Do no harm — The necessity of banning smartphones for children Guy Holder · Follow 9 min read · Just now Just now — Listen Share
An extensive body of research now makes clear what had been strongly suspected for some time — smartphones are causing significant and lasting harm to young people and are therefore not age appropriate. Legislation to ban them for children must be enacted as soon as possible.
Before continuing to make the case — this would not apply to mobile phones. In modern society, children should be allowed to have a simple ‘brick’ phone with the ability to call, text and play music, fitted with a GPS tracker. That’s it, and is actually quite a lot of power, far more than the majority of adults had when they were children. What should be banned is any device that has cellular internet connectivity, such as 5G.
The list of harms being done to children by smartphones is extensive and deeply troubling; a brief outline of my top four (borrowing heavily from the work of Jonathan Haidt) is below. If you would like to read more about why such a ban would be easy, click here. (need to add link). And if you are among those already convinced, you can skip to the end and support the cause. The time for action is long passed and we need to start taking control of our children’s digital future.
Harm 1 — Social Media
There has been a marked and significant increase in mental health disorders amongst children since 2010 and the chief cause of this is social media. The correlation with smartphone usage is clear and the causal link increasingly proven. The two graphs below, both from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health, illustrate the trend:
The pattern is replicated in other Western democracies, the UK and Canada closely tracking the US, countries such as Australia and New Zealand doing likewise but slightly lagged.
Major depression for children has doubled, to one in four girls in the US. Suicide rates have doubled (see harm 4 below). Childhood happiness, according to the Good Childhood Report (2021) is significantly down since 2010. Loneliness at school increased between 2012 and 2018 for 35 out of 36 countries (PISA 2018 report). For English speaking countries, those reporting loneliness at school increased from approximately 16% of 15–16 year olds in 2012 to approximately 35% in 2018.
Research conducted by Jonathan Haidt and others squarely points the finger at social media as the largest single cause of this epidemic in mental health disorders and unhappiness amongst children. A variety of studies on mental health, from the impact of ‘doom scrolling’ to increased FOMO, prove the causal link that explains the correlation.
Social media is clearly not age appropriate and it is something of a sick joke that the stated permissible age in many countries, 13 years old, is probably the worst possible age for a child to be using social media.
Once the smartphone is provided, the child is hooked and, whilst some mitigations can be put in place, these are necessarily limited, especially after 13 years old. The only answer to this pernicious problem is to ban smartphones for children and therefore limit their mobile communication to text messages and phone calls. If we truly care about the mental health of our children, we would do so with urgency.
Harm 2 — Pornography
Pornography is ‘hyperstimulating’, producing unnaturally high levels of dopamine. If this is true for adults, what must be the case for children? Can you recall, as a child, that first sexual experience? A brief flash of flesh that produced a shudder, a queasiness? What must it be for an 11 year old, to have that experience via a high definition pornographic video, repeated, daily? 27% of 11 year olds are now viewing pornography, according to the Childrens’ Commissioner, and this is likely to be under reported. Over 1 in 4 children.
The evidence of the impacts of this is growing, hardly surprising when almost half of 16–21 year old boys view pornography twice a week or more (compared to 31% of girls) and a fifth of 16–21 year old boys intentionally view online pornography every day or more often.
Harmful sexual behaviour has increased (possibly linked to mirror neurons). Anxiety and fear around sex and expectations, for both males and females, has risen. Some studies indicate that there is a rise in erectile dysfunction for young males. Porn use has been correlated with an erosion of the prefrontal cortex.
Is any of this a surprise? Not only is it obvious that frequently watching pornography is ‘not good’, for this to be happening during adolescence, when a “significant structural remodelling and neuronal reconfiguring of the brain” is taking place, is alarming. The viewing of pornography by children is causing no less than a rewiring of the brain. In summary, viewing pornography stimulates arousal, firing reward systems and creating and reinforcing neural pathways. Dopamine is released, which stimulates the viewer to seek further dopamine release by repeating the same behaviour. One terrible aspect of this is, should the repeated behaviour not produce the same level of dopamine release (which is inevitable), is that the viewer is likely to be pushed to find more ‘extreme’ versions to stimulate and excite.
Some will say that this issue can be resolved by better parental controls but this is weak for two reasons. First, it relies on parents both understanding and implementing said controls, which may better support those children of tech savvy and time rich parents, but not those of others. Second, anyone who seriously thinks that children won’t find a route around parental controls, to view things that they shouldn’t otherwise, clearly underestimates the flexibility of technology and forget what it is to be a curious child. It is an endless game with only one loser: the child.
Harm 3 — Extremism
Smartphones are the gateway device for children to view extremist content. From the phenomenon that is (was?) Andrew Tate to videos in support of terrorism and violence to racism, children are exposed to a smorgasbord of subtle and not-so-subtle messages of hate and lies.
