MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: A terrible danger lurks in every home - and we can no longer ignore it
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It is more than 70 years since children in the rich world began to turn away from outside play, or reading books, to passively watch screens.
It began with black-and-white TV. At the time, few thought this a problem – apart from the great poet T S Eliot, author of Cats and of The Waste Land.
He warned after a 1950 visit to the USA: ‘I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this pastime and especially about its effect (mentally, morally and physically) on small children.’
He called for an investigation into those effects before an expansion of TV here. He was ignored. What a pity that is.
The history of the world since has been the story of TV, and then smartphones, invading the lives of millions with seductive, habit-forming pictures and sound. They are often not as nice as they at first appear.
As the number of screens grows and restraints weaken, there is no real control over what sort of images these are, and an astonishingly large share of them is what our grandparents would have seen as sordid smut, or worse.
What Eliot was presumably worried about was the invasion of individual imagination by others’ ideas and the spread of conformism as everyone watched the same thing.
Since then, most parents have become equally concerned about the way screens keep children indoors, often alone, and abolish old-fashioned play outdoors.
It is more than 70 years since children in the rich world began to turn away from outside play, or reading books, to passively watch screens
But the huge increase in the danger of traffic, and widespread fear of sexual predators which exploded after the horrific Moors Murders of small children in 1965, has persuaded many parents that their young are safer indoors. It turns out they may have been mistaken.
Plenty of dangers now lurk in the apparent safety of the home. The Centre for Social Justice, in a new report ‘Relationship Recession: Pornography’, warns young men watch alarming amounts of pornography.
It suggests this is one of the reasons for a new chasm between the sexes, for relationship failure and for a decline in marriages in the 18 to 34 age group.
This coincides with a disturbing increase in the numbers of young men continuing to live at home into early adulthood, a striking social change.
As the report says: ‘Fifty years ago, most men were married by their 25th birthday. Today, as a young man approaches 25, he is 26 times more likely to live with his mum than his wife.’
The number of young married people in England and Wales has dropped hugely. Solitude has grown greatly.
Increasingly isolated teenagers now struggle with their mental health, seldom seeing friends or going out in the evening.
Working from home has become disturbingly common since the Covid pandemic.
Of course, there are many other things affecting the lives of the young. Screens and porn are not the only influences keeping the young at home.
But our culture has got itself into a mess and everyone involved – government, TV, filmmakers and social media – needs to worry about how to clear that mess up.
T S Eliot was dismissed because the danger he warned of was not solid and frightening enough.
Yet it has had very solid and frightening effects. We cannot afford to ignore it any more.
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