Supporting Individuals
These are some of the people who share our concern about the issue and who want to help bring change.
"As a neuroscientist I am particularly aware of how the human brain will adapt to any environment in which its placed. Whilst this talent has enabled us to occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet it also makes us vulnerable to influences that may not have an entirely beneficial effect. In the developed world 21st Century technology is shaping an unprecedented environment that may well challenge the traditional developmental processes that characterise childhood. The cyber world whilst offering wonderful opportunities is also creating an environment that goes beyond merely a very worrying predisposition to obesity. For the first time young people could be living in a world that is answer rich and question poor, where incessant screen communication could reduce interpersonal communication skills and concepts of identity, and where obsessional gaming could have a significant effect on attitudes to risk. For this reason I am highly supportive of this initiative and consider the issue to be one of the most important facing not just educationalists, psychologists and parents but indeed, society as a whole."
Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology, University of Oxford
If print could scream, the words on these pages would be heard as a clarion call for evidence-based educational reform. The science is clear, young children learn best when they are actively engaged and learning things that are meaningful to them. The passive digestion of facts delivered early and often both stuns and stunts young minds. In Too Much Too Soon, the authors -- teachers, scientists and policy makers -- join together to demonstrate how we might achieve rich curricular aims in a more child centered playful learning approach to early education. Bringing this diverse group together to speak in one voice shows the gravitas of our current practices and urges us to instill a corrective that will help each child reach her potential as a happy, healthy and intelligent person of today who will also be equipped for the challenges in the workplace of tomorrow...May the movement be strong and change the world for children!
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Professor of Psychology - Temple University- Author, Einstein Never Used Flashcards (Rodale) and Mandate for Playful Learning (Oxford )
A child’s brain is shaped through the experiences and relationships it encounters during the childhood years. Physical childhood has already been shortened with children in developed countries reaching puberty earlier than ever before, but the emotional, social and creative aspects of brain development have also undergone a revolution. Driven primarily by economics, parental time, family structure, physical activity, scope for free play, exploration, imagination, discipline, moral guidance and “a time of innocence” during the childhood years, have all been scavenged by the dual forces of financial necessity and commercial greed. The erosion of childhood is an erosion of society’s future.
Sally Goddard Blythe MSc.,FRSA. Author on Child Development and Director of The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology.
Schooling is not education: it is the formalization of a now pre-determined curriculum which has seemingly inescapable accountability associated with it. Young children deserve an effective and appropriate education, which includes a wide range of opportunities to play and to learn about themselves and the world around them in an atmosphere free from pressure, where practitioners understand the needs of each individual child and engage in pedagogical and curricular practices which enhance children’s overall learning and development. In that way, we are most likely to develop children who are creative, well-adjusted, happy and a credit to our society.
Professor Janet Moyles - Website Editor at TACTYC Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators, Professor Emeritus at Anglia Ruskin University
"There are three practical things we can do to improve childhood:- First agree a set of experiences that we would want all our children to have in infancy and childhood. These should replace or at least have equal weight as the over-prescriptive national curriculum. There is an urgency to debate what these experiences should be in every community. Secondly we should promote mixed age learning in our primary schools whose staff would be the 'guardians' of ensuring that all children enjoy
the agreed experiences. Thirdly we should debate how we reduce the numbers of children who each year sadly 'learn to fail'."
Tim Brighhouse - 'Chair of the New Vision Group and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education'
"Children need time and space to be children, to explore for themselves the wonders of the world around them, to play imaginatively on their own and with others, and to experiment with language, with ideas and with being actively creative. What they do not need is to think they must act like mini adults and the sooner they grow up the better; to believe that a virtual world can replace the real one; or to be put through a pattern of schooling that leaves little room for individuality. To stand a better chance of being physically and mentally robust, every child needs to be valued for his or her uniqueness, to be encouraged to enjoy childhood as a time free from pressure, and to belong to a society that accepts all children differ in their rate of development, in their readiness for formal schooling and in how they react and respond to the different opportunities that education offers."
