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PHONE-Y WAR
TikTok liquidises brains, Instagram is full of self-hate, Twitter a porn-fest – why have MPs not banned phones for kids?
Every teen now has a non-stop predator in their back pocket
WE are just weeks away from a General Election yet it feels as if we’re still in a phoney war – a strange no man’s land where the real arguments that matter to people have yet to be acknowledged.
While parents witness the horrifying influence of smartphones on their kids, politicians are doing nothing to fight the global tech firms raking in billions from the destruction of children’s minds.
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That is despite research mounting up that confirms parents’ worst fears: we are witnessing an unprecedented mental health crisis among children, with suicide rates having doubled for teen boys and trebled for teen girls since 2012, and self-harm incidents in ten to 12-year-old girls up 364 per cent.
Experts now think they’ve worked out the cause — rampant social media and smartphone use by kids.
Porn and torture
Smartphones are making youngsters feel wretched — often force-feeding them a diet of extreme porn, violence and hateful opinions.
They are wrecking their sleep, their eyesight, their ability to focus on schoolwork and their life chances.
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Politicians say they want to do something about children’s mental health.
So why have none of the main parties yet said they’d do the obvious fix and make smartphones illegal for under-16s, thus tackling the most harmful aspect of smartphones — social media.
TikTok is a brain liquidiser, Instagram a self-loathing factory, Snapchat a focus-killer, Twitter a porn-fest and WhatsApp a stinking pit of cyberbullying.
Every teen now has a non-stop predator in their back pocket.
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Molly Russell, Brianna Ghey, Breck Bednar, Olly Stephens, Archie Battersbee, Leon Brown and Sophie Parkinson are all children who’ve either killed themselves, been murdered or lost their life as a result of sinister online influences.
This should be enough to be a top talking point but so far in this election we’ve heard nothing about this from the two men who want to run the country. How many more tragedies do we need before our MPs fight for kids?
Parents can now see WHO kids are chatting to on Snapchat - and they don't even need to fight for their smartphone
In a recent poll, almost one in five 16 to 18-year-olds said social media has led them to feel “that life is not worth living”, while a similar number admitted to viewing self-harm and suicide content on their smartphones.
A new survey suggests teens spend an average of eight-and-a-half hours on their screens a day — the equivalent of a working week — and tweenagers, aged between ten and 12, five-and-a-half hours.
It’s a battle every modern parent is having.
Even if kids aren’t watching beheadings, violent porn or live torture, their young lives are being wasted and their concentration spans destroyed by endless ten-second videos of pure garbage.
Not to mention the bullying that goes on once the school gates close, with our kids in their bedrooms and us parents oblivious.
Nearly half of teens studying for their GCSEs this year will see their grades drop because they are constantly distracted by social media, according to Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of North West London’s Michaela Community School.
Teachers say it’s the bane of their lives. Pupils’ IQs are falling for the first time ever, with many commentators blaming the influence of smartphones.
Sadly, our Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have spent more time talking about banning after-work emails than axing smartphones for kids.
The over-hyped Online Safety Bill might remove some harmful material but it doesn’t address the scandal of whole childhoods spent as zombies on phones. Anyway, the new law is a bloated, slow-moving fatberg that is never going to keep up with online dangers.
Why bother with this giant piece of time-consuming, ineffective legislation when you could just give youngsters child-safe phones?
There are many alternatives to smartphones — brickphones that can make and receive calls and texts, and tracker devices so you know where your child is — and the range of products is growing all the time as more and more parents start to wake up to the reality of smartphones.
As for relying on tech companies to implement their own safety measures or so-called parental controls — that’s like putting a cat in a room with a mouse and asking it not to chase it.
Parents are in a catastrophic no-win situation.
Enough is enough
Say no and your kid will be a social outcast. Say yes and you hand over a device that will hijack their childhood.
Seventy-seven per cent of parents of primary school pupils want the Government to introduce an under-16s ban on smartphones, according to a poll commissioned by charity Parentkind.
And teens themselves are telling us they want help breaking their addiction.
MPs must listen and, rather than pointing fingers at parents, should be waving their fists at tech firms selling smartphones full of damaging apps to kids.
They need to act before this gets worse.
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Younger and younger children are getting smartphones, with a quarter of five to seven-year-olds now owning one.
It wouldn’t be hard or expensive for the Government to endorse child-safe phones with access to nothing but texts, calls, maps and music.
Then Labour would not need to spend multiple millions on “mental-health professionals” in schools if they get into power, and our kids would be free to have the childhoods they deserve.
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Enough is enough. It’s time to fight for our children.
We must win this phone-y war and see smartphone bans in the manifestos.
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