The World Health Organisation has advanced a cache of pregnant guidelines to parents in general.

It has riveted its focus to children, whose well-being is increasingly being reduced by the political class to a rhetorical chant of “universal basic health”. The goalpost is lofty, but with little or no action in the follow-through at least in India. While the platitude may have its compulsion in the season of elections, the UN entity has hit the bull’s eye with its tut-tutting against exposure to technology up to a certain age.

Advertisement

The emphasis quite distinctly is on the familial way of life. Hence the assertion that “infants who are less than a year should not be exposed to electronic screens”, now ironically integral to family bonding in the drawing room.

Chiefly, those between 2 and 4 ought not to be exposed to more than one hour of “sedentary screen time” each day. The caveat has a universal application, and is arguably of far greater relevance to the technologically advanced developed world, where robots are increasingly replacing human endeavour.

Physical exercise and sleep are of far greater importance so far as children are concerned; both can stave off obesity and diseases during adolescence and adulthood. Restrictions or even elimination of “screen time” for children below the age of 5 will result in healthier adults.

WHO has underscored the crucial link between a child’s health and exposure to the marvels of technology, the subtext of its announcement last week being that there is an age and time for everything. “Achieving health for all means doing what is best for health right from the beginning of one’s life,” is the cardinal message of WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

For all the jaw-jaw on universal basic health, the consummation devoutly to be wished for can flounder in the absence of fundamental safeguards. Early childhood is a phase of rapid development, indeed a period when the lifestyle patterns of a family “can be adapted to boost health gains”.

Thus has WHO devised a trilateral equation of the child, family life, and technology given its awesome spread. Indeed, technology is developing faster than the scientific study on the effect new devices can have on the child’s brain. Beyond the adverse effect of the radio and television, is the relatively new phenomenon called “screen time”, specifically the time that is spent watching TV, using computers, smartphones, digital tablets and video games.

Hence the warning by WHO that such totems of contemporary lifestyle, however convenient and almost indispensable, can affect the development of the child’s brain and overall health. The report, based on data garnered in 2018, has dealt with what “scientists know and don’t know, about the link between the screen, behaviour, and development”.

The child’s health is a critical determinant of public health ~ an index of human development. Which, sad to reflect, has been plummeting in India for the past few years. Acchhe din is on test.