Do it 4 the kidz

This morning I heard an item on the Today Programme on Radio 4 about an open letter in the Telegraph, signed by over 100 academics and professionals, concerned that modern life is leading to "the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions".

It filled 13 minutes of the programme, but I'm not sure what else it did.

Some empirical and anecdotal evidence was presented to support the case by two of the signatories and the interviewer had a hard time picking holes in their arguments. And yet, my feeling is that this item, like vast numbers of previous items about similar bleedin' obvious but hard to quantify problems, will simply wash over the vast majority of listeners, and like an incomplete course of antibiotics will actually have a deleterious effect - further inuring us to the utter madness of so many aspects of modern life.

Of course, coming back to the actual point of the item, I fully agree with everything that was said, and can say with alternating and slightly schitzoid feelings of smugness and angst that I personally am trying to do something about the problem (for example, we have two toddlers and no TV). This probably puts me and my family in a small minority, but I would love to know how small, and also how the rest of the population is reacting to the situation. The options as I see them are:

• Understand the problems and try to do something about them
• Understand the problems and do nothing about them
• Don't understand the problems

Then of course the really big question is, how do those of us in the first group - probably a tiny minority - get everyone else to join us?

Well I've sat here for about an hour thinking about this situation and composing this short entry. I'd love to spend another hour, but it's late and I have to be up nice and early to spend another day fending off those two toddlers without the aid of a TV. More later...