Stimulating and valuable or toxic and dangerous?

As we approach 2025, a quarter of a century into this millennium, the only record we will have of New Year's Eve in 1999 will be printed photos in albums. Parties will have been accompanied by CDs, minidisk and tape compilations; VHSs will be scattered around sitting rooms with Christmas specials (with arguments about what has been taped over); and no-one would be giving much thought to future technologies, save for excited speculation about the "millennium bug". The Oxford Dictionary had not yet published a word of the year (I believe their first was in 2004), but I am certain it would not have been "brain-rot" (the 2024 word of the year). Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was the number one best seller of 1999, and I am sure a book titled The Anxious Generation would be an anathema to those looking ahead to the new millennium, filled with optimism.

Across generations, young people tend not to change, so I suspect behaviours and challenges of growing up in the 1999s and 2000s are not dissimilar to now. There is, however, a major difference and one that has defined the challenges of Generations Z and Alpha: mobile phones.

As a sixteen-year old in 2000, I remember getting my first mobile phone. It was the Nokia 3310. Snake was the big ticket item and hotly debated was which of 16 ring-tones to choose. I gradually upgraded to colour screens, flip phones, and, I think in 2005, a Blackberry. In 2008, I got my first iPhone. Aside from the Blackberry, this heralded a new era: the smart phone.

• In 2010, the front-facing camera emerged, the same year that Instagram was founded.
• TikTok was founded in 2016
• It is reckoned that 91% of 11-year-olds now own a smartphone

Just sixteen years since the launch of the first iPhone. During this time, through absolutely no fault of parents, children around the world have been given free access to their devices, apps and the internet; schools have allowed mobile phones into lessons; children have gone to bed with their mobile phone with them. And we have become reliant, perhaps addicted, to our mobile device.

It probably wasn't until around 2018 that the negative aspect of smartphones were being aired more widely. There were reports that Silicon Valley executives were sending their children to tech-free schools and warnings were put out about excessive use of phones.

2024, has, however, seen the biggest shift in opinion on the matter:

• UNESCO called for a global ban for phones in schools, citing excessive use amongst yoing people.
• Parents in the UK launched the 'Stick To Brick' campaign, calling for smartphones under the age of 16 to be banned.
• As two successive UK Governments grapple with its own response, Australia has banned social media usage for under16s.
• In April the Serious Crime Agency put out an alert to schools about the rapid rise of Sextortion, especially impacting boys.

And Jonathan Haidt published his book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. There will be few parents and teachers who are not familiar with this work; Barack Obama has today placed it in his top books for 2024, and it features regularly in the top-ten reads. For many this is a watershed moment. His argument about the rise of smartphone use is just as strong as the decline in the freedom of childhood. He cites the 1980s when a child's freedom began to be curtailed as the start of the problem.

I attended a conference at Radley College in April, hosted by John Moule and Jonathan Porter . I had just read Haidt's book and so had questions I wanted answering. It was a balanced programme with arguments from both sides, underpinned by academic research. I didn't come away with the answers I thought I wanted, simply because, as John Moule says:

It is a complex issue. It is also nuanced: there are plenty of other variables that need to be considered. Individuals are different in terms of personality, biology and interests: all those factors will affect their use and level of dependence on phones. Some use the digital world as a way to 'avoid work' whilst others use it to relax away from it. There is a clear difference between what the device is used to access, from the toxic and dangerous to the mindless but harmless to the stimulating and valuable.

There did seem to be consensus, however, on both three facts that we should take note as we navigate this area of complexity:

1. Children have less freedom in the real world than our generation (for many of us, millennials) did.
2. As humans, we form habits. These habits can start to define how we live our everyday lives.
3. Young people thrive on contact with one another. It is a basic need and, throughout the evolution of humans, crucial skills have been learned through interaction with one another.

I asked the panelists at Radley whether they felt it possible that we will come to a consensus on the matter. They felt not. So for the foreseeable future, it remains nuanced and hotly debated, albeit we cannot change the direction of travel. What we can do, therefore, is control the influence smartphone use has on us and our children, and as teachers and parents, use our powerful influence as a force for good.

Haidt ends his book with a powerful call to arms, which whilst seems to enormous a task to comprehend, will surely continue to galvanise governments and society to see this as a defining issue for young people:

Humanity evolved on Earth. Childhood evolved for physical playfulness and exploration. Children thrive when they are rooted in real-world communities, not in disembodied virtual networks. Let's bring our children home.