Alison Stephenson joins Studio 10 to discuss how much time should kids have with computers and other gadgets.

Should we ban our kids using technology during the week?

MOST households enforce a ‘no screens at the dinner table’ policy. But ‘no screens at all’ seems a little ruthless to us.

But that’s the rule Homeland star Damian Lewis and his wife Helen McCory enforce at home. They forbid their children from using computers during the week and only let them loose online for 10 minutes on weekends.

Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter actress McCory, 46, and Lewis, 44, have two children together — Manon, nine, and Gulliver, eight.

McCory told Stella magazine she feared her children would be unable to express themselves if they overused technology.

“I want the children I meet to be less interested in staring at a computer screen and more interested in talking to me,” she said.

“There’s a whole generation of children growing up who don’t seem able to express themselves.”

McCory said she and her husband often sat down with their kids and read a dictionary and a thesaurus to them.

“When they say they want to look something up on a computer, we say no. We want them to have the space to think, you see.

“They are not actually experiencing the putting the ink in the pen, putting the pen to paper, thinking about what they are going to say, looking up the words they want to say it with.”

The acclaimed actress says she and her husband worried their children were “growing up in a society that is about instant gratification”.

“If something’s wrong — their appearance in a photograph, say — a child can now edit it to their liking or just press delete. But life’s not like that, is it?” she said.

“I don’t want my children growing up wanting to be perfect beings in a perfect world.

“I keep saying to them, ‘Darling, there are times you will be sad and unhappy and you mustn’t worry about it. Melancholia’s very interesting you know ... you should read a bit of poetry.’”