by Picture the scene. A crowded train stop on the way to Wales, one of those with few passenger seats. At one table, there is a woman with four children, one of whom is bawling her little lungs out. Finally the mother cracks and hands the little one what he was after: his smartphone. Peace comes on the chariot. The other passengers feel relieved.
And that, folks, is precisely why the Government’s latest initiative — a consultation on the possibility of banning the sale of smartphones to under-16s — is a waste of time. Because the damage is done under 16 years of age. The child is already groomed by technology that locks them into a world divorced from the world around them. The question of parental consent is simply redundant, because in most cases (as with the aforementioned harassing mother) the parents are the problem.
Who gives a child a smartphone to close it? Parents. Who gratefully takes the opportunity to browse through their own smartphone by handing a noisy toddler another device? Parents. Who is the target audience for the sad little ad outside the primary school near me: “Bless your child with a smile, not a smartphone”? Parents.
What we have is nothing less than child abuse, by which children are robbed of their experience of the interesting and exciting world around them for the convenience of busy adults who should be encouraging them to look out of windows, get in the way the street, look intuitively at odd people, ask persistent questions. Except that is tired, no?
The late Judith Kerr wrote a wonderful children’s book, Mummy Time, about all the fun things a baby and mum did on her phone: look at balloons, play with cows. She was smart but she missed a trick — it would be the child himself on the phone today.
The Government is dealing with the problem too late. By the age of 16, you have children who have a hard-wired brain to filter use.
The Government is getting it wrong with this stupid consultation because it is dealing with the problem too late. By the age of 16, you have clumsy children whose brains are hard-wired for screen use, who become irritable and irritable if they don’t have a screen at hand. The organization Smartphone Free Childhood has links to a large number of papers that identify the consequences of screen use: addiction (any idiot can identify that), mental health problems, short attention spans.
Someone on their social radar — Jonathan Haidt, has finally energized the middle classes about the problem. He noted, without reply: “I call smartphones ‘experience blockers’, because as soon as you give the phone to a child, he will occupy every moment that is not nailed down with something else … Basically it’s about the loss of youth in real life.”
But it shouldn’t take an American social psychologist to inform us of this obvious truth that we are dehumanizing children. And it’s not just a generational problem; it is a class problem. Just as it was Bill and Melissa Gates who made sure the little Gateses were not exposed to too much screen use when they were growing up, the children of the Meta bosses will not be given smartphones by the time. ‘other three. It’s not; the less privileged will be subcontracting childcare to their devices.
That tough nut, Katharine Birbalsingh, when she was social mobility czar, identified premature mobile phone use as a problem three years ago. “I want some campaigns, national campaigns, on things like phones and not giving them to your child”.
This is why the attitude of the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, is usually so vague. She prefers child-friendly smartphones, which have been engineered to exclude problematic features from the devices. But the problem with smartphones is not pornography. It is that they are a portal to a world divorced from their surroundings.
Granted, it’s not easy. I managed to keep my children away from mobile phones throughout primary school, and you’d never think to see them now. It would be impossible to do what I want to do, which is to prevent an adult from giving a smartphone to a child under the age of eight.
But what we can do is stigmatize the practice. We can make those people who use smartphones as pacifiers, regardless of the potential damage to little brains, into social pariahs. Personally I would rather have a mother who puffs smoke for her children than a mother who would shoot a device.
We are currently exposing a generation to unknown vulnerabilities. We need to make the practice as socially undesirable as smoking. But that might mean setting the devices for ourselves a bit. Tricky, huh?
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist
