Should we ban smartphones for under 16?

If I take away my daughter's smartphone, will she be cut off from her friends? Will she rebel and find ways around it? Will she be deprived of valuable connections and opportunities to learn?

I take some comfort in knowing that millions of parents around the world are wrestling with these same questions. This does not feel like a conundrum that my husband and I can tackle alone.

As a journalist covering social media for years, I've witnessed its unfettered power and unprecedented reach. I appreciate the immense advantages of unrestricted connection and access to information, but I am also painfully aware of the dangers. I am concerned about the risks of exposing ourselves in a public square owned by private entities, the sidelining of established journalism, and the marginalisation of expert mediation.

But I am also a parent. My own addiction, digital rage, and exposure to disturbing content have implications beyond myself—they foreshadow the dangers that my daughter could easily experience online. Protecting her from this has become a crucial issue, especially now that the digital world is so deeply intertwined with modern life. Even if I manage to shield her, where do I draw the line? How do I find the right balance between imposing a straightforward ban and maintaining the mutual trust I've nurtured over 11 years? Should I start equipping her with the tools to navigate social media now, or wait until she is more mature?

Parents and guardians find themselves sucked into the magical appeal of constant online access. They feel uncertain of how to navigate a media system that bombards them with contradictory information. Many see their children disappear behind smartphone screens, oblivious to anything else, but every attempt to limit screen time leads to tension and conflict. For others, the ship has sailed: they fight against mental health issues triggered in their children by social media, feeling scared and alone. Some parents have already lost their children to the platforms’ black holes.

What we all have in common, however, is a shocking realisation: the platforms do not care. Pressure from tech justice activists and the media has worked in part, forcing Big Tech leaders such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to apologise and commit to do better, but much is now simply ignored. Independent researchers are regularly denied access to platforms’ data about the mental health impact of social media on minors. The public can only rely on the occasional leak from whistleblowers. What we know is already damning, but it seems to be just the tip of an iceberg of toxic trash.

And, despite the proven damage to children, regulation is late and inadequate, and enforcement appears ineffective.

Such is the sense of urgency and distrust among many families that a small but growing minority has decided to take matters into their own hands. This is a first overview, in their own voices, of the concerns, experiences and aims of members of SmartphoneFreeChildhood (SFC), the emerging parents' movement aiming to challenge the status quo in the UK. I joined three of their many WhatsApp chats about 2 months ago, moved by my interest as a parent, and soon realised this is a story that should be amplified.

What follows is the essence of three one-hour-long conversations with some of its most committed members, edited only for clarity and brevity. Notably, these parents' children, all under 13, have fortunately not encountered the most horrific content online or fallen victim to predators. Names have been withheld for privacy.

M is a retired IT manager from Dublin. Well before SFC, Ireland has been at the forefront of the growing grassroots resistance to Big Tech because their presence in the country, fuelled by a favourable tax regime, has reshaped the power dynamics in Irish politics and society. While these companies have brought jobs and investments, they've also driven up living costs, pricing many locals out of their communities.

"When a lot of these companies came along, first they were filled with all these bright young people who had great dreams of connecting the world. There was a lot of idealism. All this good stuff, you know, but somewhere along the line, they got infected by a thing called greed because they suddenly realised capitalism. I worked in the sector all my life. And the thing is, I never came across technology that caused harm as such, the way social media does.

I have six grandchildren, from about 5 to 13 years old. And the older ones have already got smartphones, and that was the first time I really thought about, you know, do I really want my grandchildren to have smartphones?

But the other thing that really hit it home for me was two people, one in the UK and one in Ireland, who were brutally killed. One of them was a girl in England called Brianna, Brianna Ghey, murdered by her own friends. And it turns out, if you look at all the court transcripts and so on, the two people that [killed her], they were heavily influenced by things they saw on the internet. They were gorging themselves on this.  And then there was a girl in Ireland, a young girl, [Ana Kriégel] who was murdered by two boys. Sheer brutality. In court it was very, very obvious that these two boys were very influenced by horrific stuff they saw on the internet, and that goaded them to do something to this girl. I'm sure you've heard many examples of people who have committed suicide because of cyberbullying...

We need to ban smartphones for anybody who's not an adult. We have an obligation as a society to protect children. I mean, it's written into the UN Convention for Children… It's there and we've all signed this. We are committed and we are obliged to protect our children. And here we have an example where society, people, governments, everybody, we're not protecting them.

I don't trust the social media companies for one second that anything significant would change because they have the ability today to do whatever they want with their services. They just keep telling people things like, oh, we're not responsible for what goes on in our service. I mean, that's rubbish. How can they not be responsible?"

C, a software engineer from England, is anything but ‘technology-averse.’ However, after separating from his partner he obtained exclusive custody of his 11-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and was horrified to discover they were glued to their smartphones for 12 to 16 hours a day. He had to fight a serious addiction.

"They came to England and my immediate response was, you've got one hour a day. If you want to use that hour on the PlayStation and use Fortnite, you can do that. So they were doing one hour a day, across any device. When I first took the phones away, every five minutes: “Daddy I am bored. Daddy I am bored”. You know, this is not boredom. It's a lack of gratitude for everything else they've got because they're hooked on this, on the phones, gaming, whatever it is. “Daddy I am bored”. So my answer to them is, I'm sorry you're bored, but you need to find a solution. I can't fix your boredom.

