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©CartoonStock.com Three years ago I wrote an open letter to Susan Greenfield , asking her to please stop claiming there is a link between autism and use of digital media. It’s never pleasant criticizing a colleague, and since my earlier blogpost I’ve held back from further comment, hoping that she might refrain from making claims about autism, and/or that interest in her views would just die down. But now she's back, reiterating the claims in a new book and TV interview, and I can remain silent no longer. Greenfield featured last week as the subject of a BBC interview in the series Hard Talk . The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked her specifically if she really believed her claims that exposure to modern digital media – the internet, video games, social media – were damaging to children’s development. Greenfield stressed that she did: although she herself had not done direct research on the internet/brain impact link, there was ample research to persuade her it was real. Specifica...

I was surprised to see a piece in the Guardian stating that " England is one of the most unequal countries for children's reading levels, second in the EU only to Romania ". This claim was made in an article about a new campaign, Read On, Get On , that was launched this week. The campaign sounds great. A consortium of organizations and individuals have got together to address the problem of poor reading: the tail in the distribution of reading ability that seems to stubbornly remain, despite efforts to reduce it. Poor readers are particularly likely to come from deprived backgrounds, and their disadvantage will be perpetuated, as they are at high risk of leaving school with few qualifications and dismal employment prospects. I was pleased to see that the campaign has recogni z ed weak language skills in young children as an important predictor of later reading difficulties. The research evidence has been there for years (Kamhi & Catts, 2011), but it has taken ages to...