Every parent of a school-age child should watch Swiped, the Channel 4 documentary on smartphones shown last week. It was devastating. It told of an Essex secondary school’s experiment in response to what it saw as a rise in anxiety and stress among its 11-year-olds. A group of them agreed to surrender their phones for three weeks.
The parents’ stories were familiar – of children unable to make eye contact with adults, no longer chatting with ease, spending hours alone and staying awake into the small hours. Some spent five, six, even nine hours a day on their phones. They made “friends” with total strangers, received hate mail, suffered panic attacks, went from normal to self-harm. Surveys claim a quarter of British 11-year-olds have now watched online pornography. One child died in tragic circumstances closely linked to their social media use.
The survey was thorough. A monitoring team from York University scanned the children’s brains and noticed many suffered from deteriorating grey matter, despite being articulate, intelligent, normal children. We see them dropping their phones into a glass box and watch their initial symptoms of addiction withdrawal. They were acutely bored, silent at meals and had disturbed sleep.
Yet over the weeks the tests and interviews with both children and parents were undeniable. Just three weeks without phones saw a marked 17% fall in symptoms of anxiety and depression. Children had an average of one extra hour’s sleep and a 3% improvement in memory. A girl’s panic attacks ceased. Most significant was the children’s eerie sense of normality. “I thought part of me had been missing … I came downstairs … I did things with my family … I found my mum … one day phones will be banned from children.” Parents likewise reported a brief period of family happiness, and dreaded “the return of the phones”.
There is no argument here. Britain has experienced a surge in childhood mental illness. One in five young people is reckoned to suffer a mental disorder, with a 53% rise in emergency referrals in three years. Half a million children are awaiting psychiatric help. If this was a physical health epidemic, it would have signalled a crash programme of treatment and prevention. It is a mental health epidemic, and therefore unfashionable in medical circles.
The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his bestselling The Anxious Generation, has traced an identical surge in mental illness in the US. This he clearly dates to the arrival of social media in the mid-2010s. Facebook, WhatsApp and now TikTok have detached young Americans from their social context and deposited them in an alien, potentially dangerous world.
TikTok, apparently the worst perpetrator, is the subject of a proposed ban in the US from January. Bans now operate in countries including France, India, Canada and parts of Australia. Britain, where Whitehall is notoriously vulnerable to lobbying, is limp. The social media regulator Ofcom this week belatedly published a code of practice. This will try to limit child access to online pornography, material promoting suicide and stranger abuse. Such limits are notoriously ineffective.
Fining social media providers is like swatting flies. So is the wider movement to ban phones from schools – and even from Manchester nightclubs. Swiped showed that the power to solve an addiction now embedded in homes and among parents and children alike must lie elsewhere. Fear of missing out is the most potent of social toxins. The smartphone has the kind of hold over minds as young as nine or 10 that alcohol and drugs can have over adults. Parental groups such as National Online Safety are forming across Europe, but these tend to be in less at-risk communities. Parents are one answer to this challenge, but not the solution.
Smartphones must sooner or later be universally banned for young people under 16, with the same ferocity as are cigarettes, drugs and knives. A technology so long eulogised is now dissolving the bonds that should be at the heart of a child’s family and friendship relations. This must be wrong, yet nothing is done about it. At least watch the programme.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist