Thu 18 Jul 2024

 

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My 10 and 13-year-old don’t have phones, but parents still judge me

Esther Walker believes social media is a modern evil - but she warns against parents being unrealistic and extreme when they completely demonise screens

We are witnessing the dawn of a new moral panic: children and smartphones.

When it comes to battlelines drawn between different parenting choices, I thought the rows over sugar were the worst it could get. But the recent movement to keep children away from smartphones until adulthood is shaping up to be an epic battle.

A new movement, Smartphone Free Childhood, is campaigning on this. Their stated aims are: to connect like-minded parents; lobby the government and, crucially, tech companies, to be more responsible. The movement is supported by the charity Parentkind and, tangentially, backed-up by the new book from Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation.

The movement is well-intentioned and long overdue. My attention around this subject, though, is always drawn to the language used, which is pretty strong and leans heavily on addiction tropes. “Smartphones rob children of their childhood,” states the Smartphone Free Childhood website. “Even harmless content isn’t harmless.”

My own children are 10 and 13 years old. Neither have a smartphone nor have asked for one, which is weird. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, it’s because they have each had an iPad mini for years. There isn’t much they see an iPhone doing that their iPad can’t.

But the difference to me, as a neurotic parent, is that they can only use their iPads at certain times of day, are connected to the house Wi-Fi – so parental controls can’t be bypassed using cellular data – and they don’t have WhatsApp or other social media. They know I randomly cruise their iPads to check what they’re up to (and quite evidently have no idea how to clear their browsing history).

Listen: I hate the internet. And anything with the prefix “smart”. I absolutely agree that social media is a great modern evil and have never understood why smartphones were ever allowed into schools. For years we were duped by Big Food into thinking that refined sugar was “energy”; now it’s Big Tech branding social media as “connection”.

But we also have to acknowledge that smartphones are here, now, and organisations have raced to get online – from schools setting homework, to parking apps, to banks and the NHS urging you to download any number of fiddly apps. To navigate the world at any level, you need a smartphone: this isn’t a choice that purely we, the public, have individually made.

My parenting approach to screens and sugar has always been a homoeopathic dose. They can have it, but only this much, at these times. And, yes, it’s a right pain to police. “Raising children is relentless work,” says the child psychologist Dr Jen Wills Lamacq, “and anything that requires extra negotiation makes it more difficult. Banning things – sugar, screens, risk-taking activities – is one solution, and eases our own anxieties. While I would fully support any parent who wants to keep their children away from a phone, it does lead to the question of when you’ll allow them to have one.”

I have been judged hard for allowing my children screen time: if we were with another family on holiday I had to hide my children for their allotted evening screentime hour so that we wouldn’t infect other kids with our satanic practices.

Yes, it would be great if childhood was like a Famous Five novel but since time immemorial, parents have been unable to stop children from getting into trouble (just consider the crimes committed by Julian, Dick, Anne and George while they were living this free-range life: assault, unlawful imprisonment, criminal damage, breaking and entering and theft…). I grew up in the 90s. Did I still manage to get myself into trouble? Constantly.

With children you can only help them manage risk and then pray. If the aim is to keep children safe, banning smartphones doesn’t go far enough: you’d have to switch the world back to analogue. But until such an (unlikely) switch-off, we’ve got a problem.

Not least that demonising things makes them super-attractive during the teenage risk-taking years, says Dr Wills Lamacq. “And teenagers genuinely do not make good decisions.” To give a smartphone, which has been hitherto treated like a controlled substance, to a brain right in the middle of a teenage rewire, might not have the consequences you intended. “Perhaps having battles over the use of a device early on gets them out of the way.”

There’s another issue at play here and that is the large numbers of children for whom a smartphone is essential: the 120,000 or so who are carers for a parent or siblings; children who have homework set by their school online and have no alternative device to access it; children who let themselves in to an empty home after school.

Those who think that it is a binary choice between screens or playing in the park need a reality check. For many children there are no parks, or they are dangerous. Working or single parents cobble together an appealing mash of technology to occupy their child from the end of school until dinnertime as a cornerstone of their childcare plan. Tech filled a void and it’ll be hard work to replace it with nothing except someone else’s idea of what a childhood ought to look like.

“Families living in deprived circumstances with limited recreational options already feel bad,” says Dr Wills Lamacq, “making them feel worse about things they can’t change isn’t productive. I would like to see fewer arguments that make parents worried and ashamed and more practical advice on how to live with all of this. Parents ought to be allowed to make choices based on information, rather than panic or fear.”

Exposing the harm smartphones can do is not wrong. Perhaps extreme language is what’s needed to stop parents from sleep-walking into a situation that they assume is fine because “everyone else is doing it”.

The challenge is to not make it a moral issue and to simultaneously push for change elsewhere, to fill that void. Any time spent offline, doing something in the real world with real people has got to be a good thing but perhaps it is better to coax with a carrot rather than beat with a stick.

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