WOMAN'S Hour in the morning is not part of my usual schedule, but I just happened to have the wireless on one day last week and caught an item so bizarre as to suggest it came from a madhouse.

The ladies were talking about what their daughters have in their bedrooms. Then on came this 12-year-old to say she had two TV sets, an iPod, an MP3 player, a radio, a computer and two mobile phones. The ladies were questioning whether this amount of electronic gadgetry was "healthy".

Well, today they have their answer: it isn't. Baroness Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist and Director of the Royal Institution and 269 other of the great and good have declared that all these gadgets are ruining the mental health of our children. Pardon me, but did we really need a posse of the nation's brightest intellects to tell us that? They go on to say that the cure for the mental afflictions suffered by the kids is "...free, unstructured play in the street or in the park".

When I was a boy that's what we did all the time, especially in the school holidays. The trick was to get out of the house as early as possible, before your mother gave you a stack of jobs to do and errands to run, and to stay out until lunchtime. Pop back home for bangers and mash, then out again until teatime. I didn't have electronic gadgets, except my train set, and I'd never dream of playing with the train until the evening or if it was rainy. We didn't have TV either and the wireless wasn't switched on until Dick Barton Special Agent at 6.45pm.

Lady Greenfield and her chums warn that the multitude of modern electronics is addictive. Kids are spending half the night playing with them, with the result that they can't get up for school, and when they eventually arrive in the classroom they're like zombies. It's only what we've known for a long time: too much gadgetry rots your brain.

The technical philosophical term for someone who spends all his time on his own, so self-obsessed that it's as if he's the only person in the world, is solipsism - "me-alone-ism". So the modern generation of kids, besides rotting their brains, are not learning to socialise. Many of them have no real mates, only distant acquaintances they text endlessly and blather to inanely for hours over the mobile phone. No wonder so many kids are half mad and frighteningly obese: the phrase "run about a bit" is a foreign language to them.

The whole thing is made worse by the hysterical fear of paedophiles and the politically-correct obsession with health and safety. Kids just don't play out any more and they're delivered to school by car. I fear Lady Greenfield's warning is too late. The kids are addicted to modern technology and their parents are too much afraid of their kids to take the gadgets from them and give them footballs and skipping ropes instead. Welcome to the new generation of dumb, unsocialised solipsists.

And now for something even weirder. The week has kicked off with the announcement that the Government aims to give money to pregnant women for them to spend on healthy food - but they are to be allowed to spend it on what they like. It's like giving cash to alcoholics for them to spend on orange juice - but you don't mind if they spend it on whisky instead!

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange