Five years ago, in the unhealthy tradition of columnists who mine their children’s lives for material, I wrote about how my then 13-year-old daughter didn’t yet have a smartphone. At the time, the media was groaning under the weight of good advice from experts about how to manage your child’s internet usage. You know the kind of thing: track their activity and insist on having their passcodes. Talk to them about the things they might encounter online: not just the obviously harmful things such as porn and bullying, but the insidiously damaging ones such as unrealistic body standards and everyone else’s shimmeringly perfect life.
It was all good advice, but no one ever said the one thing I really wanted to hear: just say no. Say no to a smartphone, because handing over a portal to all of the darkest predilections of unfettered humanity to someone you may not trust to walk to the supermarket alone cannot end well. Instead, it felt a bit like we were all supposed to pack our children off on a flight to an unknown destination with lots of advice about keeping their emergency cash hidden and wearing sunscreen, but nothing at all about where they were going or how to survive in it. In his brilliant, troubling book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt likens it to seeing your children off as experimental voyagers to Mars.
With all the confidence and terror of one whose eldest child was only on the cusp of her teens, I wrote that I had yet to hear a single good reason why any young teenager needed a smartphone, other than “because everyone else has one”. For weeks afterwards, people wrote to me with questions and encouragement and chiding and, mostly, predictions about how soon we would cave. I also thought we would cave. And of course we did, but not until she was 15, which was far more to her credit than to her parents’.
Nothing terrible happened to my daughter in those smartphone-free years. If someone wanted to reach her, they texted her on her old-school Nokia. This child – born the year after the iPhone, the year before the like button – wasn’t banned from the internet; she just wasn’t allowed to carry it around in her pocket. By the time she actually got a smartphone, she was fairly indifferent about the prospect. (The next child got off more lightly. The pandemic intervened and ushered with it the triple whammy of smartphone, social media and Fortnite before his 14th birthday.) Did either of them benefit from waiting a bit longer than most of their peers? I’m not sure. How do you measure the absence of a potential harm that we’re only now beginning to quantify?
‘Organise childcare’ means two things - ask Granny or take a day off work
Hazel Behan and Gisèle Pelicot are not victims, but survivors setting the world on fire with their truth
My meeting with Mohamed Al Fayed went well. Then I mentioned the young women in short skirts
The Government is blinded by rich man syndrome
It sounds hyperbolic, but he describes how platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted two specific psychological systems in teenagers: the need to conform, so painfully acute in adolescence; and the unconscious prestige-based ranking system against which humans measure one another
We do now have hoards of data to show the mental health of my children’s generation has been in a state of precipitous decline since about 2012. This trend is mirrored across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA and northern Europe. Haidt attributes it to a collision between the age of the “paired technologies of smartphone and social media” and, something he has written about before, the era of peak “safetyism”. In essence, parental over-protection led to children spending much more time alone at home, locked into their bedrooms where their brains were collectively “rewired” by social media.
[ No smartphones before 14: Is this the prescription for a happy childhood?Opens in new window ]
It sounds hyperbolic, but he describes how platform designers in Silicon Valley directly targeted two specific psychological systems in teenagers: the need to conform, so painfully acute in adolescence; and the unconscious prestige-based ranking system against which humans measure one another. Big tech gamed these cracks in teenagers’ psychology by making likes, shares and retweets visible, and by displaying the number of followers someone has – even brazenly calling them “followers”. Facebook investor Sean Parker characterised social media as “a social validation feedback loop… exactly the kind of thing a hacker like myself would come up with, you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
While children and teenagers are being slowly inculcated into this world – obediently liking, clicking, silently totting up all the ways in which they are inadequate – they are simultaneously spending far less time in the real one.
The single best thing this Government could do in the time it has left is to advise schools to adopt a policy of no smartphones during the school day. Not ad-hoc voluntary codes, but bans
People still talk about children and smartphones, as I did, in terms of parental responsibility, but this has become too big for individual parents or even schools to tackle. We talk too about making big tech accountable, and we must, but we don’t have time to wait while they continue to obfuscate, spin and deny away the evidence. Collective and decisive government action are what is needed.
The single best thing this Government could do in the time it has left is to advise schools to adopt a policy of no smartphones during the school day. Not ad-hoc voluntary codes, but bans. If there is an emergency, parents can call or email the school office. Start with the low-hanging fruit and begin in primary schools. Provide funding for phone pouches, or cupboards with a big old padlock. There will be very little opposition from parents, and I suspect some children might even be secretly relieved.
I asked my own two this week what they think would be the right age for their younger sister – who is not yet 10, so the question was purely theoretical – to get a smartphone. Younger than they were? Older? About the same? The 16-year-old, who seems to regard technology generally as just as vital to his wellbeing as any 16-year-old, answered immediately: never, he said. My daughter, now 17, said: “Not for as long as possible.” A few days later, she articulated why. “She doesn’t need to be stuck inside her head on her phone. She needs to be in the real world for as long as she can.”