours screen use a day. I believe in controlling use if you see that your child is not managing their usage habits alone, but when you are a separated mother like myself, and you remove devices from your child because of excessive use, and the father of your child then gives him new devices without your permission, in the end, you lose control at home, because nowadays the only way to make a child do something or listen is by turning off their devices. When a child watches a screen, they cease to listen and all communication is blocked, hence, it is necessary to block their devices if they fail to listen. The courts are full of cases of disagreements between parents regarding the use of technology, and there was even the case of a 15-year-old that reported his mother for abuse for removing his phone. Meanwhile, sexting, gang rapes and artificial intelligence involving manipulated images simply continue to rise exponentially. In Spain, an adolescent kills his parents and his brother because his mother has turned off the Wi-Fi for not studying – why would a child do such a thing?? Because he is an addict??!!
Frankly, observing the problems that I face with my adolescent son every day with respect to screen abuse, and that many parents experience, I would go even further than China and the new Catalan platform, against giving a child a mobile telephone before the age of 16, and I would not let any child use or have any electronic device until they reach the age of majority, which is the minimum age to smoke or drink, since all these items are highly addictive. We parents are the ones converting our children into little addicts. Many parents and social workers recommend not removing devices for fear of explosive reactions from minors and that is no good: no person has to have a mobile telephone and nobody should become violent if it is removed, and if they do they have serious problems, and this attitude that kids must be connected at all times to prevent anxiety attacks is not justified because otherwise we are creating unprecedented addictive behaviour. What’s more, as parents, we all complain that our children do not listen to us or pay attention and, at the same time, we are providing our kids with the means not to listen to us, so obviously we are the ones creating this divisiveness and contradiction at home, and it demonstrates the scant control that we have with regard to this technology problem which, in my opinion, represents the biggest challenge for parents in modern society.
Kids without screens platform
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