Kids want phones, let them have them*
*Phone: a device that makes it possible for you to speak to someone in another place who has a similar device
As a child, I often heard my mother laughing and chatting to her sister in Australia. Here these sisters were, separated by oceans and timezones, yet connected via a phone – not cheap by any means, but vital to their sisterhood. After all, isn’t that what a phone is for? To dissolve the gap between us when we can’t be together in person? When Antonio Meucci was inventing the talking telegraph in 1949, I imagine this is what he wanted.
As a society today, we’ve lost this. Our children especially.
How many households still have a landline? In the UK, the traditional telephone system will soon switch off. By 2025, the whole of the UK will move to broadband-powered lines. The phone has changed. No longer a tool to simply foster genuine human connection – they’re now tiny computers with access to everything and everyone in the world.
And in turn, giving everyone in the world access to our children.
Childhood has become phone-based.
Artist Douglas Gordon created a piece listing the names of all the people he could remember ever meeting. For him, it’s more than 4000 people.
In his new book, The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt establishes that research shows humans thrive in groups of 150 people – the maximum number of people we can keep up with, support and rely on. We need high-investment, high-return relationships – and because it’s costly to leave these relationships, there is a healthy pressure to resolve conflict.
But these tiny computers we give our children guide them into a world with unlimited, often meaningless connections – chock-full of the low-investment, low-return relationships Jon Haidt talks of.
What would Douglas Gordon’s number be for the average Gen Zer or Alpha? What if we counted all the online interactions? Shallow and tenuous with no cost to leave the interaction and no requirement for healthy conflict resolution. Bully someone and exit the group. Comment on someone’s photo and then block them.
We are social beings.
We crave love and connection. We find significance through our relationships.
In my work as a therapist, these are the most common human needs I’ve identified. Smartphones and social media are perfectly designed to take advantage of this. We’re all aware of it now…the hit of dopamine is old news. But as a millennial, I was fortunate that my brain formed in childhood without it. I learned social skills in the real world. Noticing the micro expressions and the critical feedback. Trying, failing and course-correcting over and over again over the thousands of hours it takes – hours almost all of us Millennials and Gen Xers had – to become experts in human interaction.
Today, we aren’t giving our children that opportunity. Superficial smartphone interactions don’t give children the information they need to learn these vital social skills. The skills that will help them find love and connection.
And it doesn’t stop there.
The research is clear.
Smartphones negatively impact children’s physical and mental health, their social and brain development. It gives them exposure to extreme and dangerous content – violence, pornography, and more. Most of all, it allows some of the most dangerous and abusive people in this world to have direct access to their young minds and bodies.
Those of us who grew up in smartphone-free childhoods know something is seriously wrong. We all remember New Year’s Eve, right? When the clocks struck midnight, we’d all be hugging and kissing each other, marking a moment, a milestone. We experienced the joy and power of being completely present and connected to those around us.
Compare that feeling, or one similar, to this image of Paris on New Year’s Eve.
Yes, it’s sad that everyone is filming the countdown rather than being present (if you’ve been to a concert with young people recently, you’ll know that rather than moving, they’re filming). But what saddens me most, is how they’re missing out on a centuries-old celebration – a moment of real human joy and connection, passed down through the ages because it unites us. We are embodied beings, longing for physical and emotional connection to one another.
But you wouldn’t know it from this image.
Nowadays, the most beautiful places in the world are often changed by the obsessive need for content creation, everywhere you look there are selfie sticks and men taking photos of their girlfriend’s posing. We are hyper-focused on self, as Freya India documents so well, is extreme ‘self-love’ actually hurting us. The Dalai Lama has been questioned many times on how to solve anxiety and depression. His answer is always the same, “too much focus on the self, not enough focus on others.”
What values do we want our children – our future leaders – to have? Surely we want them to be compassionate, present, resilient?
If smartphones are doing everything to make our kids self-obsessed, anxious, close-minded, distracted and deeply unhappy, don’t we want to change the status quo and reclaim childhood?
The iPod tagline was ‘1000 songs in your pocket’.
What should the iPhone tagline be for our kids? ‘1000 distractions, 1000 self-harm videos, 1000 predators in your pocket’?
So I have a message for each generation.
Gen Z, we’re sorry you’ve been guinea pigs in the biggest social experiment on record. It’s not fair. You’ve been labelled the snowflake generation but you’ve been robbed of the play-based childhood we Millennials and Gen X’ers took for granted.
Gen Alpha, can we change your name to Gen Awake? You can see those who have gone before you. I call on you to rise up, you don’t have to grow up as Big Tech’s slave labour under constant surveillance. You may not know a world without smartphones, but you can also see something is seriously wrong. We can and we must do better for you.
To Millennials and Gen Xers, when kids need a phone, please let’s not kid ourselves that a smartphone is simply ‘a device that makes it possible for you to speak to someone in another place who has a similar device.’
We all know it’s a world children are not ready for. So if kids need phones let’s give them a tiny payphone in their pocket instead and a play-based childhood again.
And remember the movie Speed? There’s a bomb on the bus and our kids are on it.
Are we just going to leave them there?
In the mid-1960s, cigarette use peaked in the United States. More than 40% of Americans smoked.
60 years later, we look back on that time and think, "Why didn't all those people know better?"
The iPhone was released in 2007. In 2067, when people look back on us and how we've used smartphones, what will they think?
I think the biggest question people in 2067 will have is, "Can you believe those people in the 2010s and 2020s let their children have completely unrestricted smartphones?"
Thanks for sharing your article!
There is growing evidence against phones, but we can't wait for it to become conclusive. We need to act now.
Communities need to pull together and organise themselves and come to an agreement that they don't give their children smart phones until they are 16 (or they buy them themselves). We can't wait for the laws to change.