Nursery World - Brain drain

'Toxic childhood' campaigner Dr Richard House argues that urgent action is needed to transform children's lives before the damage becomes irreversible Grave concerns about childhood, and what educational practices and modern technology and modes of living are doing to children, have recently seized the attention of the mainstream. There has been an overwhelming response to the letter published on 12 September in the Daily Telegraph and signed by more than 100 academics, professionals and educationalists, including myself and Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood (see 'In my view', 21 September).

Grave concerns about childhood, and what educational practices and modern technology and modes of living are doing to children, have recently seized the attention of the mainstream. There has been an overwhelming response to the letter published on 12 September in the Daily Telegraph and signed by more than 100 academics, professionals and educationalists, including myself and Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood (see 'In my view', 21 September).

One of the letter's most prominent signatories, Oxford neuroscientist Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, had already written some years ago of an increasingly ubiquitous information technology that might entail profound long-term risks for children, including 'the potential loss of imagination, the inability to maintain a long attention span, the tendency to confuse fact with knowledge, and a homogenisation of an entire generation of minds'.

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