An admission (if you are my mother, please look away now): We got the internet quite late in our house, growing up. The year was in or around 1998 or 1999, when yours truly was 15 or 16 years old. It naturally followed that one of the first things I searched for, being a teenage boy, was some version or combination of the words \u201cnaked\u201d and \u201cboobs\u201d (or some other word meaning the same area of the female anatomy).<\/p>\n
On a late 1990s dial-up connection, this was not an especially satisfying experience. Honestly, in the time it took a single photograph to slowly load on your screen, you could have snuck into the local town and picked up a copy of Playboy, then only recently unbanned in Ireland.<\/p>\n
I mention this not to scandalise my poor parents, but because last week I heard a tale of a father who, browsing his eleven year old son\u2019s smartphone, came across a poorly hidden (on the device) video, the title of which did not include the words \u201cnaked\u201d or \u201cboobs\u201d, but did include the words \u201crough\u201d, \u201canal\u201d, and \u201cgangbang\u201d. You can probably figure out the rest.<\/p>\n
The experience, naturally enough (since my acquaintance is in other respects a very good parent) led to the immediate destruction of the smartphone, and a very long and uncomfortable talk with the child. It also converted at least one family to the view that the Government should ban smartphones for children under 12, and ban them from schools entirely.<\/p>\n
Instinctively, of course, this is the kind of thing I should oppose: I am a conservative which means that I believe first in personal responsibility (keep your own kids off the phones, that\u2019s your job) and individual freedom (why should my sensible kid be denied a phone because your child cannot be trusted?). I have also written extensively (including just this week) on why I loathe the political instinct to just ban things wily-nily at the first sign of public concern.<\/p>\n
But\u2026 I am fast coming to the conclusion that I was wrong, at least when it comes to the children and the phones and the internet.<\/p>\n
First, because personal responsibility does not really work. Yes, you can keep your child away from the smartphone, but you cannot keep him or her away from their peers. Think of this in terms of the \u201cPlayboy Problem\u201d \u2013 even if you didn\u2019t have the magazines in your house growing up, there was always some cad who had managed to obtain them and dutifully passed them around in his peer group. In any group of ten or twelve children, chances are that if you expose one of them to \u201cforbidden\u201d content, you\u2019re going to expose them all. That makes \u201cparental responsibility\u201d much harder.<\/p>\n
Second, \u201cindividual freedom\u201d has always run straight into its opposite: The harm principal. And the harms here are well established.<\/p>\n
Across the water, and in Australia, the talk is of a \u201csocial media ban\u201d for under 16s. In the UK, Professor Hillary Cass asks the following:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhy, when we have coroners\u2019 reports directly linking platform content to children\u2019s deaths, when we have clinicians across every specialty describing these patterns of harm, when we have the platforms\u2019 own internal research showing they know their products damage young people, why do we still hear calls to wait?\u201d<\/p>\n Jonathan Haidt, who has done enormous amounts of work on this topic, summarises his findings with stark figures:<\/a><\/p>\n Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you\u2019ve likely seen the\u00a0statistics<\/a>: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States\u2014fairly stable in the 2000s\u2014rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it\u00a0rose<\/a> 131 percent.<\/p>\n If that wasn\u2019t enough, reviews in France, Spain, and Norway have all come to the same conclusion: Social media is harming teens.<\/p>\n Is it more harmful to deny phones to children up to the age of, say, 12, or is it more harmful to expose ten and eleven year old children to the kind of video described above? Or to beheading videos? Or even to whatever lunacy they are promoting to young girls about how to get thin and beautiful, these days? There is, I think, a collective societal interest in preventing children from accessing the most harmful nonsense that adults create.<\/p>\n Third, because the smartphone poses particular challenges to parents in a way that the laptop or other devices do not: You can supervise your child\u2019s internet access when they are sitting in the kitchen using a desktop. You cannot do so when they are on the schoolbus, or in the GAA changing room, or wherever.<\/p>\n And fourth, because while such a ban would certainly be evaded by some idiot parents, I think a great many parents would actively welcome it. Call it the school uniform principle: It\u2019s much easier to stop your child demanding the latest expensive fashions for schools if there are rules in place mandating that they have no choice in their clothing.<\/p>\n Even if such a ban was imperfectly enforced, it would still give many parents a valuable get-out-of-jail card when their children started demanding the latest Samsung S-whatever-it-is.<\/p>\n The problem, of course, is the cut-off age. Some of you will be reading this saying the ban should be till age 15 or 16. That\u2019s certainly something that could be discussed, and I\u2019ve not given much thought to the precise age limit that should be in place.<\/p>\n But I do think something slightly extreme needs to be done: Kids should not have phones that can access the internet. Texting and calls as needed, yes. But not the internet, unsupervised. Heck, my generation survived on Nokia 3210s and the beloved \u201csnake\u201d game, and we didn\u2019t lose out on much.<\/p>\n The phone companies may object, of course. But on another level they might be quietly relieved: If they simply couldn\u2019t sell to children, then they wouldn\u2019t have to invest as heavily in parental controls and all the other fidgetry they employ to justify selling to or for kids right now.<\/p>\n Anyway, I\u2019d welcome your thoughts below. But to me, the more I think about it, banning the devices makes far more sense than trying to regulate the internet in its entirety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An admission (if you are my mother, please look away now): We got the internet quite late in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[4103,5200,61,206,60,202,1786,575,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-260713","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-children","9":"tag-content","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-internet","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-mobile","14":"tag-parenting","15":"tag-smartphones","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}