Something is rotten in the state of British schools. According to primary school teachers, one in four Reception students are not toilet trained, more than a third cannot dress themselves, and half cannot sit still. Children are missing a range of developmental milestones, increasingly demonstrating poor language skills, delays in basic motor functions, and a lack of core strength (there are stories of perfectly able-bodied children not knowing how to use stairs or hold a pencil).
Now a government-backed website, Starting Reception, has been created by a collaboration of early-years and education organisations to help define ‘school-readiness’. The idea is to outline key skills to parents that children should practise before school, such as taking turns, brushing their teeth twice a day, or using cutlery, and give them suggestions for how they can build these into their routines.
The examples may sound obvious, but there is an alarming disconnect between parents and schools in terms of what is expected of four and five-year olds. Nine out of ten parents think that their child is ready for school, and yet teachers report over a quarter of school-starters cannot communicate their basic needs or eat and drink independently. One poll suggested that less than half of parents think children should know how to use books correctly before starting school, which probably explains why so many children are swiping or tapping paperbacks as if they were a tablet.
How did we get to a situation where the state needs to tell parents, explicitly, that it is probably a good idea for their children to be able to recognise their name before they start school? It is easy to blame the pandemic, but the shoulder-shrugging excuse of ‘Oh, they are a Covid baby’ can only go so far. Lockdowns may partially explain why more and more children lack certain social skills, but parents suddenly being confined to home was surely the perfect opportunity to master other skills such as potty-training.
The answer is, of course, screen time. If TV was dubbed the ‘Square Nanny’ in the Noughties, occasionally babysitting children whilst parents prepared dinner or had a lie-in, then phones and tablets are the ‘Squarent’, replacing family interactions altogether. We have normalised a completely abnormal situation: in 2014, a third of pre-school children in the UK had their own tablet, which they used on average for an hour and 20 minutes every day, whilst in 2024 nearly a quarter of five to seven-year-olds had their own smartphone.
Parents are just as addicted: half admit that they spend too much time on their phones, and the other half are probably in denial. You see it all the time: a father sat down scrolling on a bench whilst his son plays in the park, a mother more worried about taking a photograph of her child for Instagram than engaging with them in conversation. One American study from 2014 observed 55 parents whilst they ate with their child in a fast-food restaurant: 40 of them were completely immersed in their phones, with some ignoring their children entirely. To compete for their parents’ attention, the children would act out or be noisy; the researchers noted that these parents were also more irritable or impatient with them in return.
This is not to completely vilify parents. Since 2020 the most common working arrangement for families has been both parents working full-time, with around 70 per cent of mothers with children aged nought to four in work. This may seem progressive, but most mothers return to work due to financial pressures, and would like to reduce their hours but can’t afford to do so. The result is a situation where both parents are exhausted, trying to juggle childcare and careers, and they know that the easiest way to placate or immobilise their children is to plonk them in front of a screen. The pull of this digital pacifier may be irresistible, but we must be upfront about the fact that parents give their children screen time for their benefit, not their children’s.
Parenting small children can be wonderful and life-affirming, but it can also be knackering, repetitive and lonely. It is all the more challenging without community support. The closure of Sure Start centres (a once vital source of help and support for parents) is regrettable, but the decline in the number of health visitors (40 per cent since 2015) also means more missed opportunities to see where children are falling behind. Many practices are running a skeleton service that struggles to check in with, let alone support, the increasingly complex needs of families.
In the meantime, parents continue to bury their heads in the pixelated sands of their phones, assuming things will get better in time once schools assume responsibility for their children’s progress. The damage to children’s development may be somewhat reversible, but the damage to parent-child relationships may not.
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