Dr Rona Tutt OBE , SEN Consultant, Speaker and Writer, Past President of the National Association of Head Teachers, Chair of the National Literacy Association
"Childhood is often mistakenly seen by adults as part of a linear progression towards adulthood. The inference is that games and learnings acquired in youth simply add up like building blocks to a rounded adult. Much research now disproves this. CS Lewis once remarked "While science may lead you to truth, only the imagination can lead you to meaning". This is, to my mind a profound insight and central to the debate about what a childhood is. The need some have to control and filter children represents to me, a fear that children cannot find their own routes, through being provided with healthy stimulating environments and company, to their own destinations. It is the terror of not being able to find the destination someone else has set for you that damages us, not a journey of your own making, nurtured by others on request. This is not a libertine thesis; on the contrary, it is a plea to trust in children to make the connections they need to make by being given the fullest opportunity to let their imaginations have free reign and thereafter to be taught the skills of enquiry to give their natural curiosity a framework for establishing the boundaries of the possible - not a set of rules that others, with less imagination may have deemed appropriate. I salute this important initiative and support it wholeheartedly as it is more important almost than anything else. It frames the generations who have to describe and make a future worth living in."
Tim Smit - Founder of the Eden Project
"Our children's emotional well-being and mental health should feature as a primary issue on every politician's agenda. Nothing less than the
future of our national life is at stake. As a practising psychotherapist for forty years, I am acutely aware of the central importance of childhood experience in the formation of creative, well-balanced adults who can contribute effectively to a healthy and successful society. The current approach in our country to early years education with its emphasis on structured and premature cognitive development alongside a culture dominated by commercial and technological forces is almost
guaranteed to produce a generation divorced from its natural and spiritual roots and devoid of empathic and creative capabilities. Nothing short of an attitudinal revolution is required but without it the future looks increasingly bleak."
Brian Thorne - Emeritus Professor of Counselling, University of East Anglia; Lay Canon of Norwich Cathedral.
We must get childhood right. Our children are too important for their needs to be ignored and their wellbeing compromised. A recent UNICEF report demonstrated that in Britain we have the least happy children of any of the countries surveyed. We should be ashamed of this, and work hard to improve.
Philip Pullman – author
Putting play before work, heart before head, love before learning, is this not what brings more happiness to 'the best years of our life'? A happy childhood lasts a lifetime. Having taught all ages and seeing our young learners grow up round-shoulded, with frowns on their faces, eyes blank - especially when their memory was being tested, saddened me. I used to stand at the door on the examination room as the students entered. Enjoy it!" I used to say. Growls, grunts, muttered swearwords.- 'Giddy Gilmore off his rocker again!" BUT, every so often, eyes would lighten as if illuminated from within, and that tiny handful of optimistic learners lightened my day as well, I hope, theirs. But why only such a tiny minority? EnJOYment is life-enhancing so let's all find many creative ways to facilitate lots more of it!
Christopher Gilmore - A United Press Writer of the Year 2010 and author of FREE SCHOOLS??? - That's the Spirit! (being published by Vanguard Books)
In our unholy hurry to 'raise' children, we give them indigestible stones instead of bread - i.e. abstractions and irrelevant facts. Because their need to play, dream and explore is not met, they are 'failing' early, getting turned off learning, stressed and asthmatic (asthma is semi-epidemic now). Many play truant and join violent gangs for a sense of self-esteem. As a culture we don't offer children the vital lessons of compassion, honesty, beauty and meaning. We turn toddlers into ICT addicts, and the school system grooms them for the economy. If we don't protect children from political agendas, George Orwell's prediction that "the child will eventually belong to the state" will come true.
Gabriel Millar
"Although the Division of Counselling Psychology is not allied to any political affiliation, nor indeed to any particular campaign, its values are very much rooted in the importance of childhood to the developing person. We privilege lifespan development in our learning and training. As such we support all efforts to maintain the integrity of childhood as a good foundation for psychological health."
