Picture the scene. A crowded stopping train on the way to Wales, one of the ones with way too few seats for passengers. At one table, there’s a woman with four children, one of them bawling his little lungs out. Finally the mother cracks and hands the little fellow what he was after: her smartphone. Peace descends on the carriage. The other passengers feel a sensation of relief.
And that, folks, is precisely why the Government’s latest initiative — a consultation about the possibility of banning the sale of smartphones to under-16s — is such a waste of time. Because by the age of 16, the damage has been done. The child has already been groomed by a technology which locks them into a world divorced from the actual world around him. The issue of parental consent is just annoyingly redundant, because in most cases (as with the harassed mother mentioned above) the problem is the parents.
Who hands over a smartphone to a child to shut him up? Parents. Who gratefully takes the opportunity to browse through their own smartphone by handing a second device to a noisy toddler? Parents. Who is the target audience for the sad little notice outside the primary school near me: “Greet your child with a smile, not a smartphone”? Parents.
What we have is nothing less than mass child harm, whereby children are robbed of their experience of the interesting and exciting world around them for the convenience of the busy adults who should be encouraging them to look out of windows, get dirty on the street, gaze impolitely at odd-looking people, ask persistent questions. Except that’s tiring, no?
The late, brilliant Judith Kerr wrote a lovely children’s book, Mummy Time, about all the fun things a baby did while his mother was on her phone: look at balloons, play with cows. She was prescient but she missed a trick — nowadays it would be the baby himself on the phone.
The Government is dealing with the problem too late. By 16, you’ve got lobotomised children whose brains are hardwired to screen use
The Government is onto a loser with this stupid consultation because it’s dealing with the problem too late. By 16, you’ve got lobotomised children whose brains are hardwired to screen use, who get restive and uneasy if they don’t have a screen to hand. The organisation Smartphone Free Childhood has links to a raft of papers identifying the results of screen use: addiction (any fool can recognise that one), mental health problems, short attention spans.
The middle classes have finally been energised to the problem by someone on their social radar — Jonathan Haidt. He observed, unanswerably: “I call smartphones ‘experience blockers’, because once you give the phone to a child, it’s going to take up every moment that is not nailed down to something else ... It’s basically the loss of childhood in the real world.”
But it shouldn’t have taken an American social psychologist to alert us to this obvious reality that we’re dehumanising children. And it’s not just a generational problem; it’s a class problem. Just as it was Bill and Melissa Gates who made sure that the little Gateses weren’t exposed to excess screen use when they were growing up, it won’t be the children of the Meta bosses who’ll be given smartphones by the time they’re three. Nope; it’ll be the less privileged who’ll be subcontracting the 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 would like some campaigns, national campaigns, on things like phones and not giving them to your toddler”.
This is why the attitude of the Children’s Commissioner, the normally sound Dame Rachel de Souza, is so puzzling. She favours child-friendly smartphones, engineered to exclude problematic elements from the devices. But it’s not the pornography that’s the problem with smartphones. It’s that they’re a portal to a world divorced from their environment.
Granted, it’s not easy. I managed to keep my children away from mobile phones for the duration of primary school, and you’d never think it to see them now. It would be impracticable to do what I’d like, which is to ban an adult from giving a smartphone to a child under eight years old.
But what we can do is to stigmatise the practice. We can make those who use smartphones as pacifiers, without regard to the potential damage to small brains, into social pariahs. Personally I’d rather have a mother who puffs fag smoke at her children than one who palms him off with a device.
Right now we’re exposing a generation to unknown harms. We have to make the practice seem as socially undesirable as smoking. But that might mean laying off the devices ourselves a bit. Tricky, huh?
