A highly significant question for parents in the modern world is when to give your child a smartphone. This is because of increasingly clear data that exposes the risks to children’s mental health as well as dangers of giving young people untrammelled access to everything on the internet/
Last week I had a very interesting meeting in the new Shenfield Library building with three local parents – Jordana, Geoff and Jodie – who are representatives of Smartphone Free Childhood, a grass roots charity set up to educate parents and schools of the risks for children of using smartphones.
As a parent who is very firmly of the view that young children should not have smartphones I was very pleased to meet them. (Last week the Conservative Party tabled an amendment to the Government’s education legislation to ban smartphones in school but were defeated on the vote by Labour MPs). There is now a lot of interest in this movement from local primary schools and their parents – many of whom feel pressured into buying their child a phone because so many classmates have one.
Jordana, Geoff and Jodie all had different reasons to get onboard with the campaign, from the fact that phones put distance between adults and families to seeing what mental health problems and addiction to social media can have on older children and trying to slow this behaviour being passed to the younger generation.
The internet has changed a lot since the 1990s when it started to enter all our lives. Lots of adults – myself included – spend far too much on it. We have a duty to make sure children grow up in the real world and that they are protected from the sort of content that would never have come close to previous generations of young people. Having a proper conversation about children and smartphones is long overdue – I am very glad to see that local parents are having it.