Dr Peter Martin, Chair, Division of Counselling Psychology
"In today’s fiercely competitive global markets, rapid changes in communications technology are driving growth at breakneck speed, leaving us floundering in its wake. Mass media saturates our children’s world and all the independent research and anecdotal evidence on the adverse effects this culture is having on children’s development is still not being acted upon effectively.
We are in a battle for the hearts and minds of our children and that is why it is so important for this new cultural movement to raise public awareness and lobby ministers about the profoundly life changing effects of so much media, including explicit violence, pornography, bad language, the portrayal of drugs and anti-social behaviour. Parents do have a role but cannot bear all the responsibility, many are themselves susceptible to this culture and others cannot cope and are often less media ‘savvy’ than their offspring. In this internet age, the Government needs to help with policies that put children first and this includes tougher regulation of an overly influential and exploitative media industry."
Pippa Smith and Miranda Suit - Founders and Co Chairmen of Safermedia
"Early childhood is a creative resource whose true potential cannot be measured. This is precisely because it is a time of relative freedom from such testing. Introducing monitoring (and competition) at this age could have profoundly destructive consequences for generations to come."
Rupert Kingfisher- Children's Author
"Babies have been primed by evolution to seek out and respond to intimate relationships, play and communication, all within the context of a loving and interested family. But these days there are just too many distractions and interferences in the surrounding world that can get in the way. Whether it is forward facing buggies or anything electronic with a screen, parents have become distracted from direct, tender, interaction with their babies as the hunter-gatherer urge to gossip and gather has been hijacked by commercial interests. Babies and parents only profit from their relationships - but this simple fact is getting lost, perhaps because there is no profit to be made here."
Robin Balbernie, infant mental health specialist
"My experience growing up and as both a parent and a godparent is that the richer the childhood, the more responsible the adult. Premature adulthood, treating children as little grown-ups, has the opposite effect. Children that did not play become adults who cannot play. Unboundaried children become unboundaried adults."
Christopher Houghton Budd, PhD., Banking - Centre for Associative Economics and Visiting Lecturer, City University, London
"As a neuroscientist I am particularly aware of how the human brain will adapt to any environment in which its placed. Whilst this talent has enabled us to occupy more ecological niches than any other species on the planet it also makes us vulnerable to influences that may not have an entirely beneficial effect. In the developed world 21st Century technology is shaping an unprecedented environment that may well challenge the traditional developmental processes that characterise childhood. The cyber world whilst offering wonderful opportunities is also creating an environment that goes beyond merely a very worrying predisposition to obesity. For the first time young people could be living in a world that is answer rich and question poor, where incessant screen communication could reduce interpersonal communication skills and concepts of identity, and where obsessional gaming could have a significant effect on attitudes to risk. For this reason I am highly supportive of this initiative and consider the issue to be one of the most important facing not just educationalists, psychologists and parents but indeed, society as a whole."
Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology, University of Oxford
If print could scream, the words on these pages would be heard as a clarion call for evidence-based educational reform. The science is clear, young children learn best when they are actively engaged and learning things that are meaningful to them. The passive digestion of facts delivered early and often both stuns and stunts young minds. In Too Much Too Soon, the authors -- teachers, scientists and policy makers -- join together to demonstrate how we might achieve rich curricular aims in a more child centered playful learning approach to early education. Bringing this diverse group together to speak in one voice shows the gravitas of our current practices and urges us to instill a corrective that will help each child reach her potential as a happy, healthy and intelligent person of today who will also be equipped for the challenges in the workplace of tomorrow...May the movement be strong and change the world for children!
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Professor of Psychology - Temple University- Author, Einstein Never Used Flashcards (Rodale) and Mandate for Playful Learning (Oxford )
A child’s brain is shaped through the experiences and relationships it encounters during the childhood years. Physical childhood has already been shortened with children in developed countries reaching puberty earlier than ever before, but the emotional, social and creative aspects of brain development have also undergone a revolution. Driven primarily by economics, parental time, family structure, physical activity, scope for free play, exploration, imagination, discipline, moral guidance and “a time of innocence” during the childhood years, have all been scavenged by the dual forces of financial necessity and commercial greed. The erosion of childhood is an erosion of society’s future.
