We must not ignore this stark warning
THE Economic and Social Research Institute is not an organisation renowned for hyperbole, hysteria or unnecessarily theatrical policy pronouncements. Indeed, its entire raison-d’etre is to provide sober, fact-based research and advice on the key social and economic issues of our day.
And so when a research organisation of such gravitas makes powerful pronouncements on matters affecting hundreds of thousands of Irish children, it behoves us to listen.
Last week, we reported that the ESRI had found that children who own a mobile phone at the age of nine do significantly worse in both maths and English by the age of 13 than those children who did not have a phone as early.
Today, we can reveal that the ESRI’s research teams are so concerned at the scale of the impact phone ownership is having on children that they are calling for two radical policy initiatives.
The first proposal is one that has been suggested many times in these pages, including by experts such as Dr Mary Aiken, the world’s foremost cyber-psychologist. That policy is a ban on smartphones in all primary schools.
As such, this suggestion is an open rebuke to the Fine Gael government, which has to date refused to countenance such an approach. Instead, government policy is to require all schools to come up with a policy of their own – in other words, washing their hands of the problem.
The ESRI authors are clear, however: ‘The evidence suggests it might be worth considering the introduction of a ban on mobile phones in primary schools. This might help to encourage the delay of mobile phone ownership to a later age and might also help to lessen any peer pressure effects contributing towards ownership demand at a younger age.’
The second policy suggestion is another that has been suggested in this newspaper, and which has the backing of thousands of parents across the country: age limits on smartphones. The ESRI researchers put it this way: ‘Another option to consider might be age restrictions on buying mobile phones, applied at the point of purchase.’
Until now, apologists for the (very wealthy) tech industry have always poohpooed such notions, suggestion they are the work of modern-day Luddites.
In fact, these are the logical conclusions of the experts who conducted rigorous scientific analysis on the issue.
The evidence is clear: smartphones are damaging our children. If our political leaders keep ignoring that evidence and keep refusing to act, they will one day be held to account for the wilful neglect of an entire generation of our children.