Imagine the scene. A crowded train to Wales is one of those trains with very few seats for passengers. There is a woman at a table with four children, one of whom is screaming her lungs out. Finally, the mother gives the little boy what he was after: his smartphone. Barış gets into the car. Other passengers also feel relief.
And friends, this is exactly why the Government’s latest initiative (consultation on the possibility of banning the sale of smartphones to under-16s) turns out to be such a waste of time. Because by the age of 16 the damage has been done. The child has already been trained with a technology that locks him/her into a world separate from the real world around him/her. The parental consent issue is frustratingly unnecessary, because in most cases (like the abused mother mentioned above) the parents are the problem.
Who gives a kid a smartphone to silence him? Parents. Who gratefully takes the opportunity to give a noisy toddler a second device to browse their own smartphone? Parents. Who is the target audience of the sign “Greet your child with a smile, not with a smartphone” in front of the primary school near me? Parents.
What we have is nothing but mass child harm, where children are deprived of experiences of the interesting and exciting world around them for the convenience of busy adults who should be encouraging children to look out the window, get dirty on the street. stare rudely at strange-looking people, ask persistent questions. Except it’s tiring, right?
The late, brilliant Judith Kerr wrote Mummy Time, a lovely children’s book about all the fun things a baby does when mommy is on her phone: looking at balloons, playing with cows. He was prescient, but he was missing a trick; These days the baby would be the one talking on the phone.
The government is dealing with this problem very late. By age 16, you have kids with lobotomies whose brains are programmed to use screens.
The government is on the losing side with this stupid consultation because it deals with the problem too late. By the age of 16, you have children with lobotomy, whose brains are programmed to use screens, and who become restless and agitated when they don’t have a screen in their hands. The organization Smartphone-Free Childhood has a link to a series of articles describing the consequences of screen use: addiction (any idiot can figure this out), mental health problems, short attention spans.
The middle classes were finally mobilized to address this issue by someone on their social radar, Jonathan Haidt. He observed, without answer: “I call smartphones ‘experience blockers’ because when you give the phone to a child, it will take up every moment of your life that is not connected to anything else… Fundamentally, this is the loss of childhood. real world.”
But it didn’t take an American social psychologist to warn us of this obvious fact that we are dehumanizing children. And this is not just a generational problem; This is a class issue. Just as it is Bill and Melissa Gates who ensure that the little Gates are not exposed to excessive screen use while growing up, it will not be the Meta bosses’ children who will get smartphones when they grow up. Cheap. No; Those who will delegate childcare to their own devices will be less privileged.
Hardcore nut Katharine Birbalsingh, while social mobility czar, identified early mobile phone use as a problem three years ago. “I would like some campaigns, national campaigns, to be carried out on issues such as phones and not to give them to your little child.”
This is why the attitude of the Children’s Commissioner, the normal-voiced Dame Rachel de Souza, is so puzzling. He prefers kid-friendly smartphones designed to exclude problematic elements from the devices. But the problem with smartphones is not pornography. This is because they are a portal to a world separated from their surroundings.
Of course it’s not easy. I managed to keep my kids away from cell phones throughout their primary school years, you’d never think I’d see them now. It would be impractical to do what I want, which is to forbid an adult from giving a smartphone to a child under eight.
But what we can do is stamp the application. We could turn those who use smartphones as pacifiers into social outcasts, regardless of the damage it might do to little minds. Personally, I prefer a mother who sprays cigarette smoke on her children to a mother who consoles her with a device.
We are currently exposing a generation to unknown harms. We need to make this practice seem as socially undesirable as smoking. However, this may mean leaving the devices to ourselves for a bit. Is not it difficult?
Melanie McDonagh is an Evening Standard columnist