I’m writing this in a café. In front of me and a little to the right sit two mums of around my age, each with a small child. The mums are sitting side-by-side; so too are the children. But while the adults are engaged in lively conversation, the kids have each been given an iPhone to play with, and are sitting there motionless, absorbed in mysterious and silent worlds of their own.

I was born in the final month of 1978. Although I am of a generation that “gets” technology – I have an iPhone, can design websites, and am active on Twitter – the world is a very different place for my children than it was when I was growing up. My wife went to decent private schools, and I went to a state primary in Hackney followed by an appalling “grammar” in north London. Yet our memories of our schooldays include various universals. We played conkers. We had blackboards. We wrote lines. We played with footballs and skipping ropes in the playground.

The familiarity that my generation has with the digital age can prevent us from acknowledging how much childhood has changed. My daughter has just started at our local primary school, and I have been dismayed to learn that conkers, skipping ropes and footballs are banned for reasons of supposed health and safety. Moreover, although the children have the use of a proper field to play in as well as a concrete playground, they are forbidden to climb the trees. This is a far cry from our experience. At my wife’s prep school, the children were issued with boiler suits and sent out into the woods to get climbing.

As society increasingly prevents children from fully engaging with the physical world, the vacuum is inevitably filled with the virtual. My generation experienced the digital revolution when we were in our mid-teens. We were young enough to adapt to it, but old enough to have already developed skills like penmanship, tree climbing, map reading, using a dictionary, debating, memorisation, and a facility for holding a proper conversation. Not so our children. Whereas we take for granted that if our satnav breaks down we will be able to use an A-Z, our children may have never heard of the word “maps” without the word “Google” preceding it. We can still remember how to play conkers; 49 per cent of British children do not even play outside. We have no problem jotting down ideas on paper, but our children’s handwriting is going from bad to worse. People like Philip Hensher argues in his new book, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art Of Handwriting (And Why It Still Matters) that “to diminish the place of the handwritten in our lives is to diminish, in a small but real way, our humanity”. But his view is not shared by society at large, which is in danger of sleepwalking to a state of bovine reliance on the virtual. Parents of my generation tend to take our essential life skills for granted; the value of them for our own children may not become apparent until it is too late. Continue reading on the Telegraph website