Opinion: Giving Your Kid a Smartphone is Stupid

Will you join me in pledging not to?

How to Build a Life is a newsletter for people bang in the thick of life’s mess and mayhem, who are still trying to find the magic. It’s written by me, Laura Jane Williams, author of 12 (!) books. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, decorate my house like a tart’s boudoir, and lift very heavy weights. Those four things are my entire personality.

My latest rom-com is Enemies to Lovers, and I am the author of teen series Taylor Blake is a Legend too.

Glossary terms (as I see it):

Smartphone - phone with access to the internet (e.g. iPhone)

Dumb phone - phone that can call and text with no access to the internet (e.g. Nokia 3310)

Social media - apps that allow group communication, that need internet access, often found on smartphones. Dumbphones cannot support most social media.

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This newsletter is all about How to Build a Life. I truly believe that in giving under-16’s smartphones, we’re robbing our children of theirs.

I’m part of a growing movement called Smartphone Free Childhood. It does what it says on the tin: it’s about parents uniting to delay smartphone use (and by proxy, most social media) in kids for as long as possible.

I believe that the best time to give a child a smartphone is when you’re ready for that kid’s childhood to end.

Giving a kid a smartphone does not allow them access to the Internet - giving a smartphone to a child gives the internet access to them.

And at 10? 11? Anything younger than 16? Their brains aren’t developed enough for that.

(The frontal cortex doesn’t actually stop developing until age 25!)

shouldn’t these kids be… i don’t know… talking to each other??

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We think tragedy will never come to our family. We think everyone else’s kids have phones and social media - we can’t have ours be the odd ones out. They’ll get bullied! Excluded! Technology is the future!

But then, these families want us to know that:

• Exposure to social media is how, devastatingly, a 'A happy, normal boy who wanted to look after his mum and dad' ended up dying from a “black out” challenge he saw online.

• Ruth Moss, whose 13-year-old Sophie Parkinson died after taking her own life in 2014, says that when she went to look at her daughter’s social media "there was a barrage of really distressing material". She accessed the internet from an iPad she needed for school, which had internet access away from wifi - so she saw all this from Googling on the bus.

• Mia Janin's parents had no idea she was being targeted on social media by pupils at her London school before she died in March 2021, aged 14.

• Stuart Stephens, the father of 13-year-old Olly Stephens who was killed after a dispute on social media, and says children are being desensitised after being exposed to graphic content online.

Those children died. In their memory, we should learn from what happened so ours do not.