Parents joke that smartphones are like ‘baby crack’, and if you’ve ever tried taking a toddler to a restaurant, you’ve probably at least considered swapping chaos for Peppa Pig.
Phones and iPads are embedded into childhoods for many families, with data showing that a quarter of children aged five to seven own their own smartphone.
With the explosion of the tech, however, has come concerns about the negative impacts.
Although phones can be a vital lifeline to keep in touch with our children as they gain more freedom, they open them up to the rest of the world too, and can even cause addiction.
MPs will discuss the problem in Parliament on Wednesday, with a private member’s bill about the potential harms to children from using smartphones.
The safer phones bill calls for phones to be banned during the school day by law across the country, as well as committing the government to a review of whether they should be sold to younger teens at all, and making it harder for tech companies to use children’s data to target them with addictive algorithms that lead to ‘doom scrolling’.
Clinical psychologist Dr Marianne Trent told Metro that she is concerned about how overwhelming the tech can be for children, whose brains and impulse control are still developing.
While her eight-year-old still doesn’t have a phone, she bought her 11-year-old a smartphone when he started to go out by himself. It has a screen plan that automatically shuts down after 8pm to protect his rest, but many of his peers have no such restrictions, with notifications able to arrive night or day.
‘When he downloaded WhatsApp, I came to his phone one Sunday afternoon and there were 1,200 unread notifications in the two hours since he’d last picked up his phone,’ she said.
Her son is still frustrated he can’t have TikTok yet, but also admits that screen-free days are surprisingly good fun, with table football a recent success.
With the number of children and teens being treated for mental health conditions increasing, a University of Oxford study is looking at whether phones could be contributing to this epidemic.
Cognitive health professor John Gallacher, who is leading the work, told the Financial Times that initial results showed ‘a linear relationship between higher rates of anxiety and depression and time spent networking on social media sites’.
Dr Trent described some of the concerning signs that children have become dependent on smartphones, saying if parents spot these it may be time to make changes.
What are the signs of smartphone addiction for children?
Distress or resistance when boundaries are put around screen time. Dr Trent, of Good Thinking Psychology, said one of the first signs of a problem would be if limits on phones become a major issue. They might enter a hyperaroused state of shouting or crying in an attempt to get it back, and if this doesn’t work they could drop down into a hypoaroused state where they seem spaced out and even dissociated, because they are ‘acutely distressed from not having that connection and having that FOMO (fear of missing out).
Agitation doing activities that don’t involve screens. Children may have a sense of unease and that their hands feel empty without a phone.
Neck and back pain. Adults can get bad posture from leaning over to look at phones, and children have heavier heads proportionately so this may have even more impact on their neck muscles and developing bodies.
Lying about usage. As with any addiction, secretive use is a red flag. For example if asked whether they had used the phone they may claim they hadn’t.
Distracted and missing out on other things. Children may neglect other areas of their lives such as a family time, or forget they had tasks to do because they were so immersed in their phone life.
Poor sleep. Overuse of phones can cause poor nights sleep, both from blue light from the screen itself or from the distraction of a constant stream of news or notifications keeping children awake, which can impact school work and life in general.
How to deal with addiction? The first step is setting boundaries around use of the tech, such as only a certain time each weekend day, as well as making sure there are other activities that can fill the gap.
‘It’s not us being a bad guy putting in place screen limits,’ she said. ‘We’re not stealing all capacity for joy when we do that, but we’re helping our children to tap into other joys, that they perhaps couldn’t even have begun to imagine were out there.’
This may require more active parenting during the adjustment if screentime has previously allowed for quiet periods, and parents may also need to address their own screentime in order to be good role models!
Bex Burn-Callander, 41, is a mum-of-two living in York and has already decided her children, aged five and two, won’t get smartphones until they are at least in secondary school.
‘A lot of my friends were having kids before I was, in the era when smartphones just exploded, and they were almost the guinea pigs,’ she told Metro.
‘Because I was having children a bit later, I saw how it became a battle, with mental health and social media cyber bullying, and I would hear about the daily trials that they were going through with their kids,’ she said.
The communications director for Build Concierge says she does let her kids use phones now and then, such as if they get delayed on a long journey, but this only reinforces her belief that it should be rare.
‘They absolutely love it – it’s like baby crack,’ she said. ‘If you put it into their hands, they just don’t want to let go.’
Although a phone can be an easy fallback for entertainment, the flipside is you can become like a ‘zombie’ just staring at it with little need to interact, unlike in previous eras when kids might have tried to avoid boredom by making up games or going outside.
When children get phones early on, it’s easy for life to then ‘revolve around the phone’, whether that be for punishments with loss of screen time or rewards of ‘ten minutes more’, she said.
‘That’s sort of terrified me: Just how much they love it, because it’s all designed to set off rockets in our brains and make us feel like we’re getting those big hits of dopamine – and then the big crashes, when you come off.
‘I don’t think kids’ brains are built to withstand that. I don’t think my brain is built to withstand it either if I’m honest!’
She has signed up for the Smartphone Free Childhood pledge, where parents agree not to give their children a smartphone until they are at least 14.
After being set up in April, the grassroots campaign has seen massive success with over 65,000 people joining up.
Daisy Greenwell, who founded it along with her husband and a friend, told Metro that studies show teenagers are spending up to eight hours a day on their phones.
This is ‘equivalent to a part-time job’ and means they miss out on doing more social or creative things because their time is spent on apps which are designed to be addictive,’ she said.
The mum-of-three with children aged five, seven, and nine said: ‘There are children in my eldest two’s classes who have got phones already.
‘As soon as one child gets one in the class, everyone else wants one and they feel left out if they don’t because suddenly the social life starts going online.
‘It’s really hard to resist that pressure as a parent.’
She has a family computer which her children use for their school work, but sees this as less concerning than phones, which are ‘like a precision-engineered supercomputer in their pockets 24/7’.
Her children’s primary school has a no phones policy where they have to be handed in at the gate, and she would like to see this rolled out to more schools, in particular secondary schools where they often have a ‘not seen’ policy but kids can keep them in their bags.
Not allowing them at all during the school day could help with the peer pressure aspect, and another solution could be the use of so-called ‘brick’ phones which allow children to keep in touch with calls and texts, but do not have the addictive features which make smartphones so concerning.
Former teacher Josh MacAlister, Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington, will introduce the bill on protecting children from harms caused by excessive screen time on October 15.
Mr MacAlister, who led an independent review into children’s social care for the former government, said: ‘The evidence is mounting that children doom scrolling for hours a day is causing widespread harm. We need the equivalent of the “seatbelt” legislation for social media use for children.
‘Adults find it hard enough to manage screen time, so why are we expecting children to manage this addictive content without some shared rules? Parents are in an impossible bind over whether to ostracise their child from social media or expose them to the harms and addiction of content.
‘Countries around the world are now taking bold action and our children risk being left behind. It’s time to have the national debate here in the UK.’
MPs are expected to debate the issue in the new year.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
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