Everyone from the UN to the newest classroom assistant will tell you the same thing about kids and smartphones: They don’t work well together.
That is, they work so well together that they take over kids’ brains, colonising their neural pathways so effectively that it causes kids to live inside the world of their devices rather than here on Earth.
This online world is unpeopled by adults, other than the ones who design the algorithms that facilitate social media addiction, cyber-bullying and all that other fun stuff that even grown-ass adults struggle with, never mind teens with still-forming brains, their pre-frontal cortexes still not fully downloaded inside their own heads, never mind digitally.
What could possibly go wrong? Oh wait, it has already.
Good news then that schools across Europe are finally putting proper restrictions in place — initially seen as a human rights breach by denying little John and Mary a back-to-school iPhone16, or putting them in mortal danger because you can’t track their every move when they’re not with you, at last the culture is shifting.
Eyes are opening.
We are realising that actually, giving a child a smartphone is not doing anyone (except tech companies) any favours.
So will phones at school become like vaping at school? Verboten, taboo, even behind the bike sheds?
I am not one of those good-old-days fetishists who longs for landlines, pen and paper, set television schedules.
God no.
The upside of tech, which is also its downside, is how apps allow us to communicate limitlessly across time and space; this is a problem if you’re trying to teach geography to a bunch of 13-year-olds all TikToking under the desk, but a blessing if your 23-year-old lives in Australia, and Bake Off is about to come on our screens.
By the sorcery of WhatsApp, Zoom, and catch-up TV apps, will she and I be able to watch our beloved cake programme together if one of us agrees to get up in the middle of the night?
Never has the magic of comms tech been so apparent since my child relocated to the other side of the Earth.
“No offence, Mum, but I don’t miss you at all,” she says happily, her face and voice booming into my house.
“Me neither!” I beam back, as I am bounced across satellites into her Melbourne front room.
We don’t miss each other because our hunter gatherer brains are tricked, satisfied with the sounds and images of each other from our phones that mimic real life connection. This is the power of tech: the human brain, not that long out of the cave, cannot differentiate between digital and real: In mine and my daughter’s case, it scratches what would otherwise be a terribly long-distance itch (or a gaping hole for pre-digital letter-writing generations).
It is benign and useful, connecting us across the world. But for kids navigating hormones, adolescence, relationships, family and school dynamics, it’s neural heroin. And not in a good way.