My kids suffered quite severe neglect. I realised that for them to get better, they needed psychotherapy and that having a device to escape into, which is all it is, it's just a tool for emotional escape. So I got rid of everything. This phone here is actually a family phone that lives here, in this office, and they use it to speak to their mother every day between 8 and 8.30. And that's it. It's not used for anything else. They don't have a phone. I've made it very clear to them that the percentage chance of them having a phone before they're 18 is zero. When they're old enough, if they want to smoke, do drugs, do alcohol and destroy their lives or buy a smartphone, then there's nothing I can do about this. But up until the point of 18, at least I can make sure that they hopefully have a decent education to fall back on.

A mobile phone is designed to be addictive. It's not age-appropriate. Social media is extremely harmful. They are chewing gum for the brain. There can be no justification or reason or excuse that would justify giving someone a digital pacifier with all this crap on just because kids are kids.

The school started giving homework on Google Classroom. And initially, when they first arrived, I installed it on the phone. And then I thought, this doesn't feel right. So I actually removed it from the phone and I bought a refurbished 100-pound desktop computer here from eBay, I think it's about 15 years old, but it allows Internet access.

You know, we can blame the schools, we can blame the government. It has to fall on the parents. Parents are accountable. We're accountable for their safety. And if we're sending them to schools, we're asking the schools to do our job for them. We're trying to push all this back onto the government. The government should do something and the schools should do something, but we parents are not taking accountability very well. And platforms don't care".

L, a lawyer, had her first epiphany while working for Big Tech in Dublin. She has two girls, aged 13 and 9. She supports a ban on smartphones for those under 16 (at least) and advocates for a deep cultural shift in adults’ relationship with devices.

"I'm now living in the UK, but in 2022, I moved to Ireland and I worked for the Big Tech companies, Google, Facebook, TikTok. 

I'm a lawyer, okay? So I was doing all their law work, and I soon realised that amongst those people that worked for the tech companies and were kind of the likes of me, lawyers high up working for them, they just didn't give their kids phones because they had the insider knowledge about how damaging it was. And we lived in a town called Greystones, which is the town that went smartphone-free. In the school where I was governor of and where my children were, some kids were having exposure to phones and social media and all the talk about body image, and sexualisation. It was all just coming out in the playground, and it really felt like kids were just not kids anymore. They were nine or ten, whereas here in England it's happening at six or seven. 

It was like the younger kids who had older siblings who had phones, were watching them on TikTok, coming in and doing TikTok dances, talking about TikTok, as opposed to climbing a tree, talking about a book.

My nine-year-old, who has friends who've got social media, has come home and has started to diet and wants to look thin and has started tying ribbons around her waist, trying to make herself skinnier, because these girls are watching TikTok dancers who promote skinniness and a certain body image.

Now, I understand that growing up, at some point, mostly during puberty, when you're twelve or 13, you started becoming body conscious, but not at nine. And even worse: all her peers want to look a certain way, want to act a certain way, driven by social media, and that's having an impact even on my 13-year-old girl who doesn't have a phone.

There was no getting away from it. I helped the school there start the initiative of phone-free, where all the parents agreed to come together, not to buy their kids a phone... It wasn't even just raising awareness amongst the kids, but it was the parents, because a lot of parents were like, oh, well, life is harder now, parenting is harder… but when you kind of scale back, you realise parenting is harder because your parents are spending more time on their phone and less time with their children.

And parents are on their phones looking at world news, which is just making them so anxious that they don't want their kids to go out and play because they fear everything and they're happier putting them in front of a screen.

I've had parents say to me here, well, I'm going to give my kid a phone because I'm worried about the groomers. It's a real paradox we've created here for ourselves. We've given our kids exposure to porn, violence, beheadings, racism, sexism, instead of letting them go to the park where we think groomers are hiding in a bush, whereas the groomer is in your phone, in your pocket, in your bedroom, with you 24/7.

We're so caught up in our phones, and it's robbed us of our friendships, our relationships with our children, our attention, our emotions, our empathy, everything. It's literally robbed us of our world, our real-world life experiences.

And I know amongst myself and my friends, we don't bring our phones anywhere anymore. We don't talk on the phone, we don't WhatsApp as much as we used to. We've really made a concerted effort to push against phones in our lives now.

You're not going to eradicate them all together. The tech is here to stay, but it's been like, cigarettes are here to stay, like alcohol is here to stay. But we just have to approach it with caution and realise the damage is done and have a healthy habit with it, because we've all got really bad habits with it, we just need to push against it. I do think it's a cultural change happening."

This is only a partial selection of parents' concerns and opinions. We encourage you to submit yours and contribute to our series of features, investigations and debates on this very topic.

Produced by: Sabrina Provenzani
Edited and mixed by: Manasa Narayanan
Design by: Isabel Sunderland

Disclaimer: In Public Hearing, we collate voices, stories and experiences from individual members of the community on issues that are most important to them. These excerpts include perceptions and opinions that are personal to the individual and do not reflect the views of the Citizens as an organisation. 

In order to manage volume and repetition of content, we are unable to feature all submissions that we receive. Any submissions that explicitly promote hate, harassment or violence towards any individuals or group will not be published. Submissions may be edited for length and clarity, and names of individuals or organisations may be removed for reasons of privacy, safety, fairness or defamation. More information here.

Connect with The Citizens on WhatsApp

Our Public Hearing posts are curated text, audio and video clips that have been submitted to us online, or collected via our community outreach.

Send a text, voice note or video to +447457411321

Click to connect