I WAS brought up in Bradford. I’m now a dad of two grown-up boys and privileged to work in a fantastic Keighley primary school - East Morton CE.

I work alongside amazing staff with children of nursery ages through to 11-year-olds. I help run breakfast and after-school clubs, and I get to greet parents, grandparents and carers every day. We are one big extended, eclectic family.

It’s a very different sort of job, I get to revert daily back to my childhood, daub paint on paper, finger knit, colour, skip, and join in with all sorts of exhausting fun activities, spending time with pupils outside of classes.

In our clubs older children (ages seven to 11) have access to computer tablets and laptops. They use apps to practice times tables and maths quizzes, learning as they play. We keep them all safe with really good technologies and restricted access and monitored screen time.

However, even in my lovely school, it’s very evident that if unmonitored, the children would spend a lot more time on screens. They often ask to access the internet or go on social media. Children under six can become very frustrated that they aren’t allowed to use the smart screens. They tell us they can use smartphones at home, so why can’t they at school (97per cent of UK children have phones by the age of 12)

I’m a dad of two, my children got their first smartphones at the end of primary school. I watched helplessly as they slowly became more and more consumed by the things.

As I travel around Bradford, I see younger and younger children on phones, often unsupervised. I’m not sure some parents realise just how quickly children master technology and gain access to everything the internet wonderland has to offer - the good, the bad and the very ugly.

I’m not a technophobe. I’m not anti-technology. Much of my working life has been spent creating digital content for design and web industries. I taught myself to use one of the first Apple computers. I composed music on first-generation music software. However today smartphones worry me. The world’s cleverest boffins compete against each other to make their technologies ever more addictive and distracting.

Russel Jeanes has written a book to help parents and children discuss the right age to have a smartphone Russel Jeanes has written a book to help parents and children discuss the right age to have a smartphone (Image: Russell Jeanes)

This is why I was compelled to write my book. It is designed for children who have not yet been bamboozled by smartphones to read alongside their parents. Its purpose is to give parents a tool to help them discuss with their children the right age for them to get smartphones. The book is split into sections, a story and an amusing quiz. The book aims to educate children without them knowing it’s happening.

At its heart, my book is a modern reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures. Alice follows the white rabbit down a new kind of rabbit hole, to meet hatters and catfish and chat bottoms, and pretty-faced love-bombing books. It’s set in a wonderland of time-wasting gadgets, which is ruled by a game-playing queen. The cover is illustrated by the globally respected illustrator Lia Visirin from Transylvania, it has re-imaginations of John Tenniel’s original illustrations throughout the inside (re-illustrated by me).

The book will be familiar to all lovers of Alice, it retains many of Carroll’s original characters, with reimagined poems and morals and nonsense. It also introduces references to many of today’s new technologies, search engines and AI machines.

Children who have read the book think it’s funny, and everyone says they learn something from reading (including adults). Much of the humour is inspired by observed events at my school.

Alice Through The Smartphone has already received lots of glowing five-star reviews from children, teachers and parents. It’s even been reviewed by a prominent member of the Lewis Carroll Society, Lenny De Rooy, who is one of the leading experts on ‘Alice’. Lenny wrote “The book certainly stimulates thought and discussion, Jeanes has most certainly succeeded in his aim: offering a playful way as a teacher or parent to start a conversation with their children about smartphone use!”

If I could add one last thought. I have seen lots of books starting to flood the market written and illustrated by AI. At this time, with the recent Bradford Literature Festival, wouldn’t it be wonderful if people supported art created by humans? As one clever lady recently said: “I want machines doing laundry and dishes whilst I am designing and thinking, not the other way round.”

* Alice Through The Smartphone is available on Amazon and bookshops.