Sally Goddard Blythe MSc.,FRSA. Author on Child Development and Director of The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology.
Schooling is not education: it is the formalization of a now pre-determined curriculum which has seemingly inescapable accountability associated with it. Young children deserve an effective and appropriate education, which includes a wide range of opportunities to play and to learn about themselves and the world around them in an atmosphere free from pressure, where practitioners understand the needs of each individual child and engage in pedagogical and curricular practices which enhance children’s overall learning and development. In that way, we are most likely to develop children who are creative, well-adjusted, happy and a credit to our society.
Professor Janet Moyles - Website Editor at TACTYC Association for the Professional Development of Early Years Educators, Professor Emeritus at Anglia Ruskin University
"There are three practical things we can do to improve childhood:- First agree a set of experiences that we would want all our children to have in infancy and childhood. These should replace or at least have equal weight as the over-prescriptive national curriculum. There is an urgency to debate what these experiences should be in every community. Secondly we should promote mixed age learning in our primary schools whose staff would be the 'guardians' of ensuring that all children enjoy
the agreed experiences. Thirdly we should debate how we reduce the numbers of children who each year sadly 'learn to fail'."
Tim Brighhouse - 'Chair of the New Vision Group and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education'
"Children need time and space to be children, to explore for themselves the wonders of the world around them, to play imaginatively on their own and with others, and to experiment with language, with ideas and with being actively creative. What they do not need is to think they must act like mini adults and the sooner they grow up the better; to believe that a virtual world can replace the real one; or to be put through a pattern of schooling that leaves little room for individuality. To stand a better chance of being physically and mentally robust, every child needs to be valued for his or her uniqueness, to be encouraged to enjoy childhood as a time free from pressure, and to belong to a society that accepts all children differ in their rate of development, in their readiness for formal schooling and in how they react and respond to the different opportunities that education offers."
Dr Rona Tutt OBE , SEN Consultant, Speaker and Writer, Past President of the National Association of Head Teachers, Chair of the National Literacy Association
"Childhood is often mistakenly seen by adults as part of a linear progression towards adulthood. The inference is that games and learnings acquired in youth simply add up like building blocks to a rounded adult. Much research now disproves this. CS Lewis once remarked "While science may lead you to truth, only the imagination can lead you to meaning". This is, to my mind a profound insight and central to the debate about what a childhood is. The need some have to control and filter children represents to me, a fear that children cannot find their own routes, through being provided with healthy stimulating environments and company, to their own destinations. It is the terror of not being able to find the destination someone else has set for you that damages us, not a journey of your own making, nurtured by others on request. This is not a libertine thesis; on the contrary, it is a plea to trust in children to make the connections they need to make by being given the fullest opportunity to let their imaginations have free reign and thereafter to be taught the skills of enquiry to give their natural curiosity a framework for establishing the boundaries of the possible - not a set of rules that others, with less imagination may have deemed appropriate. I salute this important initiative and support it wholeheartedly as it is more important almost than anything else. It frames the generations who have to describe and make a future worth living in."
Tim Smit - Founder of the Eden Project
"Our children's emotional well-being and mental health should feature as a primary issue on every politician's agenda. Nothing less than the
future of our national life is at stake. As a practising psychotherapist for forty years, I am acutely aware of the central importance of childhood experience in the formation of creative, well-balanced adults who can contribute effectively to a healthy and successful society. The current approach in our country to early years education with its emphasis on structured and premature cognitive development alongside a culture dominated by commercial and technological forces is almost
guaranteed to produce a generation divorced from its natural and spiritual roots and devoid of empathic and creative capabilities. Nothing short of an attitudinal revolution is required but without it the future looks increasingly bleak."
Brian Thorne - Emeritus Professor of Counselling, University of East Anglia; Lay Canon of Norwich Cathedral.
