Ask any parent in Britain today what is the right age to get your child a smartphone, then sit back and buckle in. There is no short answer to this question, and no parent that doesn’t have strong feelings on the topic.
Fifteen years ago smartphones were a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye – today they dominate the parental worry list. When to get your kid one, how to protect them from harmful content when you do, how to ensure they don’t give up all their hobbies and spend 10 hours a day staring at it, how to protect our daughters from being ‘TikTokified’ (looking like they’ve been raised by a TikTok video). This is the new frontier in parenting.
The average age of first smartphone ownership is nine, and by the age of 12, just 9% of kids are smartphone-free. A fifth of three and four year.){href='https://www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/media-habits-children/a-window-into-young-childrens-online-worlds/#:~
If all their friends have one, to leave your child the only one without feels cruel. The last thing any parent wants is to isolate their child from their peer group. Many people don’t want to get their kid a smartphone but feel forced into it because everyone else is.
The solution to this problem lies in better regulation of Big Tech, but enacting legislation takes years. It’s time that we, as parents of children today, don’t have. The government’s Online Safety Act has been a decade in the making, and parents still see no improvement in the quality of their children’s digital lives. While we wait for the predatory and addictive algorithms of Big Tech to be reined in, our most powerful defence lies in banding together and taking collective action.
To help parents do that, the grassroots parent movement Iinadvertently helped kick off in February, Smartphone Free Childhood, has launched theParent Pact.
It’s a way for us to join together with parents in our community in choosing to wait before getting our child a smartphone. If your child knows that ten others in their class will be getting a simple brick phone instead, they’re happy to wait, the peer pressure dissolves.
How does it work? You can sign up to delay until at least the end of Year 9 in 30 seconds, and then see a leaderboard of data for your county, your school and your child’s year group. You can then connect with the others who have signed via your school’s SFC WhatsApp group.
Within 24 hours of launch, 20,000 children had been signed up to the Pact. Our next target is 50,000, and by this time next year we intend to have well over 100,000 British kids going smartphone-free until they’re 14.
The ultimate goal? To reach a tipping point where the culture around when children are given smartphones is permanently changed. If we achieve that, we’ll be helping improve the wellbeing of an entire generation.
The ultimate goal is to reach a tipping point where the culture around when children are given smartphones is permanently changed.
The Smartphone Free Childhood community has exploded since we launched in February, and now includes 150,000 parents across Britain. It’s been deeply moving to see the energy with which they’ve taken time out of their busy lives to push for change and engage their communities in what can – let’s be honest – be a very awkward conversation. Through talking with other parents and their schools, organising talks and summer fair stalls and meeting their MPs, they’ve had an extraordinary impact. In May, all the primary schools in the city of St Albans went smartphone-free. In June, 18 out of 20 state secondariesin Southwark took the leap. Two weeks ago, SFC parents in Northern Ireland worked with their government to introduce new policy guidance removing smartphones from the school day.
This movement is up against big forces, billion-dollar advertising spends and the most powerful companies in human history – but as anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has’.
Parents across the world are rising up to reclaim their families and ensure their kids don’t lose their childhoods to a smartphone. Our dream is for SFC to be a shining example of how grassroots movements can change the world for the better. It’s early days, but it might just happen.