The debate about smartphones, well, about the use of smartphones by children, keeps on going. There’s even a campaign called Smartphone-Free Childhood, a group that wants to keep the “child” in “childhood”. Dressing them like mini adults, arranging “graduation” ceremonies and discos - that’s okay. An 8 year-old glued to a smartphone is a different matter.
And yet I read about teachers (mostly high school teachers) who declare smartphones a useful tool in the classroom, teachers who encourage their pupils to look things up during lessons. The city of St Albans is woking on becoming smartphone-free for under-fourteens. Headteachers in 30-plus primaries across that city apparently got together to draw up a joint letter to send to families, in which they declared their schools smartphone-free and urged parents to delay giving their children a smartphone until at least year 9 of secondary school.
It’s worth noting that it’s the primary schools not the secondary schools. Parents of secondary-schoolers having bent to the inevitable. But maybe we need some way of preventing parents from letting their small children watch videos on their phones (the parents’ phones, not the children’s phones). Our daughter, for example, is a very good mother but occasionally even she gives in and lets her smallest (4 years old) watch a video on her phone. He prefers to watch stuff on the slightly larger screen of his tablet (she controls what is accessible there) or better still on Grandma”s telly. He has recently discovered DVDs and delights in being able to work all the controls himself. (They no longer have a DVD player at their house, streaming anything they to watch.) He watches and re-watches certain episodes of Octonauts in the same way that he used to like having certain baby storybooks read aloud to him over and over.
Getting back to children and smartphones, according to Ofcom research, 91% of children in the UK own a smartphone by the time they are 11 and 44% by the time they are nine, but concerns have been mounting about online safety and the impact of social media on children’s mental health. The St Alban’s headteachers know of even younger children with smartphones: “We know that in our schools some children as young as key stage 1 [ages five to seven] have smartphones. Whilst smartphones can be a very helpful piece of technology for adults, they can equally expose children to a number of negative risks.”
Some of it is the result of “nagging” - the child goes on and on and on about how “everyone” has a smartphone, so why doesn’t he/she? Parents get worn down. There’s also the “I would have loved to have this when I was a child” aspect, where parents almost live a second and idealised childhood by giving the children everything they would have loved to have at that age.
Personally I don’t see what primary school children need a phone of any description, smart or otherwise. They don’t usually travel independently. As for the secondary school pupils, who do travel independently (although the queues of cars waiting to collect them can still be quite impressive), I think it may be too late. We may say they should only have ‘text and calls only’ phones but it’s a lot harder to enforce it. And they can usually manipulate the smartphones better than I can. They are the digital generation, after all.
And the smartphone genie is out of the bottle. We are not going to get it back in, no matter how hard we legislate. That’s my opinion, anyway.
Thinking of children and smartphones, I wonder about the terminology we use. When I hear talk about children, I always visualise primary school children. Even though some of the year six (10-11 year olds) may be almost as tall as I am, they are still recognisably “children”. In their first year - no, the first term - at secondary they seem very small and young and innocent but they seem to grow rapidly into teenagers and have a much more visible, and often noisy, presence. We need a new term for 11 - 16 year olds - too big for smaller children’s toys and games but not quite grown-up yet. As for 18-18 year olds, I favour “young people”rather than “children”. Maybe even include them in the “young adult” category. After all, there’s a whole load of “young adult” novels around and some people are agitating for them to be allowed to vote in elections.
Okay! Rant over!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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