If you have a few grey hairs (yes, coloured ones do count!), think back to your childhood. What was your most valued possession: first bike, doll, football?

Mine was my imagination. I was an only child with protective parents, so I spent a fair amount of my childhood playing by myself. Even when we went caravanning (yep, the great British holiday, trapped in a tin can with the rain drilling into the roof), I was on my own most of the time, only with far fewer toys and less room! In the absence of pocket-sized boxes of electronic entertainment, my brain actually had to do some work to keep me amused!

I was a ballerina on tour, the first female Prime Minister (Maggie hadn’t been invented yet), the first female to climb all of the highest mountains, a teacher to my beach stone students, a singer in the best band in the world. I was all of these things and many, many more, because my imagination was able to place me in a movie set of my own design at any time and in any place.

My question is how many kids can do that these days? Gosh, I’m not even sure if I can do it anymore; I am ‘welded’ to my Samsung Note II when on the move, sleep with my iPad and my fingers twitch involuntarily when a remote control is at hand. How did this happen? How did we all become bit players in a world created by our own devices?

This past weekend I spent an enjoyable day at Central Market, a local café and then a film with a dear friend who is anti-technology and refuses to have a mobile phone. After spending hours in conversation with her, not a digital screen in sight, and really enjoying it, I began to empathise with her position.

On the tram on the way home I sat next to an extended family comprising no less than 5 iPads, 5 matching smartphones, several Gameboys and similar, and I think there were a few humans as well for good measure. The average number of devices in use per person was more than the number of hands. Figure that one out!

Not a word was spoken, unless you count the completely anti-social beeps, bangs and shouts from the devices, all turned up to full volume without earphones. At least three generations of the same family and no non-electronic communication at all from the CBD to the beach. At least, until all electronic devices were confiscated in preparation for departure from the tram. Then there was communication, if you count wailing and crying!

I know that this is an extreme and, I hope, rare, example, but I fear that it is more common than we would all like to admit, and the days of children being entertained by simple things like books and lego are as lost to us as hats and suits were to the horrified parents of children growing up in the sixties.

At our centre we combine computer work with paper-based work, and it can be difficult, persuading children to wrap their hands around a pencil and make primitive marks on paper. When asked to write, particularly the longer passages needed for certain writing, hand cramps quickly become an issue. Even here, we have given ourselves over to technology, and depending on your perspective, this is either to our advantage as it saves time and effort, or to our disadvantage as that effort gave us skills that are now being lost.

My sister-in-law has recently moved her family to a new house, in need of top to toe renovation, including the garden, which is a wild land of grass, old foundations and a crumbling driveway. But the amazing thing is that her kids are happier than I have seen them in ages. Somehow this ‘unfinished’ place has inspired their imagination and they now choose ‘playing’ (and by this I mean actual, physical playing, where there is a danger of dirt and getting hurt) over ‘gaming’ (to include all digital entertainment) by choice. Maybe there is still hope.

I am not suggesting that kids are deprived of computers; they are a fact of life and necessary for their future success. But I am suggesting that their use of computers is balanced with ‘proper’ play, that involves physical movement, social skills with others and, yes, large doses of imagination that will drive the next generation of writers, inventors, engineers and philosophers. Let’s try and keep those pesky little electronic devices in their place, as servants, not masters.