Why smartphones bamboozle politicians Is it possible to keep children safe?

Only last week, the Education Select Committee once again sounded the alarm, reporting that one in four children use their phones in a manner resembling behavioural addiction. Ministers are now debating whether to ban under-16s from owning smartphones altogether — an extreme proposal which 33% of parents nevertheless support. The recommendations could not have come at a better time to circumvent the glacial pace of policymaking: as we await election manifestos, legislation on smartphones may well hitch a ride to becoming a governmental pledge, with the idea holding appeal for both major parties.

If it does appear on a manifesto, it will not be without a hitch. For the Conservatives, it may be tempting to see a ban, alongside the reintroduction of National Service and the phasing out of smoking, as part of a glut of boomer-friendly panic policies, directly mined from the resentments of village-hall coffee morning-goers. But in promoting a ban, the Tories would be pushing an instinctively un-conservative interventionism. For Labour, meanwhile, the unchecked power of Big Tech is an indictment of slack regulation of corporations — tick — but it also curries the least favour among the young, the party’s electoral home. Starmer’s decision to slash the voting age to 16 may backfire in a second-term election if the youngest voters are livid about being denied TikTok for 15 years of their lives.

Yet while the question of smartphone use can easily fall into a political storm drain, ministers should understand that any legislation it throws up is more than an election gambit. Like cigarettes and alcohol, it is fast becoming a public-health issue. In his new blockbuster book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt drew attention to the “selfie” function on smartphones and its deleterious effect on Gen-Z girls’ self-image, calling Instagram “unsafe at any speed”. But what is it doing to Gen A, the freshest crop of smartphone guinea pigs, born between 2010 and 2025?

My sister has two children, both toddlers. Like many stay-at-home mums, an important part of her day is going to the supermarket. I remember these times myself: me and my twin being plonked into our car seats, then sitting in Costa having a frothy milk while our exhausted mum glugged a 12-shot cappuccino, and finally getting to sit in the small compartment at the front of the trolley while we sailed through the aisles. (My sister, because she was better behaved, got the proper seat.) There was so much to watch and touch and smell; we’d go to the fish bit and grimace at the heads, or snigger in the bra section. Hardly Little House on the Prairie, but now this real-world interactivity seems quaint.

These days, my correspondent tells me, trolley-seats are replete with zombified, glassy-eyed tots glued to Paw Patrol, Bluey or whatever else keeps them quiet. They aren’t babbling — just squealing when their phones or iPads are withheld. Their chauffeur — or “mum” — is often scrolling away herself.

Generation A scares me. And I suspect it may be because they have rarely known the value of being really, really bored. Boredom is such an integral part of childhood. Irritating parents tell us “only boring people get bored”. They expect you to spend an hour on your tod on a rainy Sunday and come up with a Picasso, that having nothing to do is a prerequisite for some incredible creative flourish. This isn’t true, and I don’t want to see your child’s art. But I do wish all children would know the crushing, annihilating boredom of being little with nothing to do, because it counteracts the cult of impulsive self-centredness which tells us that we must be happy and stimulated all the time. You cannot be. As a child, you must sit in excruciating boredom in assemblies, dentists’ waiting rooms, funeral services, MOT garages — so that being dragged around shopping centres or being dumped in a creche with other kids is a relative delight, not an unwelcome interlude to hours and hours of bed-bound scrolling.

We know smartphones are already affecting this. But what of the effects of technologies we know nothing about, which are developing so quickly that legislation can hardly get a look in? A recent thread on X drew attention to a worrying number of AI apps which claim to be able to “delete any clothing” or blend real photos with sexy composites — essentially a deepfake handbook, arming users with airbrushed breasts to append to real images of women or girls you know. “Crushmate” allows you to “chat with the girl of your dreams” who will “accommodate even your wildest requests”. “Talk about any topic with AI stepsister,” promises another, complete with an image undoubtedly compiled from 10,000 porn thumbnails. Why bother finding a real human being to undress, when you can blast your retinas with instantaneous, pornified and forever compliant facsimiles?

Something must clearly be done — but what? The problem with “banning” smartphones outright is that it almost definitely wouldn’t work. Age limits for social-media use, the key element at the heart of the smartphone issue, are almost impossible to enforce, and so easy to circumvent. ID verification techniques — which have been recommended for pornography — are seen as intrusive and risky for data protection.

Besides, there are good arguments against a blanket ban. Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly killed herself in 2017 after viewing suicide content online, wrote in The Guardian last month that he opposed an outright prohibition, calling it “naive”. “This would punish children for the failures of technology companies to build their products responsibly,” he said. As a result, the best the government may do at present is to issue guidelines which strongly recommend. This is already happening on a local level: last week, the headteachers of 20 of the 24 primary schools in St Albans signed a letter addressed to parents to urge them not to buy smartphones for their children until the age of 14.

But if childhood has been one of the first sacrifices on the altar of Big Tech, the “victims” themselves do not want salvation. “Children have told us that being online is fundamental to their lives,” wrote Russell. The NSPCC similarly denounced consultations for leaving children’s voices “glaringly absent”. And when outlets do consult them on the prospect of age restrictions, children express concerns about “controlling” parents infringing on their privacy, or mention easy workarounds like using VPNs. Young people’s knowledge of these routes underscores a fundamental problem with adults imposing such rules on children: their tech literacy is likely to be much higher than that of the legislators themselves.

The only realistic and sensible approach, then, and one which does not appear to trample on civil liberties, is to better regulate the companies cultivating addiction-like behaviours in children, and to approach smartphones like a traditional public-health concern: raising awareness, and putting rules in place so that at least sometimes — and certainly during school — kids are not on their phones.

In February, the government issued guidance on schools’ individual policies on mobile phones, recommending prohibiting use with a firm foreword by Gillian Keegan. But how equally can this be enforced in schools with dramatically varying resources and teachers per pupil? Myleene Klass recently told The Times about volunteering in state schools, passing on her own parenting wisdom to children less fortunate than her own. One of these pearls was that phones must be kept in “magnetically locked pouches” at all times at her children’s private school. That this was spoken of as a novelty suggests that smartphones have taken their place among the many class-markers of modern Britain: a greater conscientiousness about the harms of tech obsession may, like healthy eating, be considered a luxury for those who have the time and money to strictly enforce or to provide satisfying alternatives.

Meanwhile, mental-health problems, like physical illnesses, are increasingly bearing down on the body politic — affecting worklessness, happiness and prosperity. Policy must reflect this, taking into account the clear and present risks of being “too online” to self-image, confidence and social cohesion. Cracking down on platforms’ age-restriction enforcement, limiting the harmful content available on those platforms (something which the Online Safety Bill was, on paper, meant to enact), and raising awareness among parents with something resembling a public information campaign might all help. Parents accept that drinking and excess junk food is bad for children; in time, social media will join these as something to be judiciously introduced, and enjoyed in moderation once the brain is developed.

I pity the children who have the thousand embarrassments of being young, like that day in the playground, reflected back at them by the funhouse mirror of the internet. But aside from electoral brownie points, what do the big parties have to gain by taking this issue seriously? Both main parties have, in the past few days, launched cringe-inducing campaign blitzes on TikTok — one by Labour compares Sunak poorly dribbling a football around some plastic cones with Starmer prancing around a pitch to the Match of the Day theme tune. What is certain is that this may be one of the most difficult policies to get right, and if social media can be a silver bullet for a successful bid for power, politicians are likely to continue to dance to its rhythm — even if on the edge of a volcano.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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