Now that even Play-Doh has an app, is real play dead?

Play-Doh has just entered the 21st century — and civilisation, as we know it, might be about to end. Childhood is doomed. Or not. The company is about to release its first app. Children can now take their Play-Doh creations — or anything else, for that matter — photograph them against a white background, and animate them on a screen, creating 3D characters they can manipulate.

This will trouble some. “Screen time” has, after all, become the demon of our times. Our grandparents worried about polio; our parents worried about television; and we worry iThis, iThat, and iOther will turn our kids into zombies. And yes, there’s evidence that all the extra time they spend in front of screens does everything from desensitising them to violence — if the content they are watching is graphic — to inhibiting their ability to recognise emotions.

Yet I look around myself, and the kids I see are way smarter than I ever was. And screen time, unlike polio in a public pool, is very easy to control.

Are you a worried parent? Guess what — you’re the boss! If your child is spending too much time on a screen, you have the right to take away that screen. If you can’t do it, then your problem is bigger than the Play-Doh app.

Interestingly, the Play-Doh app arrives just as the American Association of Paediatrics has revised its screen guidelines. Last month, for the first time, the AAP announced that up to an hour of screen time for preschoolers aged 2-5 is acceptable and even beneficial, depending on what they do with it. I’d say letting your preschooler browse Tinder for an hour probably isn’t the best use of her time, but then neither is playing outside in traffic where there are no screens. Almost every summer since they were born, my daughter and my two nephews have spent time in a village with first no, and then mind-numbingly slow, internet access.

These are kids who have grown up with devices, and they have never had a bored moment during their summers. Three savvy New York kids perfectly happy to play in the mud and watch fireflies with rapt concentration ... I don’t think we’ve lost the magic of childhood. I think we’ve added to it.

I get very tense and cranky when my teenager holes up in her room and watches videos or goes on Instagram — what is she doing, why isn’t she outside, who is she connecting with, should I be stopping her? On the other hand, she’s the first person I go to when my phone acts weird and I don’t know which button to press. She knows things. I don’t know everything she knows, and that might not be such a bad thing. And just imagine if we’d had the Play-Doh app when she was two. Instead of saving all those — let’s face it — hideous creations of smelly clay liberally mixed with dust balls and pretzel crumbs, we could have just photographed them, animated them, saved them on the hard drive, and tossed the shelf-space-eating monsters. Sometimes reality just isn’t better.

Using an iPad to animate blobs of clay probably won’t turn your two-year-old into an idiot, especially if you turn it into something you do together. He or she might surprise you and prefer the tactile pleasures of sticking Play-Doh up their nose anyway, leading to a nice teachable moment as you race to the paediatrician.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Sohaila Abdulali was born in Mumbai and lives in New York City. She is a freelance writer and editor, and she has published novels, children’s books, short stories, and non-fiction pieces