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The children who won't grow up
by Frank Furedi

The alarm bells started ringing a few years ago. I was showing a friend around my campus when we encountered a group of undergraduates absorbed in watching Teletubbies in the bar.

Normally, the sight of a group of 18- to 21-year-olds indulging their taste for a programme aimed at toddlers would not have made much of an impact on my imagination. But my then two-year-old son's attachment to these sickly-sweet characters meant that I had become all too familiar with them; and the previous evening I had made a futile effort to wean my son off the Teletubbies by offering him some more challenging visual alternatives. It didn't work - and I was struck by the thought that it wouldn't work with these 21-year-olds either.

Not every twentysomething is into the Teletubbies - indeed, many of today's students seem to prefer the older pre-schoolers' favourite, The Tweenies. Yet when I complain about young adults' fascination with early years television, 28-year-old John Russell looks at me as though I am a lost cause. John, a well-paid lawyer, says he isn't interested in doing 'adult stuff'. He loves his PlayStation and spends a considerable portion of his disposable income on hi-tech toys....