It can be like a zombie apocalypse.
It is not yet a fact that all of our children will suffer a range of mental health issues and deteriorating social skills due to the omnipotent presence of smartphones in their lives. We should not swallow that pill without question.
The number of times I have been told by people of all generations that ‘there is nothing we can do about it’ as I bemoan the don’t look up culture that has swept the world. The most saddening factor in this epidemic is not actually watching children glued to their devices, mindlessly scrolling through an infinite source of ‘content’, the worst part is the malignant modelling actuated by adults. Blaming parents is a dangerous path, but you don’t have to wander far out of your front door to see a familiar pattern of a child pulling on their parents arm, quietly appealing for attention, to be completely ignored as their parent is busy checking their phone. It can be like a zombie apocalypse.
A recent example of this went something like this. As my son Jack and I sat enjoying a coffee and chat in a local cafe, the table opposite caught our attention.
Father, whilst sitting with his four year old son, scrolling his smartphone for guitars and not looking up. Not once.
“What’s the matter Josh?”
Josh continues whining quietly whilst seeking his father’s attention.
“What is it? Joshy stop whining”
Joshy continues whining. Father has not looked up once.
“Josh-y eat your cake”
Joshy continues whining. Father has still not looked up once.
“Josh-y stop whining — what’s the problem?”
Joshy continues whining. Father has still not looked up once. On it goes until the mother returns with the daughter.
“Alright? Are you two having a nice time? she says as Jack and I look at one another in despair.
Of course, with this transaction taking place in England, I said nothing. It probably wasn’t my place to do so even though my internal voice was screaming, “for god’s sake, put the damned phone down for five seconds — he just wants your attention!” It broke my heart to watch this exchange, not just for the child but also for the father. To see him pass up on this wonderful time in his child’s life, time that he would never get back.
This is not unusual. I have lost count of the number of occasions that we have been out and about and watched entire families sat around a table having a meal whilst all perusing their smartphones. Not a word spoken.
There was a highly prescient line in the film Tick, Tick…Boom!
“Superbia. A satire set in the future on a poisoned planet Earth, where the vast majority of humanity spends their lives staring at the screens of their media transmitters, watching the tiny elite of the rich and powerful who film their own fabulous lives like TV shows. A world where human emotion has been outlawed” (Jonathan Larson — author Superbia/ Steven Levenson — screenplay for Tick, Tick…Boom!)
The side effects of children’s access to social media and the emerging mental health crisis is a hot topic in the UK right now. The idea of a bullying crowd or an individual following your child into their bedroom and prodding and taunting them through the night, when they are at their most vulnerable, is a chilling reality for many. Many children are so in thrall to their device and the community of social platforms, that even though they receive a barrage of cruel abuse on a daily basis, they still cannot tear themselves away for fear of missing out. This is the most pernicious affect of smartphone culture, but an equally unwelcome compound effect is that many children have their social skills blunted by the amount of hours spent staring at, and communicating via, a screen. So as well as living an internal hell due to their device enslavement (I do not exaggerate) they also simultaneously lose their ability to talk about it. They are robbed of the capacity to look up and say to their parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters or friends, “this is making me so unhappy but I don’t know what do do about it. Can you help me?”
There is hope
So what do we do about it? How do you stand in the path of a tsunami of screen dependence in which we are encouraged to live every moment of our lives through our devices. Where there is an appropriate app for every aspect of our lives, where we are encouraged to use our phones for all transactions and where the notification beast harasses and nags us for our attention through every hour of the day. This is before we even touch upon the amount of hours required to sustain a modest social media presence. But it is possible to step away.
Having written about this subject in another post, I was directed to a fantastic new campaign (slightly ironically being launched on Instagram) called #smartphonefreechildhood. This is really worth supporting if you share any of these concerns. Launched by two parents in the UK who wanted to raise awareness of the damage of smartphones and to create a movement for opting out of this, seemingly inevitable, appendage (97% of UK 12 year olds own a smartphone) They tackle the issue with a lot of empathy and a strong desire to not judge parents. They have amassed almost 18,000 followers in a few weeks. I wonder if this is the start of something bigger. I really, really hope that it is.
Our personal experience is one of swimming against a stronger and stronger tide (this thing makes a riptide look like a gentle stream) We have a fairly tight rein on screen time already and there are some hard rules including no phones at the table during meals, no devices upstairs and all devices plugged in downstairs at night, when the Wi-Fi is switched off. But we still need to put in occasional hard breaks. After last Christmas our youngest son was spending more and more time playing on his Switch, for which he has time limits, so when he came off the Switch he started watching other people play the game he had been playing on the Switch, on YouTube. He also talked about nothing else apart from Luigi’s Mansion. This was not a problem in itself, but he also became quite withdrawn and stopped engaging in conversations (that weren’t about Luigi’s Mansion) during meals and in the car. It was taking over all of his waking thoughts. So we decided to have a break and for one month the Switch went in the cupboard. Whilst he was unsurprisingly unhappy about this development, it was the nature of his reaction that worried us most. It was as if we had taken our pet Cockapoo away and locked her in the cupboard for a month, such was the level of upset and anxiety. The Switch attracted an unhealthy level of separation emotions that would normally be associated with being separated from a living thing, not a device. This is not even a smartphone, which he does not own, but nonetheless we felt that a reset was badly needed.
The upshot was that he became far more engaged in the prevailing conversation, he started writing and drawing again and we went back to talking about what had happened during his day in the real world. It was arguably a reasonably hard line, but it worked and I would strongly argue that he is happier as a result of balancing his screen time and real world time.
This topic is the challenge of our generation and clearly we need to find a way to live within the digital age, to allow our children to be part of the conversation, but to take a stand about what we are led to believe is inevitable. Because it is not inevitable, but it is going to require a herculean effort by many people to restore some balance and to preserve the art of conversation and eye contact.
Ultimately it is a case of, just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should regarding screens presence in our lives. Smartphones have a part to play for most of us, but we can choose what part that is and above all, we must be the master of our devices and know how to say no to them and how to set boundaries.
Our children should be allowed to experience humanity first hand, to understand non-verbal communication, to know how reinforcing it feels to meet our real friends in-person and to laugh together without the need for a supporting emoji.
This is a conversation for which I do not profess to have all of the answers, and for which reason I would love to discuss it with you. So please do not hesitate to reach out if you would like to get involved.
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Previously Published on Medium
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