And it’s not just us parents who are made miserable by our offspring’s online addictions. Earlier this week the NSPCC chief executive, Peter Wanless, warned of a nation of deeply unhappy children, due to “the pressure to keep up with friends and have the perfect life online ... adding to the sadness that many young people feel on a daily basis”.
Before you accuse me of being an appalling father (I do quite enough of that myself, thanks very much), new research by the charity Action For Children finds that a staggering one in four parents struggles to control their children’s screen use. We’re all in this together, it seems, which should be of some comfort. But the charity undermines its survey, in our house at least, by adding that a mere 10% of parents find it hard to get their kids to do homework (they’re having a laugh, right?), while 18% can’t get them to go to sleep at night....
