We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2020: It was once a widely accepted way of explaining why some children struggled to read and write. But in recent years, some experts have begun to question the existence of dyslexia itself. By Sirin Kale

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Children should be banned from most social media until 18 amid attempts to ‘monetise’ them, says Macron-commissioned study

Children should not be allowed to use smartphones until they are 13 and should be banned from accessing conventional social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat until they are 18, according to a report by experts commissioned by Emmanuel Macron.

The French president had asked scientists and experts to suggest screen use guidelines for children with a view to France taking unprecedented steps on limiting their exposure . It was unclear how the government might now proceed after the report’s publication. Macron said in January: “There might be bans, there might be restrictions.”

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Ian Russell says parental controls could weaken trust and ‘punish children for tech firms’ failures’

• Ian Russell: Tech companies need to change

Government proposals to ban the sale of smartphones to under-16s and raise the minimum age for accessing social media risk causing more harm than good, the father of Molly Russell has warned.

Ian Russell said it was “no surprise” there is a groundswell of pressure for tougher regulation of social media platforms but said plans for a fresh crackdown were flawed.

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If the government is going to strengthen the Online Safety Act, banning social media for under-16s is not the answer

• Smartphones ban may cause more harm than good, says Molly Russell’s father

In the six years since my youngest daughter Molly died , it is striking how little has changed. Children and young people continue to face a wave of inherently preventable online harms on often negligent social media platforms. In a ferocious battle for market share, the risks on sites such as Instagram and TikTok have, in some respects, become worse.

It is therefore no surprise that there is a considerable groundswell in demands for much more to be done. Across the UK, grassroots parents’ groups are increasingly calling for a fundamental reset in the relationship between children and their smartphone use.

Ian Russell is an internet safety campaigner and chair of the Molly Rose Foundation

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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Observation was made by medics contributing a new pain management manual for treating children in conflict zones

Children being treated in Gaza’s hospitals are “underplaying” pain because it “seems trivial” in the context of the wider conflict, doctors have said.

International medics met in Doha, Qatar, on Saturday to discuss plans for a new trauma pain management manual to support professionals treating children in Gaza and other conflict zones.

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Campaigners say cash-strapped local authorities are placing young people in budget accommodation, making them targets for grooming by criminal gangs

Vulnerable teenagers in care are being placed in hotels by cash-strapped councils, with experts warning they are being “served up” to criminal gangs.

Children aged 16 to 17 are entering care in greater numbers than any other age group, often with complex needs, and experts say many councils in England now have nowhere to put them. They are increasingly resorting to budget hotels, with no adult support, as a way of cutting costs and keeping teenagers off the streets.

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Pots of slime, pig heads, sexy dolls… we were only looking for a present for my son’s fourth birthday

This week I found myself in a large toy shop in a retail park off London’s North Circular. We were looking, in a pleasant panic, for a present for my son’s fourth birthday. His birthdays always hit me in an odd way, a bit like those slaps round the face they have in films to stop the woman screaming. Because: he was born at the beginning of the pandemic and, just as his early developmental stages like sitting up or eating solids worked as a marker of time having passed, of us having survived, so do his birthdays. It is four years, this means, since those tight, hot days of the first Covid lockdown, of sanitiser-cracked hands and the brisk hell of home schooling, and every time the anniversary comes round I find myself having to sit down, take a breath.

Anyway, this toy shop, good God. Do you have any ideas what toys are today? I was not prepared. There are the board games, which include your Guess Who’s and so on, but they are overwhelmed by other games called things like, Who Can Poo On Who and Fart School and Diarrhoea of a CEO and I may be misremembering titles slightly yes, but this was very much the gist, boxes with rabid cartoon characters covered in phlegm and instructions that involve, for eg, burping one’s name.

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Claimants were supposed to be deterred from having more children, but the policy has made families poorer, not smaller

There’s much talk of “fiscal pinch points” driving economic policy decisions. But there are moral pinch points, too. Not least when it comes to our children: for many in larger families, we have now come close to creating a poverty guarantee.

Since 2017, the two-child limit has prevented families from receiving child-related benefits for a third or subsequent child, worth about £3,200 per extra child. The result? Half of children in families with three or more children are now in poverty vs a third in 2011/12. And that’s before the policy’s full bite has been felt (by 2035, 750,000 families will be affected , vs 420,000 last year). These statistics risk sounding abstract, but the reality they reflect isn’t. While one in three smaller families are materially deprived , that proportion rises to three-quarters of larger families.

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Four families torn apart by Chile’s illegal adoption scandal finally found each other decades later. They describe the emotional moment they met – and how they pieced together the lives they had spent apart

For Sara Melgarejo, the wait at Santiago airport was agonising. The 65-year-old had travelled about 30km north from San Bernardo, a working-class suburb of the Chilean capital, for the reunion. She walked the length of the building trying to calm her nerves, holding her breath for the arrival of the two children she had spent the last 40 years believing were dead. “My heart was racing and my body was trembling,” she says, “but I felt pure joy.”

Siblings Sean Ours, 40, and Emily Reid, 39, walked into arrivals together, having arrived on a flight from the US. Even though they had never met Sara in person, there was no question that she was their biological mother – they share the same eyes, the same infectious smile.

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