Are young children being harmed by the new digital era?

It has become apparent over the last few years that digital technology plays a huge part in children’s lives. Most children have mobile phones, tablets and now watches where they can encounter a new world whenever they want.

Working in Early Years it is clear that children entering the school system are seemingly not ‘school ready’. Every day, I read posts on social media regarding this and 9 times out of 10 digital technology is given the blame. One of the challenges in the classroom I have noticed over the last couple of years is that children's communication and understanding of vocabulary is changing. I began to wonder why. Is this change down to Covid, parents, schools or just a change in societal norms for young children? I appear to not be the only practitioner thinking this. Lots of posts I read on social media are making the same point and the majority lay the blame squarely at the door of technology.

A report by Gould (2025) stated that teachers were now seeing children entering school with poor speech skills and that there was a decline in reading skills this reports corresponds with what I have been witnessing recently. I have seen first-hand that parents’ interactions with children on the playground have changed in recent years. Parents are pre-occupied with phones, they then hand the phones to the children and off they go at times barely speaking a word. I witnessed a mum in the local supermarket take her mobile of her child who promptly started screaming, she kept apologising (she needed to pay) before handing it back. I see parents with children in pushchairs wearing earbuds, so they are busy listening for themselves and not conversing with their children. It was at this point I decided to do some research and dig deeper to see if living in a digital world was having a detrimental effect on not only our children’s communication and language skills their well-being too. Research undertaken by Ofcom in 2023 discovered 87% of 3-4 year olds were accessing online content, via a tablet or a mobile phone (Early Years Alliance, no date). However, small children need to learn how to access a digital world and in turn require adult support to do so, surely now is the time that we need to mitigate the risks to small children and teach them how to access a digital world safely.

I began my research by examining the Early Learning Goal results for the previous three years Children in Reception need to gain a Good Level of Development by achieving their Early Learning Goals. Out of the seven areas, Communication and Language stood in fifth place and Literacy in 7th place (Gov.UK 2024). However, when you look behind the headlines and break the figures down even further it shows that 79.3% of children attained a GLD in communication and 70% achieved the ELG for Literacy in 23/24 which actually isn’t as bad as the headline suggests. At this point I began to wonder if digital technology was the cause of any issues at all to children and whether it was just an easy option for the older generation to find fault with. The world moves on, society changes. This will continually continue to happen again and again and again. It is easy to say back in my day; however, we have to look forward and not back. We need to embrace what we have now. It is not just children who are having to face new challenges parents are too. No longer is it deemed acceptable to be a stay at home parent, you should be out working and contributing to society, sending your children to child care. Sure Start Centres for supporting parents and children are no longer there. It is no wonder that parents rely on technology when they are busy trying to hold everything together. Maybe children are beginning school with the same skills they have always had and it is no different, what has changed is that it is now easy to jump on a bandwagon and believe what you want to believe and see what you want to see. I have had to change my own mindset and now appreciate we could possibly be doing our children, our future generation, a disservice by not becoming more knowledgeable ourselves about the digital era.

Flewitt et al (2024) discovered the majority of children in the United Kingdom access highly technical environments from birth. When they interviewed parents for their research the parents believed technology was now part of our culture and embedded into children’s everyday life. This is true, far more so now than ever before. I was listening to a speaker while accessing an online course regarding digital technologies and she quite simply stated that adults are far more afraid of technology then the children. It was at this point that I understood it was me who needed to change not the children.

Play Matters (2025) suggests approaching the use of digital technology by using a play approach with adults modelling the skills and language needed for children to not only embrace the understanding of the technology but how to do so safely for them and their peers. This makes sense, technology is not going away, in fact, it will probably become far more proficient and evolve time and time again. We now need to keep pace and change our mindsets for the benefit of the children. As adults we must ensure we understand and acknowledge both the positives and negatives of digital technology, including considering screen times and the effects on development. Nobody is saying that this will be easy, digital technology is not one of those fads that comes and goes it is here to stay and we have to put the effort in to ensure we keep up to date with research and understand ourselves the world that the children now live in. I have arrived at the conclusion that digital technology is only harmful, if we, as adults allow it to be.

In my classroom at the moment, we are learning to embrace the new and merge it with the old. In my opinion there is room for both. We are learning together; the children are teaching me and I am teaching the children. Working simultaneously as a team just how classrooms should be.

Marie Hales