Phone use is the new smoking

Ever heard a kid say ‘I’m putting my phone away because too much screen time is bad for me’? Didn’t think so. Adults need to step up, writes Angela Mollard.

I used to think my kids were the lucky ones.

Born at the dawn of the new millennium, they entered a world where books and bikes and bare feet were still the core accessories of childhood. They grew up in what I now know was an age of wonderment: where excitement came from turning over a damp log to see what lay beneath; where a puddle and a pair of gumboots brought pure joy; where the creativity, brilliance and inclusiveness of the Harry Potter stories defined their moral universe.

What made these freshly squeezed Millennials so fortunate was that they spent the first 10 years of their lives largely free of handheld devices. They looked at the world rather than screens. They engaged with faces. They became bored. Equally, their parents were gifted a golden decade free of policing what would later become instruments of mass distraction.

Yes, I thought we were the lucky ones.

But we’re not.

Primary school students Ruby and Lia at Brisbane’s New Farm Park with their mobile phones. Education experts are calling for a blanket ban on all mobile phones in primary schools. Picture: David Clark/AAP

Because as my kids entered their tweens, they and the rest of their generation became the guinea pigs of an age that has seen the explosion of technology yet without the necessary limits to mitigate its damaging effects. Like the teens of the 1970s who smoked unfettered because the tobacco lobby had more clout than the public health messengers, today’s youth are the unwitting victims of a revolution that has galloped ahead of our ability to temper it.

It’s time to act. Promptly. Decisively. Federally. We must ban phones from schools.

The French have done it — all school pupils under the age of 15 are forbidden from using smartphones in school. Albania has instituted a similar policy. Here it is up to individual principals to set their own rules, a ridiculous notion which effectively positions technology usage as inconsequential as piercings, hair styles, lunch wrap and hem lengths.

Yet the research is coming through thick and fast. Kids who spend long hours on mobile devices are more likely to suffer from depression, they’re more easily distracted, less emotionally stable, and have problems finishing tasks and making friends. They suffer sleep problems, poor body image and a third haven’t read a book for pleasure in a year. These are not pesky side effects of a little too long on Snapchat. They are the brain-altering, life-threatening, deeply destructive consequences of a life spent too much online. Individually, they can be fatal. Collectively, they are eroding much of what it means to be human. As Dr Brian Primack, a professor of medicine and paediatrics from the University of Pittsburgh, concludes: “I would say that we now have enough evidence of concern that we should be exerting more caution than we are.”

Parents know. They see their kids holed up in their bedrooms. They worry constantly about whether the moodiness and isolation is teen typical or the result of a tech addiction they have little power to avert. Teachers know too. They’re wearied by the constant policing of the pulsating rectangles that sit on desks or lure from pockets. They’re trying to teach deep concepts to minds rendered shallow and jittery by the constant clicking and flicking. And yet the legislators do nothing even though the research clearly shows the trouble brewing. The NSW government has commissioned a review of the non-educational use of mobile devices in NSW schools but the report, due early next year, will only make recommendations, not rules.

We know too much time online is bad for our kids, but we can’t be bothered having the fight.

Smartphones are addictive — and adults know it. Those “likes” we receive on Facebook and Instagram release dopamine, the same chemical produced when we drink, smoke or gamble. As organisational consultant Simon Sinek points out, we have age restrictions for smoking, gambling and alcohol yet no age restrictions for mobile phones.

“You have an entire generation that has access to an addictive, numbing chemical called dopamine, through social media and cell phones, as they’re going through the high stress of adolescence.”

It’s concerning, he says, because these kids become hardwired to turn to technology rather than their friends in times of stress. Ergo, they lose the ability to form deep meaningful relationships. Indeed, when Deniliquin High School, in the Riverina, banned phones in July staff immediately noticed how “fabulously noisy” it was at recess and lunch. Kids were talking to each other.

Tech enthusiasts argue that adolescents need devices to learn, that educating them to moderate their phone use is more important than banning them. Yes, the internet is a tool for learning but most schools have computers for this. Besides, thinking is at the heart of learning. Equally, just as we now know that a little alcohol at home does not teach kids safe drinking behaviour, so their prefrontal cortex is not mature enough to self-monitor screen usage.

Have you ever heard a child say: “I’m putting my phone away because too much screen-time is bad for me”?

Ask yourself why the tech giants Bill Gates and Steve Jobs seldom let their kids play with the devices and products they helped create. Because they knew.

A smartphone ban in schools is to this generation what seat belts were to the 1970s: an urgent and necessary caution in an ever-advancing world.

@angelamollard