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Cicely Higham, 16, student: Why turn off the smoke alarm instead of putting out the fire?
I wouldn’t mind if only in St Albans the directors wanted create a city without smartphones for children under 14 years old. I can take reasonable steps to not live there. But banning phones for young people comes up all the time and is the easy way out. There are notable negative effects of extensive internet use: I’m 16 and in the middle of GCSEs; If I could get back all the review time I wasted on TikTok, believe me, I would.
But I don’t think the cons outweigh the good. Telephones have allowed my generation freedom with less anxiety. Unfortunately, teenage girls are known to suffer a lot of street harassment. The main function of a phone is contact with other people, and when you are a teenager this is essential. And yes, it has to be a smartphone: a dumb phone is no good. You need your friends to be able to find you on Snap Maps or to tell you that you are in a suspicious situation; it is not always possible to call 999. It is incredibly naive to try to limit this and shows a lack of social thinking. It is very easy to villainize the artifact rather than the culture that has formed around it.
One hope for the Internet was that it would allow greater access to information around the world. I think my generation is Much more aware of global politics. than those before our age; If we know about the battle over abortion in the United States, about the temperature increases in Mexico or the bombing of Gaza, it is thanks to social networks. We are fueled by empathy for global struggles that could previously have been overlooked. Just look at the school strikes for the climate and the youth presence in the pro-Palestine marches.
Of course, there is a flip side to this. Many people fear the impact of misinformation on young minds who have unlimited access to the Internet through their phones. To that I say: Generation Z is much less gullible than previous generations. We have grown up with the Internet and have much more media knowledge. We are more likely to check the facts and we are more likely to read laterally.
It would not be effective to take away something to which we have adapted much better than our elders. Scrapping smartphones is like removing the batteries from your smoke alarm instead of putting out the fire.
Nadeine Asbali, teacher: When there are real mental health risks, there should be age limits
As a high school teacher, I can’t help but think about stopping children under 14 from having smartphones. It should be a policy throughout the country.
I know we live in a rapidly developing world and smartphones are increasingly becoming the key to accessing many important services, from banking apps to making appointments. While phones have many benefits for adult users, who are already cognitively developed, for children they represent a real risk to their mental health, body image and even their safety. I see these issues arise in the classroom every day: Teens focus more on the latest social media trends than on their learning; or emulate the hypersexualized and violently misogynistic language used by viral figures.
A new book titled The Anxious Generation reports that nearly 40% of teenage girls who spend more than five hours a day on social media have been diagnosed with clinical depression. In schools, this manifests itself in increased rates of self-harm and social isolation, with more students missing class. Throughout my seven-year teaching career, I have personally witnessed things getting worse. It is now common for a handful of children in each class to have serious mental health problems, often leading them to become “school refusers.”
Uncontrolled access to smartphones among children has also led to an epidemic of hypersexualization in our schools. Just below 30% of 11 year olds have viewed explicit sexual content online and around a tenth of people aged 14 to 18 are reported to be addicted to pornography. Not only does this have links to self-esteem issues and wider relationship problems in later life, but it also means there has been an increase in sexual harassment in the classroom.
As a teacher, I feel that almost daily students use explicit, violent, misogynistic or sexualized language directed at their classmates and teachers. Normal playground discussions can descend into virulent misogyny with words like “whore” or “man of great value” uttered by children who barely understand their meaning. Young people increasingly see people like Andrew Tate as their role model, and even write about him in English essays.
There is also a latent pressure that taking and sending sexually explicit images is part of a normal “adult” relationship, and is expected of them, in particular, girls resigned to overly sexualized behavior since before puberty.
Pre-adolescence is a vitally important stage in terms of development that it is up to us, as a society, to recover part of what childhood means: socialization, discovery, learning and fun. Most young people will inevitably get a smartphone at some point, but why not delay it a bit and give them room to just be kids first?
Zoe Williams, mother: Technology problems run deep and monitoring children is not the answer
It’s impossible not to sympathize with the parents of a teenager who has suffered some tragedy related to their phone use, whether sexual exploitation or harmful, deepfake content driven by dubious algorithms or classic technology-enhanced bullying. Without a doubt, evil actors have had more ways to infiltrate your children’s lives since the advent of the smartphone.
However, politically, the idea of banning smartphones for children under 14 is part of a parental discourse that follows a pattern: a deep and large-scale social problem – say the mental health crisis of children and adolescents. – is linked to modern technology, while the real causes (for brevity, difficulties) are not discussed; all the responsibility falls back on individual families, sometimes schools too, and then people exercise their orthodoxy and mutual respectability by banning phones altogether to keep their children safe.
I deeply distrust it, not only because it misdiagnoses the problem and diverts attention from where it is needed, but because it is fundamentally divisive, ranking parents based on their obedience to the narrative and the compliance they can extract from their children.
With two 16 year olds (a boy and a girl) and a 14 year old daughter, I never worry about their behavior or their friendship circles and would never invade their privacy. I worry about the misinformation (especially on TikTok), the creeps (especially on Discord), the constant parade of perfect and shitty lives (especially on Instagram), the way some platforms seem designed specifically to sow teenage paranoia (Snapchat ) and distractions (Everything). However, policing the use of any of them would introduce a layer of mutual distrust that I’m happier without.
