Rescuing our children from the clutches of smartphones

Remember what it was like growing up in the 1980s. No seat belts in the car, crazy summer sunburns and sucking in secondary smoke from chain-smoking adults were part of an average kid’s life. What a time to be alive.

Then came change.

By the time we were teenagers, buckling up was becoming a thing. So was real sun cream regularly applied, not just a dab of factor 4 at noon. Smoking around children was increasingly frowned on.

In all three examples, a convincing body of evidence that certain behaviours were creating unacceptably high risks led to the introduction of new norms. And because child safety is a cultural priority, this is where the change was considered most urgent. Today, parents readily adhere to the accepted norms around seatbelt, sun cream and smoking safety, and there is government intervention and legislation in all three areas in countries all over the world.

The children of the 1980s are today’s parents, and they’re getting to grips with a new and previously ignored childhood danger: the inevitable and pervasive presence of smartphones and social media in their kids’ lives.

As with the earlier dangers, there have been growing concerns for years in many quarters. Parents and educators everywhere have long realised that a childhood centred on an addictive device is, at least in some fuzzy sense, not a good thing.

For so many parents, however, the (understandable) path of least resistance has prevailed, and after a period of relentless nagging from their children, beginning at perhaps age 10 or 11, they relented and bought them a smartphone. Whatever misgivings they may have had eventually succumbed to a decisive rationale: their children’s friends were getting them, and they didn’t want their own children feeling left out and socially ostracised.

Boom. All of a sudden, in 2024, we’ve hit an inflection point, and the norms are rapidly changing.

Driven by the work of prominent US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, parents around the world are realising that the evidence is now in and it’s overwhelming — just as it was once upon a time with seat belts and sun cream and smoking. As Haidt points out in detail in his New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation, reputable peer-reviewed research has shown the litany of ills that smartphones in general, and social media in particular, have delivered to a generation of children.

Chief among them are vast increases in addictive behaviours, attention fragmentation, sleep deprivation and social deprivation. Each of the first three alone would be enough to raise serious concerns, but it is the array of risks associated with the latter — essentially a lack of meaningful interaction and connection with other humans — that would appear to have parents around the world most motivated to take action.

The irony of social deprivation being driven by media that is misleadingly described as “social” may have helped mask these effects from those who would not believe them. But data from studies undertaken all over the world reveals a generation of children who, from about 2012, have suffered catastrophic rises in depression, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy and general mental health problems.

A further irony underscores the phenomenon: the modern culture of safety-ism, which means we’re reluctant to let our children play outside unsupervised, has allowed them to be subsumed by an online existence with dangers that are often worse than our real-world fears, and certainly more likely. Exposure to traumatic events and imagery, crippling bullying, sexual harassment and sexual extortion (“sextortion”), and thoughts of self-harm and suicide, are some of a parent’s worst fears — and they are all far more likely online. 

One critical finding is that there is a direct correlation between the age at which children receive their first smartphone and their subsequent mental health: the younger the age, the worse their mental health outcomes in the years to come. A further indictment: the overwhelming response from young people in their late teens and 20s who now report regret at being given smartphones so young and wish their parents had stood firm against their pre-adolescent nagging.

In response to this now-clear social catastrophe, Haidt and other social scientists encourage four new norms:

• Delay smartphone use until at least high school — about 14 years old;
• Delay social media until at least 16;
• Make all schools phone-free, from bell to bell; and
• Encourage free play and independence.

Just as Big Tobacco once denied the health risks of smoking and lobbied against regulation, so Big Tech has remained largely unmoved. Effective age-gating to enforce the nominal age limits of social media platforms, for example, is a technical problem that could have been solved a decade ago with sufficient willpower, but Meta (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Alphabet (YouTube), ByteDance (TikTok) and others continue to value corporate profits over the health and wellbeing of their customers. The share price of Meta is nearly six times what it was a year ago.

But there is good news. Parents, educators and even legislators in a number of countries are starting to take action. In June, US surgeon-general Vivek Murthy called for mandated warning labels on social media apps. In August, he issued an advisory on the mental health crisis facing parents, compounded by navigating new technology and social media and the crisis of loneliness among children.

Perhaps most importantly at this stage, parents have begun to understand the importance of taking “collective action” — working together in localised groups to ensure that children in the same grades, schools and communities are all guided by the new norms. In this way, the “but my friend has a smartphone” argument can be delayed indefinitely.

In February this year, the Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) was ignited in the UK by a conversation between two young mothers, followed by an Instagram post on the topic that went viral. (Again, the irony.) Within a matter of days, thousands of parents had joined local WhatsApp groups and, as Haidt put it, “the global parents’ revolt against the phone-based childhood [had] just begun in the UK”.

In May, SFC held a global webinar for parents all over the world, including several South Africans, and today there are more than 150,000 parents signed up to SFC in dozens of countries. Clear-thinking educators are declaring schools phone-free zones, with a number of private SA schools, including St Alban’s College, Herschel Girls’ School and St Cyprian’s School revising policies in recent months.

Encouraged by grassroots pressure, legislators now appear to be catching up, too. In the US, smartphone legislation has become a rare bipartisan issue, with numerous states having taken action to limit the use of phones in schools, and two major national bills in the pipeline (the inevitable lobbying notwithstanding). In the UK, the Safer Phones Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on October 16 “to make smartphones less addictive to support healthier, happier childhoods”. 

Even Big Tech, guided by market forces, has evidently detected a change in the winds: Meta has made tentative moves towards improving privacy settings for children on Instagram.

For now, though, the most effective action is happening at parental level, with the SA SFC offshoot taking the lead locally. Describing itself as “a national movement focused on delaying children’s first use of smartphones and social media”, it gained more than 3,000 members within weeks of its launch in July. Earlier this month, it introduced a pioneering “digital parent pact” at two events, at Rustenburg Girls’ Junior School and SACS Junior School in Cape Town.

Collectively attended by more than 1,400 parents in person and online, the Press Pause, Go Play events included panel discussions on the topic and the announcement of the digital pacts, which provide a simple and tangible way for parents to commit to delaying the introduction of smartphones for their children. The accepted wisdom is that a 25% uptake among a grade or school will be enough to initiate a change in norms.

“Introducing a smartphone before a child is ready can lead to serious consequences,” said Emma Sadleir, a digital law expert and event panellist. “That is why the support community SFC offers is so crucial in helping parents navigate this challenge.”

Fellow speaker Kate Farina, a long-time tech awareness advocate, summed it up: “This is the start of a movement empowering parents to take control of their children’s digital futures.”

The new norms have arrived.

For more information: www.smartphonefreechildhood.co.za