Cicely Higham, 16, Student: Why did you disable the smoke detector instead of putting out the fire?
I don’t care if the Headmaster only wants St. Albans. City bans smartphones for under-14sYou can take reasonable steps to not live there. But banning mobile phones for young people is constantly being discussed and it’s a lazy way out. The negative effects of excessive internet use are clear. I’m 16 and in the middle of my GCSEs. If I could make up for all the revision time I lost on TikTok, believe me, I would.
But I don’t think the bad outweigh the good. Mobile phones have given my generation freedom with less anxiety. Unfortunately, it’s well-known that teenage girls experience street harassment. The main function of a mobile phone is to be in contact with others, and for teenage girls this is essential. And, of course, it has to be a smartphone. Not a dumb phone. You have to ask your friends to find you on Snap Maps or let them know you’re in a dangerous situation. Calling 999 is not always possible. Trying to restrict this is incredibly naive and shows a lack of social thinking. It’s so easy to demonize the culture that has formed around it, rather than the artifact.
One of the hopes of the Internet was that it would give people access to more information around the world. Increased awareness of international politics Social media has enabled us to know more than we ever knew before. We know about the fight over abortion in the US, the rising temperatures in Mexico, and the shelling of Gaza. We are driven by empathy for global struggles that we might have ignored before. Just look at young people taking part in climate strikes at school or demonstrations in support of Palestine.
Of course, there is a flip side to this. Many fear the impact of misinformation on the minds of young people with unlimited internet access on their mobile phones. To which I say: Gen Z is less susceptible to gullibility than older generations. We grew up with the internet and are much more media literate. We are more likely to fact-check, There is a strong tendency to read sideways.
It would be ineffective to take away something that we have adapted to so much better than our predecessors: throwing away smartphones would be like taking the batteries out of a fire alarm instead of putting out the fire.
Teacher Nadine Asbari: If there’s a real risk to mental health, there should be an age limit
As a middle school teacher, I can’t help but feel that children under the age of 14 should not have smartphones. This should be made into a national policy.
We know that we live in a rapidly evolving world and that smartphones are becoming increasingly important as the key to accessing many essential services, from banking apps to bookings. For adult users, whose cognitive abilities are already developed, smartphones have many benefits, but for children, they pose real risks to their mental health, body image and even safety. I see this problem at work every day in my classrooms, when teenagers are obsessed with the latest social media trends rather than learning, or when they imitate the overly sexual, violent and misogynistic language used by celebrities.
According to a new book called “The Anxious Generation,” about 40% of teenage girls who spend more than five hours a day on social media are diagnosed with clinical depression. In schools, this manifests itself in increased self-harm, social isolation, and more students skipping classes. In my seven years as a teacher, I have personally witnessed the problem worsen. It is now common for several students in each class to suffer from serious mental illness, which often leads to “school refusal.”
Children’s unlimited access to smartphones has also led to the proliferation of sexualised content in schools. 30% of 11 year olds Around one in ten young people aged 14-18 has viewed sexually explicit material online and around one in ten 14-18 year olds are reported to be addicted to pornography. This not only means that it is linked to self-esteem issues and wider relationship problems later in life, but also increases sexual harassment in the classroom.
As a teacher, it seems like an almost daily occurrence that students use explicit, violent, misogynistic and sexualized language towards their peers and teachers. A normal schoolyard argument can degenerate into an intensely misogynistic one with kids hurling words like “whore” and “high-paid” – with the kids barely understanding what the words mean. Young boys are increasingly looking at people like Andrew Tate as role models and even writing about him in their English essays.
There is also the underlying pressure that taking and sending sexually explicit images is a normal part of a “grown-up” relationship, with girls in particular coming to terms with the expectation of hyper-sexualised behaviour even before puberty.
Because early adolescence is such a critical stage in terms of development, it seems incumbent on us, as a society, to recapture some of the elements of childhood: socialization, discovery, learning, and fun. While most young people will inevitably get a smartphone at some stage, why not delay it a little and give them some room to be kids first?
Zoe Williams, parent: Technology issues run deep, and monitoring kids is not the solution
It’s impossible not to sympathize with parents whose teenage children have experienced the tragedies associated with mobile phone use: sexual exploitation, deepfakes, harmful content pushed by dodgy algorithms, and classic bullying that’s taken to the next level by technology. There’s no doubt that the advent of smartphones has provided more ways for bad actors to infiltrate our children’s lives.
But politically, the idea of banning smartphones for children under 14 is part of a parenting debate that follows a pattern: large and serious social problems (for example, the child and adolescent mental health crisis) are linked to modern technology, and the real causes (for brevity, difficulties) are not discussed. All the blame is pushed onto individual families, and sometimes even onto schools, and people exert their legitimacy and respectability over each other by banning mobile phones altogether to keep children safe.
I deeply distrust this, not just because it misdiagnoses the problem and diverts attention from where it is needed, but because it is fundamentally divisive, ranking parents by their conformity to a narrative and the obedience they can extract from their children.
I have two 16-year-olds (one boy, one girl) and a 14-year-old daughter, and I’ve never worried about their behavior or relationships, nor would I invade their privacy. I do worry about misinformation (especially TikTok), weird people (especially Discord), the perfect shitty series of lives (especially Instagram), how some platforms seem tailor-made to instil teenage paranoia (Snapchat), and distractions (from everything). But policing their use would
Source: www.theguardian.com
