Every Shade of Grey

Every Shade of Grey

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Every Shade of Grey
Every Shade of Grey
A Smart-Free Childhood is the Challenge of Our Lifetime

A Smart-Free Childhood is the Challenge of Our Lifetime

Katherine Ormerod's avatar
Katherine Ormerod
Jul 14, 2024
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Every Shade of Grey
Every Shade of Grey
A Smart-Free Childhood is the Challenge of Our Lifetime
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person holding smartphone
Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

‘When can I have my own one?’

‘Your own what?’

‘Phone.’

‘No time soon, probably never.’

(Short pause) ‘Is it because you’re addicted to yours?’

(Me inside) ‘Exactly’.

(Me outside) ‘I’m not addicted to my phone, it’s what I use to write on and sometimes mummy is on her phone around you as she is multitasking her job while being your butler.’

‘You should practise what you preach’. 
Mike drop from a six-year-old.

Good God, I wasn’t expecting this yet. I wrote a book back in 2018, Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life, about the perils of digital culture and how we could best navigate them. In its pages I covered some of the earliest research on how omnipresent connectivity was impacting our children and needless to say its findings were not exactly reassuring. 

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