Children in England growing up ‘sedentary, scrolling and alone’, say experts
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/11/children-sedentary-scrolling-alone-lack-of-play-england
Posted by pajamakitten
Children in England growing up ‘sedentary, scrolling and alone’, say experts
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/11/children-sedentary-scrolling-alone-lack-of-play-england
Posted by pajamakitten
24 Comments
Instead of banning “no ball games” signs, how about more youth clubs or investment into places they can play sports?
I’m not sure how we change this, it’s a hell of a lot easier to be good at football on fifa than it is to do it in real life. I’ve been a teacher for a long time and know my kids well, used to go and watch them play football on the weekends, been to cricket and hockey games, been to martial arts competitions to support, hardly ever do that these days because so few of them play for teams.
Both my kids are addicted to Youtube shorts and online gaming. I’ve tried to get them to visit the local playground more often but they always complain that there’s no-one there except for mums with babies. There’s also acres of sports fields nearby – also empty of children.
Hmm maybe there could be more funded clubs at libraries and they could be more like community centres.
Or maybe there could be more funded youth clubs.
Or maybe towns could be protected from retail rent becoming so high that every interesting/interactive business (cinemas, “gaming coffee shops”, bowling etc) doesn’t just shut down in a year and get replaced with yet another barber shop.
Let the outside become miserable with no point to it and you get people sitting at home. Who’da thunk.
Not mentioned, but I think key in early years is also if you want your child in a class (like a structured football team, music group etc) or doing an activity with some adult supervision the costs can be prohibitive! Around us, easily £15-20 per weekly session.
And with schools budget cuts, I wonder if there’s less focus on things that could be ‘fun’ to do with friends outside school– playing sports, art, music, drama clubs etc, so kids don’t feel confident or even know to ‘go it alone’.
Additionally (and guilty of this myself), as a parent I don’t have the time or money to be modelling the best example either— I’m not out there playing tennis with my friends once a week….. sedentary, scrolling and alone often sounds like a perfect evening post work!!!
Important to remember that this is exactly how big businesses want them. They can be advertised to their whole lives, and grow up developing behaviours that make them susceptible to advertising. If we are going to change this it is more about stopping our children’s interactions with private companies through their phones than the tech itself.
Most people are trash. What chance do their kids have?
It is from Guardian which promoted never ending lock-downs and masks……..
Growing up alone, how about we fix that by sorting out the cost of living and not requiring both parents to work, and pushing mothers to put their 9 month olds in childcare.
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I grew up sedentary, gaming and alone in the 90s so is it that different?
Is that not by design?
Is that not what people want?
Any children’s or teen resources have been NIMBY’ed out of.most places haven’t they?
Give it 15 years and children will be back in the work force if we follow americia dw
Trying so desperately hard with mine to get her doing more active fun pursuits and it’s so difficult. The problem you have is they refuse because of their screen addiction, but the more you push and promote your alternative, the more they resist. Until eventually you’re just forcing them to do something they don’t want to do. So even if what you are doing is “fun”, they won’t experience it that way and will see all future attempts to get them out of the house in a negative light as well. We’ve sleepwalked into this situation
Reading these threads is always like playing bingo to see all the usual excuses.
Lack of facilities, Covid/ lockdown impact, cost of living have all been mentioned already. Anything but a good old look in the mirror when it’s so much easier to blame anyone else
Tbh my teen years were no better. Summers spent playing on the gamecube or xbox and on the Internet. Also read. I didn’t venture out much.
We had LiveJournal, Bebo, msn, aim, MySpace, chatrooms and message boards tbh. They were all equally damaging. Had the same articles written about my generation too. Usually from the Daily Mail.
As a parent to a yong kid myself [6 years old] the problem here 1000000000000000000% is shitty parents who shouldn’t have had children.
For instance, my daughter’s infants school went on a trip to the zoo last year with me and several other parents as extra help. In the car park before we got on the bus, almost every single parent handed thier then 5 year old thier phone to watch on the coach journey. When during the journey two of the other parent helpers saw my daughter wasn’t watching a screen, they openly yelled at me, right to my face for “being abusive for depriving her of it”. Most of those kids also took said phones of the coach and kept watching them as we walked round the zoo, not even looking at the animals once. Several phones ran out of battery and the kids threw screaming fits about it, and when the teachers refused to hand over thier personal phones so the kids could keep watching, the same two patrents from before shouted at THEM for being abusive
edit: spelling
They are not alone. They are being raised by shrieking attention hungry strangers with flexible morals and zero ethics other than subscription numbers, in short form bursts of satisfaction.
My MIL used to do a lot of youth work which included youth clubs weekly across our county. Fast forward to now, only one or two of those youth clubs are still open, the others have shut down and been turned into something else and others have been knocked down completely and turned into houses. Then you have people on Facebook groups informing others of “group of kids hanging down this road” or “this park” so when kids are outside they’re treated suspiciously and sometimes confronted and asked what are you doing here?? I don’t know, maybe being kids and hanging outside at a fucking park Sheryl??
You have places with signs up saying no ball games, cctv everywhere, any place that could have been for kids or once was (like youth clubs) are long gone and there’s nowhere really for them to go. So we now complain that they’re always inside being lazy, playing on game consoles or their phones ? Honestly they can’t win.
The idea that banning smart phones would make all children go outside is horseshit. As is the idea that removing “no ball games” signs. The issue is the media intentional making parents believe that children aren’t safe outside.
Wow so much advice on how to parent kids under here from people who don’t have kids.
Ma nephew is like this. Only plays football at the weekend for his team, and it looks like he really couldn’t be arsed with it. Always on his PlayStation. Problem is all his mates are the same, so if his mum and dad were to kick him out to play he would be on his own. It’s a serious problem imo. Not just for health, but for social development too. Also i’d like to add, my nephew plays at this massive sports complex with about 12 football pitches and it’s always busy as fuck. Anyway, the amount of fat kids there is really eye opening
I was born in 1991 in the US but I imagine there are a lot of similarities.
When I was a kid we did some indoor stuff like play video games (N64) or computer games (starcraft/age of empires)
But a lot of our time was spent riding bikes around the neighborhood, going grabbing a few friends, playing basketball outside, playing on our local schools playground equipment, visiting each others houses, going to the local pool, going to gas stations and buying some candy but a lot of times just aimlessly riding bikes around.
I’d say by the time you could comfortably ride a bike on your own you were out and about a lot. So age 8 or so.
Seems like kids don’t do that type of outside “roaming” anymore.
Just spent hours outside and we didn’t have cell phones. Our parents just knew we would be back eventually (when we got hungry/hurt/bored/friends had to leave) and that was fine. We told them who we would be with and maybe had some light instructions about when to be back but sundown was a good rule of thumb anyway.
It was great.
I feel bad society seems to frown on that nowadays.
We were always out playing in the street and local area and out on bikes. Also played video games. It was a healthy balance. No smartphones back then though.
‘She reads, scrolling on Reddit alone in the morning’