Jamie Oliver thinks he keeps his children safe with an app, but they’d be better off with no smartphone

LAST week, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver revealed he tracks his daughters, who are 15 and 16, using an app on their smartphones.

The girls and their parents have downloaded Life360 and ‘it’s brilliant’, he says. ‘It allows us to see where everyone is, and what route they’ve gone. So if one of the girls says, “I’m going to Camden Town”, and I see they’ve gone to Reading, then we have a problem.’

Well, yes they do. But it’s a problem parents have always had, when teenagers begin to strike out for their freedom. Growing up involves testing boundaries and breaking rules, it means going places that your parents don’t know about, with people they might not necessarily like, to get up to stuff they probably wouldn’t approve of. But whether it’s a problem that is resolved, or actually worsened, by giving your young teens a smartphone is a different matter altogether.

Trust

If Jamie can’t be sure where his children – and a 16-year-old, by any reckoning, is still a child – are going in the real world, if he can’t be sure they’ll stick to the routes and the locations agreed, if he doesn’t trust them to stay within the boundaries they’ve discussed when they’re travelling by Tube, how can he trust them when they venture into cyberspace?

Being a modern, clued-in dad, Jamie also has some apps that tell him what his kids are up to online. He’s spoken in the past, for example, about an app called OurPact. This allows him to control the time they spend on their mobiles, to block social media sites, to permit them to use the internet for homework research but not to browse apps and games. All very commendable, but wouldn’t it be so much easier if his young girls didn’t have smartphones in the first place?

I’m sure the Olivers could stretch to a shared desktop in the family room, where his children could research their homework under parental supervision to their hearts’ content. An iPad, again used with parental oversight, would solve the problem too. And an old-fashioned ‘dumbphone’ is all they’d need to let their parents know their whereabouts, given sufficient trust on both sides. After all, I doubt the tracking app works if the phone happens to be turned off/out of battery/left in a school locker/loaned to a friend (who happens to live in Reading …) or one of the many other reasons why youngsters are mysteriously inaccessible on their phones sometimes.

Jamie’s children are probably banned from Snapchat and Instagram and sites like Ask.fm. That doesn’t mean their friends are, though. It doesn’t mean that his children don’t see those sites and posts and images, courtesy of young pals with less vigilant parents. It does not mean their pictures aren’t being posted, online, on friends’ accounts, and commented on and shared and viewed by God knows who. And that’s the problem with a lack of regulation on underage smartphone usage. When it’s a free-forall, there’s no moral or social support for those parents who just want to say ‘no’.

According to a new survey, one in three children in British classrooms is suffering from mental health problems directly linked to social media. And, given Irish smartphone usage is the highest in the Western world – some 83% of us have the devices – there’s no reason to doubt that a similar problem is brewing here. Talking about the online trolling she receives, and her concerns for modern youngsters negotiating the bear-pit of social media, Vogue Williams – who owes her success to that very forum – says she’s glad she grew up without smartphones.

Rude

Whether she can bank on that same freedom for her newborn son, though, depends on whether our legislators listen to schools and parents on this one: When your main parenting tasks involve putting out fires and limiting damage caused by social media, cyber-bullying, grooming and gaming, then you clearly need backup from politicians, and accountability from platforms.

Ryan Tubridy, who has been hugely supportive of this newspaper’s campaign to protect children online, remarked yesterday that, in his house, taking out a smartphone on the sofa of an evening is akin to producing a cigar and lighting up: it’s anti-social, it’s rude, it’s indifferent to the presence of others and, just like smoking these days, if you want to do it you take yourself off somewhere else. The analogy with smoking is pretty apt, too. It’s a habit, it’s an addiction that we sleepwalked into, when smartphones first appeared, without fully appreciating the risks, and having raised our children in an atmosphere dense with social media, fake news and manipulative marketing, we’re fighting a losing battle to clear the air.

Most adults defend their smartphone use – and, by extension, the example they give their kids – by arguing that the inter- net is where they get their news these days. The problem with that plan is that, unless you’ve subscribed to a responsible newspaper’s site or app like this one’s, you’ve no guarantee that the news you’re consuming is fair, truthful, honest and impartial. The election of Donald Trump and the debacle that is Brexit shows just how easily vast populations can be misled and misinformed by ‘fake news’ targeted at their prejudices and designed to unseat their democratic function.

Wisecracks

As a result, our children are living through historic times, events that their own children and grandchildren will study decades from now. And, whatever the consequences of these times, future generations will look to those first-hand witnesses to explain and analyse what happened and how it all unfolded. Will they be able to tell them, I wonder, or will their knowledge of Trump and Brexit and climate change and the rise of right-wing populism be limited to some funny GIFs that they shared on Instagram, and the superficial, 240-character wisecracks of their own echo chambers?

When I was my children’s age, there was always a newspaper on the kitchen table. I remember the front-page headlines when Lord Mountbatten’s boat was blown up, and Elvis died, and the Pope came to visit. I can still see my father, in tears, holding up a newspaper front page to show us a picture of a little girl’s body, a blossom of red where her stomach should have been, in the arms of a fireman after the Talbot Street bomb in May 1974. That graphic picture had an unforgettable impact because we couldn’t scroll it away. Now that our kids see all sorts of horrors and gore, hardcore porn and decapitations before they reach double figures of age, the lines between reality and fiction have become blurred, every set of facts comes with an ‘alternative’ and you simply choose the version you prefer: Pictures lie, truth is relative, reallife horrors make little impact any more.

Without a shared source of trustworthy news, there’s no shared response, no shared resolve, no shared recollections. And when your children are glued to their smartphones, headphones on, tuned out of conversations and family chatter, there is no scope to discuss, interact with and analyse what it is they see and hear.

With the best will in the world, there’s no parental supervision app, no tracking device, no amount of monitoring that will substitute for the engagement and interaction that smartphones inhibit – no more than monitoring your kids’ smoking habit would spare them the harm.

When I was a child, adults and children watched the same bulletins (there was little else to watch) and read the same papers. If journalism is the first draft of history, then we all agreed the proofs. But what witness to these days, these times, will this atomised, distracted, manipulated generation bear? What version of the truth will our grandchildren learn?