The race to make smartphones illegal for children under 16 – and why it matters
When Steve Jobs climbed onto a stage in San Francisco to unveil the first iPhone in 2007, he promised a revolution. Inevitably, the crowd at the Macworld Conference and Expo went wild as he merged an iPod, a telephone, and an “internet communicator”. But, he was as good as his word; it did not take long for the gadgets to end up in the pockets of schoolchildren around the world. Children in Britain who could afford the latest tech quickly showed off the magical phone and zany apps such as “iBeer” – which turned your phone into a virtual pint – or played music to their peers on Pocket Guitar.
Soon after, most children who had the pocket money, or willing parents, had ditched their “dumb” flip phones or “bricks” and picked up a smartphone – with the darkest recesses of the internet a few taps away, and widespread use of social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram quickly following. According to a report by Ofcom in 2022, 91 per cent of children now own a smartphone by the age of 11, while 41 per cent have one by the time they are nine.
Yet while parents have grumbled for years that their children might be spending a little too much time buried in a screen, in recent months the fight back against mobile phones has gathered momentum and turned into a veritable crusade against the devices. It comes amid growing fears over their impact on young people’s health, development and education.
This week, it emerged the Government is considering banning the sale of mobile phones to children under the age of 16. It echoes previous efforts to curb potentially injurious activities among the young. In 1906, a House of Lords committee thought that juvenile smoking should be brought before the Board of Education and suggested “teachers should be invited to point out from time to time the bad effects of this habit in stunting growth and in producing disease”. The sale of cigarettes to under-16s was forbidden in 1908.
This restriction came 300 years after King James I observed, in his 1604 treatise “Counterblaste to Tobacco”, that smoking was “harmefull to the Braine, dangerous to the lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse”. So, these days legislators are at least acting with greater haste.
The policy now under active consideration is among a range of measures to empower parents to take back control over their children’s use of tech, although Westminster sources insist that “nothing has been decided”.
‘Virality and addiction’
But the reports have been jumped on by politicians and parents seeking to curb the use of smartphones. Miriam Cates, the Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, said a ban should be “music to the ears of Conservatives” and said “of course regulation is necessary to protect children”.
Molly Kingsley, founder of the children’s campaign group UsForThem, said on Twitter: “Smartphones are a dangerous, nasty product and we don’t usually tolerate the supply of harmful products to kids.”
While politicians dithered for years to pass the Online Safety Act, which was enacted into law in October, the rules do not come into full effect until 2025. The current, sprawling regulations have been criticised by both tech giants and safety activists, and demand for urgent action on smartphones has rapidly climbed the political agenda. The Government’s move to explore further curbs on tech giants is said to have been driven by No 10.
In the United States, the psychologist Prof Jonathan Haidt – who previously campaigned against “cancel culture” – has spearheaded calls for a rethink of how children use smartphones. Haidt has argued that since the early 2010s, the mental health of young people has taken a nosedive. That decline in happiness, he wrote in The Atlantic, coincided with “the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online – particularly onto social media platforms designed for virality and addiction”.
His statements have given fervour to a fast-growing movement against phones. Provocative adverts for his new book, The Anxious Generation, feature 1984-style messages such as “Safety is Growth. Surveillance is Love”.
Campaigners have increasingly likened the rise of Big Tech to Big Tobacco. But while it took decades to bring down the number of people smoking – through advertising blackouts, plain packaging and banning them from pubs and restaurants – activists are seeking to turn the tide against phones much more quickly.
In The Atlantic, Haidt adds comparisons between the tobacco industry and social media are “not fair to the tobacco industry” – teens could choose not to smoke, but have almost no choice but to use smartphones and social media. He has called for an effort to “roll back the phone-based childhood” by 2025.
Parents in the US have increasingly taken up arms against Big Tech. Across the US, hundreds of schools and thousands of parents have sued social media companies, alleging their faulty products have harmed children.
These fears increasingly have an audience in Britain. Following the murder of her daughter Brianna, Esther Ghey has called for age limits on smartphones and stricter rules for social media.
On WhatsApp, a group of parents dubbed Smartphone Free Childhood has attracted 60,000 members and morphed into a grassroots effort to give children simple “brick” phones instead of a touchscreen device.
Daisy Greenwell, the group’s co-founder, says: “This all began from a deep sense of unease about the fact that children in my eight-year-old’s class were starting to get smartphones. I knew I didn’t want to get her one, but everyone said you have to because everyone else does.”
Arabella Skinner, a director of UsForThem – a parent-run group that is calling for restrictions on children’s use of phones via its Safe Screens campaign – says: “There needs to be prominent, tobacco-style health warnings on devices coupled with a public health campaign about excessive screen time and the addictive nature of devices – both for children and adult usage around children.”
A ban on sales to children would represent a novel attempt to halt their use, although other countries have tried similar restrictions.
China has been most aggressive in tackling smartphone use in teenagers. The Communist state has proposed blocking children under the age of eight from using smartphones for more than 40 minutes per day. Under-16s would have a one-hour limit and 16 and 17-year-olds a two-hour limit. China already bans most online games from being played overnight with a 10pm curfew.
Multiple countries have enacted bans on mobile phones in classrooms – or in schools outright. New Zealand allows phones at break times only, while in France, under-15s cannot use them within school grounds. This year, the Netherlands followed with a ban on phones, tablets and smartwatches in classrooms. In Ireland, some parents have banded together for an informal ban on buying phones for children before they reach secondary school.
In March, the UK Government issued guidance to headteachers that they should prohibit phones from classrooms and during break times.
For a sales block to work, Skinner argues that “at a minimum” the ban should include a block on “sales, supply and marketing of unrestricted phones and applications” until 16.
‘This penalises children for the failures of Big Tech’
There are questions over whether a ban would be effective, or if it is even necessary. A major study from the Oxford Internet Institute, published in November, determined that there was “no evidence” that screen time was harmful to children’s development. Using MRI scans, the scientists examined 12,000 children aged nine to 12, comparing their screen use to brain development and mental health.
Meanwhile, in a review of Haidt’s new book in the science journal Nature, the psychologist Candice Odgers writes: “Age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices are unlikely to be effective in practice – or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour.”
Even some internet safety advocates are cautious on demands that children are denied smartphones. Andy Burrows, a spokesman for the Molly Rose Foundation – the charity set up in the memory of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who was found dead in her bedroom in 2017 after months browsing dark images and videos on social media – is sceptical about the proposals, calling them “bad, reactionary”, and questions whether they are likely this side of a general election.
There are also simple practical questions. Right now, children cannot legally take out a mobile phone contract if they are under 18, and mobile networks should not sell them one.
“This feels like at best it would be closing a technical gap,” says Burrows. “Ultimately, we feel that this is a distraction from where the real focus needs to be, which should be on strengthening the regulatory regime and making sure when children do go online they can do so in a safe way.” He said it may be an “easy solution to pull up the drawbridge”, but this “frankly penalises children for the failures of Big Tech”.
Greenwell, of Smartphone Free Childhood, however, remains adamant. She says: “It’s now clear that parents the length and breadth of Britain are demanding change.”
It would appear the race to make smartphones illegal has only just begun.
