Term 1 has been very full but seems to have gone so quickly. It was wonderful to see so many of our families spending time together on Sunday at the Cultural Festival, making new friends and experiencing the many traditions of our school community.
On a darker note, there has been a lot in the media recently about the dangers of social media addiction for young people following a landmark ruling in the United States. Big Tech has, for the first time, been found liable for ‘deliberately and knowingly designing addictive products’. Recent experiments have been conducted in which children who innocently sign up to social media platforms are being presented with material about eating disorders, sleeplessness, paranoia and other mental health issues that they did not seek, within hours or even minutes. The ruling suggested that this material is deliberately served up by algorithms to engage the minds of young people because of its shock factor.
Sapiens Labs recently undertook a study that identified four factors that predict the generational decline in wellbeing that we are currently seeing in young people:
- Diminished family bonds
- Diminished spirituality
- Increased consumption of ultra processed food
- Smartphones being introduced at increasingly younger ages.
I hope these upcoming holidays provide an opportunity to address the first of these issues. At school we are providing a strong spiritual basis for our students which addresses the second, and many of you will have your own faiths and philosophies which help with this. Our healthy, wholesome lunches go some way to addressing the third factor, and the dangers of overly processed diets are well known to you.
Under the fourth contributing factor, we could include excessive screentime and unregulated access to online material and communications. As parents, it can be difficult to deal with the societal pressures to allow more and more access to the online world at younger ages. What we can do is make a stand for the future benefit of our children.
The most important thing is that you decide when your child is going to have screen time. They should not decide this for themselves but should come and ask to be given a time limit. For older students, we advise that you use the tools the school has provided to monitor what your child is accessing online and for how long. Furthermore, I would highly recommend no devices in bedrooms – simply make it a rule that they only use phones and other internet capable devices in the public parts of the house. Do not give in to the idea that you are ‘restricting their freedom’ by not giving them unlimited access to online material. At some point they will inevitably have this, but it should be when they are mature enough to deal with it.
Perhaps this is a rather morose note on which to be finishing the term, but the holidays are such an important time for family connections, time in nature and useful occupation in activities that nourish mind, body and heart. Let’s not allow tech companies to steal away this valuable opportunity to be present.
I wish you all the best for a peaceful and happy Easter break and look forward to meeting the children again in Term 2.
