Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Do as I say, not as I do” – could any idiom better describe our hypocrisy when it comes to screens and teens? Or screens and children, for that matter.
Thanks to a growing body of evidence, it’s generally been accepted that spending unmitigated amounts of time staring at smartphones, tablets and tellies per day is detrimental to young people’s mental health and development. (Quelle surprise.)
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book, The Anxious Generation, published last year, gathered together a compelling range of studies linking the rise of smartphone use and social media with a spike in anxiety and depression in young people. Meanwhile, groundbreaking Netflix drama Adolescence shone a light on the potentially devastating effects of teens spending huge swathes of time online consuming harmful content.
But while much of the conversation and handwringing has zoned in on kids’ behaviour, there’s been very little airtime given to adults’ problematic dependence on devices. Now, a group of schools in southeast London are finally bringing the grown-ups into the chat. A consortium of 21 nurseries, schools and colleges in Southwark has banded together to collectively urge parents to limit not just their children’s screen time at home, but their own screen time too, reports The Times. Sent out to the families of more than 11,000 students on Monday (9 June), the letter encouraged adults to “minimise their own screen use when in front of children”, adding that teachers would also be adopting better behaviour, and laying out guidelines for different age groups.
Suggested daily screen time limits ranged from five minutes for infants up to 18 months to five hours for year 10 and 11 students aged 14-16 years old (though it’s surely a mark of how dystopian current culture has become that five hours constitutes “cutting back”?). While the educators dishing out the advice stressed this was “not an attack on modern parenting”, they explained that the move was in response to some troubling observations: namely, children at nurseries developing worrying attachments to screens and pupils starting school with speech and language issues, plus emotional needs “that are likely to have been exaggerated by or are even directly attributable to excessive screen time”.
As Joanne Hawthorne, of St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, said of the new campaign: “A sad observation is that children on buses, in buggies and in cars are given devices rather than toys.” We’ve all seen it happen, and nothing could be more understandable – harangued, overworked parents pacifying a screaming toddler by shoving a tablet into their hands, or capitulating to the demand for “just one more” episode of Gabby’s Dollhouse in exchange for five minutes of blessed peace in which to hang out the washing, get dinner on or file an overdue tax return.
But what’s more alarming still is seeing adults around children doing the scrolling themselves, lost to a never-ending digital world – so that kids’ overwhelming experience of their caregivers is one of half-present distraction. Attention is a constant battleground, one in which phones and laptops frequently emerge as the victor. It’s sad yet telling that Southwark parents are being encouraged to “be present and engaged when they drop off and pick up their child rather than being on a phone”, according to Hawthorne.
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Children mimic adults when it comes to smartphone use (Getty)
The issue runs deep, and it is adults, not children, who are at the heart of it. “From early on in development, children spontaneously imitate the complex actions of others, a capacity that increases steadily with age,” according to one paper published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Youngsters will imitate behaviours they see, even if these serve no obvious function – a phenomenon known as “over-imitation”. Think about it: babies don’t pop out of the womb desperate to get their chubby little hands on a touch-screen. They learn their behaviours from us – they want to be on devices the whole time because, well, the grown-ups they’re unconsciously mimicking are on devices the whole time.
It’s why parenting experts and educational psychologists bang on about the importance of modelling behaviour; children are picking up on our every word and action, learning what’s appropriate and acceptable by watching those around them and soaking it all in like tiny sponges. Sometimes called “observational learning”, it doesn’t just apply to kids’ caregivers either. The models “do not have to be people that the child directly interacts with. Children learn from models all around them, on television, in the grocery store, at school and at home,” according to one article published by Michigan State University. Whether or not you have children yourself, the way you behave in the world – including being surgically attached to your device while out in the wild – is inherently shaping the next generation.
In the UK, people spend an average of five hours and six minutes a day on their phones, according to one piece of research. Another study estimated that adults spend 76 per cent of their waking hours online. It’s why I worry that the growing raft of measures aimed at minors, welcome as they are, are only solving one half of the equation.
The way you behave in the world – including being surgically attached to your device – is inherently shaping the next generation
The town of St Albans in Hertfordshire, for example, became a pioneer in 2024 by attempting to become the first smartphone-free city in the UK for children under 14; more than 30 local primary schools have banned the devices, while a collective of head teachers have called for parents to delay buying smartphones for their children until they reach Year 9 (aged 13-14). New Zealand has gone a step further, with the government having prohibited phones in schools, and the country is now considering a blanket ban on social media for children under 16 following a similar measure being approved in Australia (it’s due to come into effect at the end of this year).
The UK government is taking a softer approach, so far resisting calls to implement legal restrictions on smartphones for adolescents; however, it’s been reported that the technology secretary is seriously mulling a two-hour cap on social media apps for teens to tackle “addictive behaviour”.
These all feel like positive steps in the right direction, like the threat of harm to young people is finally being taken seriously. But unless the adults around them can get their own tech addiction issues under control, will we really be able to coax Gen Alpha offline? As that old bit of biblical wisdom goes, you’ve got to deal with the plank of wood in your own eye before you start cleaning the speck of sawdust out of someone else’s. If we really want to solve the problem of screens and teens, surely we need to unplug ourselves and start leading by example?
