BARCELONA, Spain (AP) – Try saying “no” when a child asks for a smartphone. What follows, parents everywhere can attest, begins with some variation of, “Everybody’s got one. Why can not I?”
But what if no pre-teen has one — and what if having a smartphone was weird? It’s the end of a growing number of parents across Europe who are concerned by evidence that young children are using smartphones endangers their safety and mental health — and share the belief that there is strength in numbers.
From Spain to Britain and Ireland, parents are flooding WhatsApp and Telegram groups with plans not only to keep smartphones out of schools, but to lock arms and refuse to buy young children the devices before – or even in – years their teenage years.
Inspired by a conversation in a Barcelona park with other mothers, Elisabet García Permanyer started a chat group last fall to share information on the dangers of internet access for children with families at her children’s school.
The group, called Teens Without Cell Phones, quickly expanded to other schools and then across the country to now include over 10,000 members. The most engaged parents have formed activist pairs in schools across Spain and are pressuring other parents to agree not to give their children smartphones until the age of 16.
“When I started this, I was just hoping that I would find four other like-minded families, but it took off and kept growing and growing and growing,” says García Permanyer. “My goal was to try to join forces with other parents so that we could push the point when smartphones arrived. I said, ‘I’ll try to make sure my kids aren’t the only ones who don’t have one.’
A push, with the help of the Spanish government
It’s not just the parents.
Police and public health experts were sounding the alarm about a large number of violent and pornographic videos being witnessed by children via handheld devices. Spain’s government took note of the momentum and banned smartphones entirely from primary schools in January. Now they can only be lit in secondary school, which starts at the age of 12, if the teacher deems it necessary for an educational activity.
“If we adults are addicted to smartphones, how can we give one to a 12-year-old who doesn’t have the ability to handle it?” García Permanyer asks. “This has gone away from us. If the internet was a safe space for children, then that would be great. But it isn’t.”
The movement in Britain gained steam this year after the mother of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey, who was killed by two teenagers last year, began calling for children under 16 to be blocked from accessing social media on smartphones.
“It seems like we all know (buying smartphones) is a bad decision for our kids, but the social norm hasn’t caught up yet,” Daisy Greenwell, a mother of three children under 10 in Suffolk, posted on area of England. her Instagram earlier this year. “What if we could change the social norm so that in our school, our city, our country, it was a weird choice to give your child a smartphone at 11? What if we could hold off until they’re 14, or 16?”
She and a friend, Clare Reynolds, set up a WhatsApp group called Parents United about a childhood without smartphones, with three people in it. She posted an invitation on her Instagram page. Within four days, 2,000 people joined the group, prompting Greenwell and Reynolds to split dozens of groups by locality. Three weeks after the original post, there was a chat group for every British county, one of the organizers said on WhatsApp.
It’s an uphill climb
Parents rallying to ban smartphones from young children have a long way to go to change what is considered “normal”.
By age 12, most children have smartphones, statistics from all three countries show. Look a little closer, and the numbers become clearer: In Spain, a quarter of children have a mobile phone by the age of 10, and almost half by 11. By the age of 12, this percentage rises to 75%. British media regulator Ofcom said 55% of UK children owned a smartphone between the ages of 8 and 11, with the figure rising to 97% at 12.
Ofcom added another statistic to their report last year: One in five children aged 3 or 4 owns a smartphone.
Parents and schools that have succeeded in changing the paradigm in their communities told The Associated Press that change became possible the moment they realized they were not alone. What began as a means of keeping in touch with friends has turned into something more worrisome to keep children away from – similar, these parents claim, to things like cigarettes and alcohol.
In Greystones, Ireland, that moment came after all eight primary school principals in the town signed and posted a letter last May discouraging parents from buying smartphones for their students. Then the parents themselves voluntarily signed written pledges, promising not to let their children have the devices.
“The discussion went away almost overnight,” says Christina Capatina, 38, a Greystones parent of two pre-teen daughters who signed the pledge and says there are almost no smartphones in schools this academic year. “If (the kids) ask now, you tell them: We’re just following the rules. This is how we live.”
For Barcelona’s Mònica Marquès, no signed pledge was necessary to get the same result. She surveyed the parents of her daughters’ class two years ago and was surprised to find that “99% of them were as horrified or more so than I was.”
She shared the results of her questionnaire and says that this year, when her daughter started high school, no student in her class had a smartphone.
And as for the other excuse that kids supposedly need a smartphone so parents can control them, Marquès says an old school cell phone with no Internet access like the one her daughter carries is a perfect substitute.
An incremental control
Something like a consensus has been building for years between the institutions, governmentsparents and others with whom children’s smartphone use is associated bullying, suicidal ideation, anxiety and loss of concentration necessary to learn. China moved last year to restrict use by children of smartphones, while France has in the country a banning smartphones in schools for children from six to 15 years old.
The push to control smartphones in Spain comes amid a rise in notorious cases of children viewing pornography online, sharing videos of sexual violence, or even taking part in creating “fake deep” pornographic images of classmates using artificial intelligence generating tools. Spain’s government says 25% of children aged 12 and under and 50% of children aged 15 and under have already been exposed to pornography online. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain is facing an “authentic epidemic” of pornography aimed at minors.
Threats include adults taking advantage of minors they meet online, such as the recent arrest of two “influencers” in Madrid for allegedly sexually assaulting underage girls they followed on TikTok.
The risks have prompted school bans on smartphones and internet safety laws. But they do not address what children do in their free time.
“What I try to stress to other principals is the importance of joining the school next door to you,” says Rachel Harper, headteacher of St Patrick’s National School, one of eight in Greystones to encourage parents to refrain from smartphones for their children. “There’s a little more force that way, as all the parents in the area are talking about it.”
Parents’ concerns are different. Some dread the day when their young children ask to pick up a phone like their friends. Others have young teenagers with phones and regret following the herd during what they consider a naïve phase when screens were just a way to let kids have fun and chat with their friends. Parents say they have emerged from a state of blissful Internet ignorance.
The home quarantine of the COVID-19 pandemic offered a first-hand look at their children looking at screens and getting smart to hide what they were seeing there — and what they were finding.
“Screens were seen as a safety valve that allowed adults to work and kept children busy, whatever that meant,” says Macu Cristófol, who founded a group of concerned parents in Malaga, southern Spain, after hearing about parent group with balloon in Barcelona. “That’s when I thought, where are we going? We have become hostages of the screens.”
Capatina says she saw her 11-year-old daughter change the day she returned home from a playground and pointed out that a girl there had recorded video of the scene on a smartphone.
“Panic, panic, panic”, Capatina remembers her daughter’s reaction. “Nothing major happened,” Capatina says, “but I saw the pressure and the anxiety levels rise to where they hadn’t been before. And I thought, this is not healthy. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about things like that.”
But if kids can’t have smartphones, are parents cutting back on their internet time? This is difficult, many parents say, because they are managing families and working online. Capatina, an interior designer, says she tells her kids what she’s done online — work, for example, or schedules — “to keep myself accountable.”
Laura Borne, a Greystones mum of 5- and 6-year-olds who have never known smartphones, says she is aware of the need to model online behavior – and that she should probably cut back.
“I’m doing my best,” she says. But as with the children she parents, the pressures are there. And they don’t go away.
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Kellman reported from London.
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