‘I’m banning my children from having a smartphone until 16’, shadow Education Secretary tells LBC

They will find a way to get one. Kids under 16 get hold of worse things than smartphones.

> Laura Trott – who has three children under ten – insisted she’s seen enough evidence to see the harms for children of spending too much time online.

Yeah, she’s probably seen what spending too much time online has done to her party’s voter base!

Seriously though, I think the issue is less the phones themselves and more the shite that’s on social media. Compared to what I was watching back on Youtube in like 2007, the sort of stuff that’s on there now is significantly more ‘brainrot’. There have been plenty of studies which demonstrate that the format of a show can have a massive effect on the attention spans and information retention of children, and all the quick cuts and constant shouting in the sort of videos pushing front and centre by Youtube algorithms clearly aren’t doing kids any good.

I’d much rather be taking a long look at how much of our children’s time and attention we’ve handed to these huge and unaccountable companies like Google, rather than just blanket banning what is an incredibly useful piece of technology for children.

Agreed. There’s literally no reason why kids under 16 should be anywhere near phones

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I feel bad that there someone in this position of power is so tech illiterate that they think the only option is to ban their kids from smartphones instead of managing them sensibly. Both my kids have smart phone, but they’re blocked from social media and have time limits and locks on browser access too. They still use them for a lot (homework, audiobooks, chatting with friends, gaming and watching tv to name just a few). They’re now used to having it on their pockets and learning to deal with living life without using them 24/7 despite temptation.

I agree with the sentiment and I also think that all social media should be banned for under 16s but:

1. Its quite common now for schools to *require* the use of phones to access timetables, notices, school meal credit, class quizzes and other things. My cousins kids school are all about “mobile education” with full use of phone, tablets and laptops. How that works for pupils who’s families can’t afford such things, i honestly done know (I actaully suspect its a way of weeding out certain low income families from the school….).
2. All the tools and methods of communication have just moved on. I’m 38 and I can’t remember the last time I sent a txt. Its all WhatsApp and other IMs now and has been for about a decade. We forget that we are digital immigrants while our kids are digital natives. Its like having a modern car and being asked to go back to riding a horse just because that’s what our parents did. Yea sure you could do that, and a horse would get you there, but a modern car is just better and easier.
3. Much like alcohol, fast food and the like, learning control and moderation with our phones is often better than total enforced abstinence. What we need to do is to educate our kids and ensure that they regulate their use and apply parental controls as necessary.

Am I alone in thinking there should be a national ban on smart phones for under 16s? Solve most of the problems, would mean adults’ privacy wouldn’t need to be invaded as children wouldn’t have access to social media or encrypted messaging, would cover children whose parents are neglectful or who live in the care system. If no children were allowed smart phones the element of social pressure would be removed, too.

I am annoyed that the only legislation the government seems to be doing affects adults.

Good call. I remember back when I was a young teenager in 2007 when my parents were anxious about me getting access to the internet. Back then, I thought they were overreacting, but looking back they had good reason to be worried. Things are a lot worse now.

All these people in this thread are really showing their age. “There’s no need to have a smartphone at XYZ age”. Firstly, you’d be hard pressed to go about your everyday life even outside of school without a smartphone – try getting reliable bus timetables and updates, try getting directions to somewhere you’re not familiar with, try talking to your friends and family. Oh, what’s that, just text or call them? That might work for your parents or whoever, but for a lot of young people, people simply do not use standard texting and the like to keep in contact, they’re using things like Discord, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram messages. By not having a smartphone, you simply do not have the means to stay in contact with most of your friends, and just going about your day becomes measurably more difficult when you can’t find out that your bus has been cancelled or is going to be late, you can’t find your way to the place your friends arranged to meet up, and you can’t take a picture of some notes the teacher put up on the board for people to grab a picture of.

Half of the responses to comments like this are also just as absurd. “Just completely rearrange society so that smartphones are no longer useful”. Uh, no? They’re useful in and of themselves, not just because old things have also moved to them. It’s completely delusional to expect that you would be able to access every possible thing you’d need to access in modern society without ever interacting with any technology beyond the 90s’. That isn’t going to change, and for many things, there’s absolutely no need for it.

And finally, there’s the fact that much of this boils down to “A, B and C apps/websites are harmful to use”, like TikTok, Instagram, etc. But instead of addressing these specific harmful things, the response from many in this thread and for many parents is to blame all technology involved and try to ban kids from using or having it. It’s the modern equivalent of banning your kids from having paper because somebody was using it to post mean notes to someone. The base technology is not the problem, it’s some specific uses for it. And you can literally, easily, directly address these issues on both the government and personal level. Just because you as a parent cannot be arsed to look up how to use parental control settings and apps to prevent the use of specific apps and the like doesn’t mean that your kids deserve to be socially isolated from many of their peers and to be prevented access to the huge amount of just massively useful tools that come with smartphones and the like. Learn to take responsibility instead of going “technology bad, kids can’t have it” and ignoring every other piece of information available to you.

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Dam my son is 10 and has a smart phone, mainly because he goes to the park with his friends and I can track where he is I can also control everything he does on it. Depends on the situation you are in really

Banning a phone because some apps are bad is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Phones make a lot of things easier and safer.

Why are so many people unaware that parental controls exist on smartphones? Parents can easily control which apps their children are allowed to use, prevent them from downloading new ones, filter out adult content and violent language, and set time limits for each app. With a little customization, a smartphone can be transformed into a productivity tool – think audiobooks, news, coding games, educational infographics shows, online courses, and more. It’s also crucial for kids to learn how to use AI tools, as most white-collar jobs now expect proficiency with these technologies. And that’s just scratching the surface – essential tools like calendars and reminders can help kids develop good organizational habits, not to mention a whole range of other useful apps.

When I was a kid, computers, especially laptops, had the same negative stigma as smartphones do now. I wouldn’t be the high-earning software developer I am today if my parents hadn’t let me touch a computer till I was 16.

Balance is the key, and the tools to find that balance are already available. You could even turn a smartphone into something functionally similar to a 90s Nokia if that’s what you prefer. So why is everyone, especially politicians, acting like the solution must be one extreme or the other? These technically illiterate politicians don’t even realise how stupid they sound when they talk about passing down their illiteracy to their children.

I’d like to limit my parents access to certain news sites, the harmful ones that encouraged them to vote against my children being allowed to work in Europe.

Let’s face it smartphones are harmful for everyone not just kids. Sure they can be useful and convenient but they also take up hours of our time and distract us from other things.