We are banning social media for under 16s. Apparently we’re doing this to give children their childhoods back, but when I think back to my childhood I remember getting home from school and doing 30 minutes of homework before heading off to have my quality time.
That quality time could have been building a sweet bike ramp with my pals or painting a picture of Judge Dredd in my room, or maybe playing computer games all night. Whatever I chose, it was my time to enjoy and I felt like it was just as important as school – it was free time to be a kid and to be creative or to just have fun and socialise.
I look at my teenage daughters now and I feel for them. I don’t think as parents we noticed the rise in pressure to do more and more homework after the Covid years but the amount expected each night has grown exponentially.
In the pandemic, a system was rolled out to have kids do their schoolwork at home in the form of the online test app Sparx. That was fine, even though some days it made life harder as a parent because you were trying to help do the online tests while also doing your work-from-home job.
The problem came when kids went back to school but the online courses remained in the form of homework. My daughters now do as much as two-and-a-half hours a night as well as revision for multiple tests the next morning. It often ends in tears because the questions don’t necessarily match up with what they’ve learnt in school, which means they have to sit looking at a complex maths equation when they’ve had no relevant lessons to learn it.
You would think that if it’s all so stressful then maybe just skip the massive amount of online homework, but the kids will then be punished and receive behaviour points which lead to detention or worse. It feels like we’re teaching our children that work doesn’t stop when the end of day comes and that your free time is actually still on the clock because there’s always more work to be done.
We’re ruining their childhood with multiple online mandatory tests that must be completed most nights and could well have the child completely stressed out by bedtime when they should have been out playing and having fun. Life is not all about exams and achieving grades – life can be creative and art, music, sport after school can lead to a different career path. I know this myself as an artist who makes artwork for this newspaper thanks to copying drawings of Judge Dredd as a boy.
If we’re really trying to give children their childhood back then we can’t just focus on taking apps like TikTok off them, we have to also cut down the online homework so that they have more free time to enjoy life beyond school hours. We have to remember that we made all of this tech and let our kids use it. We’ve created a generation that are far, far more advanced than we ever could be when it comes to life online but now we want to put the genie back in the bottle yet keep the endless amount of online homework.
All punishment and no reward will not go the way our politicians think it will. Our kids are already 10 steps in front of us with smartphones and tablets, and if we really want them to enjoy more free time away from screens then we have to cut down on online homework, too.
Wefail is a British political artist
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