Finding statistics, particularly for children, can be challenging. However, one measure, that of the number of children arrested for anti-terror offences, was its highest, in 2021, since records began. So alarmed was the Metropolitan Police, they wrote a letter in July 2022 to London parents, via primary and secondary schools, warning them of the risk of their child becoming radicalised during the 6 week summer holiday.
That the MET felt compelled to take this course of action is nothing short of extraordinary. It is both an acknowledgement of the harm being done and an admission that the police are somewhat powerless to prevent radicalisation of children. This, they imply, must be done by parents during the long 6 week holiday when they are most likely at work, trying to balance the various competing demands of running a household, including keeping their children entertained, stimulated and occupied. To expect parents to manage this, in the face of often sophisticated and incremental manipulation, is unrealistic. As shown in recent reports of extremists using online gaming as a gateway to spread their hate, children are a key target group for those who seek to sow discord and violence. It has also been noted that vulnerable children are most at risk.
It is not just ‘extreme’ content that is relevant in the context of radicalisation but the well documented fact that use of the internet, and social media in particular, can lead to a narrowing of viewpoints. Driven by algorithms, children are taken further and further into echo chambers, presented with a narrower and narrower view of the world that is toxic to our societies. For this to take place during those formative years of questioning and identity formation is heartbreaking; a stunting of intellectual curiosity and a polarisation of opinion the obvious result.
There is only one clear and obvious course of action that will reassure the police, schools, parents and civil society, that children across London and elsewhere are not sat on their phones for hours on end, summer after summer, holiday after holiday, watching racist, misogynist, homophobic, far-right and far-left anti-Western violent content: ban smartphones for children.
Harm 4 — Suicide and self harm
Devastatingly, the rise of self harm and suicide by children is one indicator of the harm being done. Research confirms a doubling of admissions to children’s hospitals in the US for suicide ideation or suicide attempt in recent years. In the UK, an analysis by UCL in 2018–19 of those born at the turn of the millennium confirmed the increasing prevalence of mental illness amongst the young, with a staggering 1 in 4 teenagers reporting that they self-harmed and 7% of them attempting suicide (10% of girls, 4% of boys).
Statistics such as these are hard to believe yet they are now commonplace. What I find even more alarming is what must lie beneath; if 1 in 10 UK teenage girls are attempting suicide, as the UCL states, what of their peers? Whilst they may have not been driven to that particular step, they too are surely struggling. And what it must it be to have a generation who are now far more likely to have a peer who has attempted suicide? As with much of the data on teen mental health, we see but the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
The correlation between the mental health deterioration of children and smartphone use is well known . The causal link is increasingly proven, with tragic high profile cases such as Molly Russell highlighting the appalling content being viewed. With the Digital Childhoods report finding almost half of children reporting seeing harmful content online in 2022, is it any wonder?
Yes, the Online Safety Act has been passed and, yes, it may make a difference to the exposure of young people to inappropriate content, particularly involving self harm and suicide.
But will it be enough? Will those children who are curious about such topics still be able to find relevant information online? Will disturbed people still be able to send messages to others, dodging the various checks and safeguards that the Act seeks to put in place? Will your child, and their friends and peers, still be a few clicks away from some of the most unimaginably horrific content? The answers are obvious.
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These are my top four. Should I find the time (and the stomach), I will write about some of the others, such as online bullying, eating disorders, misinformation, the increase in underage gambling or harmful content such as road traffic accidents and animal cruelty.
In what ways might your child, niece, family friend, be part of the statistics above? One of those who self-harms? One of those who sends nude images of themselves to other children? One of those who asks others to do so? Will your child watch videos of murder and violence? Will they video themselves and/or their peers in inappropriate situations and then send it to the world? Will they be one of the boys who report that they cannot get an erection due to pornography?
Most devastating of all, and crucial to the necessity of a smartphone ban, is that even if your child, improbably, makes it through unscathed, what of their generation? Statistically, it makes for miserable conclusions. What is it like to grow up surrounded by a peer group going through such harm? What of their friends? What about their older (but still young) role models? Their current (and future) girlfriends and boyfriends?
Smartphone based childhoods transform the childhoods of all children. This is the cohort effect that Jonathan Haidt refers to and the transformation is clearly for the worse.
There is one simple thing that would put a dramatic stop to this, that would lead to the trends above going in the opposite direction, that would wrest childhood away from social media, lunatic fringe ideas, pornograpy, violence, lies and manipulation. And, as an added bonus, it would save parents thousands of pounds!
A smartphone ban for children is long overdue. We can work out the details, such as the functionality of mobile phones that we would allow children to own, the age that we would permit them to ‘progress’ to a smartphone, and so on.
Doing so will be part of a process, a process of reclaiming childhood from the horrors of unmetered, untrammelled internet use. One that I want to kickstart, with urgency.
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A smartphone based childhood is no childhood.
If not now, when?
If not you, who?
Source: medium.com
