Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.

I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them.

Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

I think what's at risk is kids losing touch with being a kid. Being a kid is being defined differently than it was when you didn't have all this stuff you could put in front of your face.

I'm not against watching myself, but I miss a lot of it. I've got two little kids who we don't let watch TV.

These days young kids don't have any place to form an epic adventure. It's more often in front of the TV screen or a laptop. That's very hard on them. They're being taught daily unsocial skills. Facebook is an unsocial skill. It's so sad.

I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?

Kids still can be said to live in their own little world. Even if their parents are helicoptering around them, assigning play dates and so forth, I think they're still living in some sense of their own little perceptual worlds.

I learned that there are two things that kids really like: movement and love. Happy kids move; unhappy, they don't move.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

I don't think any child could really be happy between five and eight away from their parents.

Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.

A stable and nurturing childhood is essential for the healthy psycho-emotional and spiritual development of a human being. While we may understand what is supposed to happen to us physically, we must begin to better understand what happens to children mentally, emotionally and spiritually as a result of the families into which they are born.

I don't like games. You're robbing the precious time of children to be children. They need to be in touch with the real world more.

The average teen today spends about 35 hours a week in front of a screen of some kind: iPod, movie, TV, video. And a lot of it is good, but a lot of it's not. And so I think you've got that five hours a day of media coming into your kid's head that's creating a lot of havoc out there.

Throughout my work with family and child support organizations, one thing that has stood out to me time and again is that getting early support for a child who is struggling to cope is the best possible thing we can do to help our children as they grow up.

The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.

Lego for many parents is the antithesis of the high tech world. We are desperate to wean our little ones away from the tablets and into the bricks.

I was always listening to music on headphones or working on something on my computer. I realised it wasn't healthy to be so reliant on creating stuff. I needed to be more sociable.

But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that's the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

We're in a digital age where it's cool to be on your iPhone all the time. All of out-of-school activities my daughter has such as piano one day and acting another day and dance another day are about getting her away from that. People are on video games and their phones, and it's taking up all their mental space.