We must get childhood right. Our children are too important for their needs to be ignored and their wellbeing compromised. A recent UNICEF report demonstrated that in Britain we have the least happy children of any of the countries surveyed. We should be ashamed of this, and work hard to improve.
Philip Pullman – author
Putting play before work, heart before head, love before learning, is this not what brings more happiness to 'the best years of our life'? A happy childhood lasts a lifetime. Having taught all ages and seeing our young learners grow up round-shoulded, with frowns on their faces, eyes blank - especially when their memory was being tested, saddened me. I used to stand at the door on the examination room as the students entered. Enjoy it!" I used to say. Growls, grunts, muttered swearwords.- 'Giddy Gilmore off his rocker again!" BUT, every so often, eyes would lighten as if illuminated from within, and that tiny handful of optimistic learners lightened my day as well, I hope, theirs. But why only such a tiny minority? EnJOYment is life-enhancing so let's all find many creative ways to facilitate lots more of it!
Christopher Gilmore - A United Press Writer of the Year 2010 and author of FREE SCHOOLS??? - That's the Spirit! (being published by Vanguard Books)
In our unholy hurry to 'raise' children, we give them indigestible stones instead of bread - i.e. abstractions and irrelevant facts. Because their need to play, dream and explore is not met, they are 'failing' early, getting turned off learning, stressed and asthmatic (asthma is semi-epidemic now). Many play truant and join violent gangs for a sense of self-esteem. As a culture we don't offer children the vital lessons of compassion, honesty, beauty and meaning. We turn toddlers into ICT addicts, and the school system grooms them for the economy. If we don't protect children from political agendas, George Orwell's prediction that "the child will eventually belong to the state" will come true.
Gabriel Millar
"Although the Division of Counselling Psychology is not allied to any political affiliation, nor indeed to any particular campaign, its values are very much rooted in the importance of childhood to the developing person. We privilege lifespan development in our learning and training. As such we support all efforts to maintain the integrity of childhood as a good foundation for psychological health."
Dr Peter Martin, Chair, Division of Counselling Psychology
"In today’s fiercely competitive global markets, rapid changes in communications technology are driving growth at breakneck speed, leaving us floundering in its wake. Mass media saturates our children’s world and all the independent research and anecdotal evidence on the adverse effects this culture is having on children’s development is still not being acted upon effectively.
We are in a battle for the hearts and minds of our children and that is why it is so important for this new cultural movement to raise public awareness and lobby ministers about the profoundly life changing effects of so much media, including explicit violence, pornography, bad language, the portrayal of drugs and anti-social behaviour. Parents do have a role but cannot bear all the responsibility, many are themselves susceptible to this culture and others cannot cope and are often less media ‘savvy’ than their offspring. In this internet age, the Government needs to help with policies that put children first and this includes tougher regulation of an overly influential and exploitative media industry."
Pippa Smith and Miranda Suit - Founders and Co Chairmen of Safermedia
"Early childhood is a creative resource whose true potential cannot be measured. This is precisely because it is a time of relative freedom from such testing. Introducing monitoring (and competition) at this age could have profoundly destructive consequences for generations to come."
Rupert Kingfisher- Children's Author
"Babies have been primed by evolution to seek out and respond to intimate relationships, play and communication, all within the context of a loving and interested family. But these days there are just too many distractions and interferences in the surrounding world that can get in the way. Whether it is forward facing buggies or anything electronic with a screen, parents have become distracted from direct, tender, interaction with their babies as the hunter-gatherer urge to gossip and gather has been hijacked by commercial interests. Babies and parents only profit from their relationships - but this simple fact is getting lost, perhaps because there is no profit to be made here."
Robin Balbernie, infant mental health specialist
"My experience growing up and as both a parent and a godparent is that the richer the childhood, the more responsible the adult. Premature adulthood, treating children as little grown-ups, has the opposite effect. Children that did not play become adults who cannot play. Unboundaried children become unboundaried adults."
Christopher Houghton Budd, PhD., Banking - Centre for Associative Economics and Visiting Lecturer, City University, London
