10/12/2024
Channel 4 is the latest institution to investigate children using smartphones, and I am glad they are doing an experiment that involves science. I researched smartphone use for my book How to Leave a Group Chat before the conversation around it mushroomed. You only have to look around you to see that smartphone use can have negative effects on people of all ages. I have known people who started using these devices in their 20s, 30s – even 50s and they are almost all addicted. I’ve sat through dinners where I am the only one without a phone on the table next to my plate, I have witnessed a young man walking down the street in broad daylight on video call to a friend who is in the shower, and I have had to put up with women taking video calls in the ladies’ changing room at the gym. I don’t believe that children need, or should have phones, before high school. But what is special about the age of 16, or 18?
If smartphone use is delayed until a later age, children have a chance to exist in the real world and to learn how to interact with each other. They have a chance to grow and to develop the skills that are essential for life. However, equally, we need let them do that. We need to design our environment so that children are able to be “free-range” again. Build a safe bicycle network and improve our streets so that they can quickly and conveniently get around without being chaperoned by adults. Let them out to play and explore – just like they have done for millennia. If they are mainly kept inside, or under the watchful eye of adults, there isn’t much alternative other than to exist online. Maybe Britain should have a scheme whereby children are given subsidised activities such as sports, dance, coding or whatever else they enjoy to encourage them to be out of the house and off their phones. We also need to protect the few places that they have left to play and give them safe spaces to be after dark where there are fun activities to do.
Children’s behaviour around smartphones starts with adults. Adults should model good behaviour: put their phone away when they are interacting with children and give them the attention that they need and deserve. Adults can interact with children in ways that help their development, instead of handing a toddler TikTok and letting her get on with it because they are scared of an outburst, like a couple in the row behind me did on a recent WizzAir flight to Bucharest. Adults can restrict screen time and stop children from having phones, at least when they are pre-teens, and don’t put hundreds of photos of children on social media – if the adults are doing it, this will make it seem even more normal to children.
Should smartphones be considered a grown-up toy that’s legally kept away from children like alcohol or vapes (two other things we’re all better off not using, or using less, but that’s another story)? The science for this is still coming out, and it looks like tomorrow’s programme Swiped on Channel 4 will have some very interesting revelations, but it can’t be denied that it’s in children’s best interests to have alternatives to screens and to be encouraged to use them less. Actually, that’s something that is good for all of us.
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