Giving your 6-year-old a phone is like giving them a grenade

IDON’T know whether I’m more shocked by the news that a quarter of six-yearolds own their own smartphones, or by the fact that their parents admitted as much in a major new survey published this week.

I think, if I were a parent of a smartphone-owning six-year-old, I’d have lied. In much the same way as respondents in health-related surveys tend to round up the time they spend exercising and down the units of alcohol they consume, I’d have known deep down that this wasn’t just a question of behaviour and attitudes; that there was, in effect, a right and wrong answer to this one. I wonder, if the question had been Would You Give rather than Have You Given, would the outcome have been different. As an example of ‘do as I say, not as I do’, this takes some beating.

Forget for a moment about the quarter of parents who admitted giving phones to their six-year-olds – and, presumably, the significant number who did lie about having done so. Does anybody, like anybody at all, seriously think it’s a good idea for six-year-olds to have unsupervised access to every corner of the internet and all the apps and social media that smartphones open up for them? Surely that’s a question that Amárach, which conducted the shocking survey, wouldn’t even bother asking.

Because it’s a terrible idea. Everybody knows that. Even adults need to be in the whole of their health before they dive too deeply down the warren of dark, dangerous tunnels to which smartphones give us access. Since the development of smart technology, we’ve been debating the amount of access teenagers should be granted to the frequently uncharted and treacherous murky waters inhabited by some of their peers. Children and teenagers have died because of online bullying and abuse and violence that had its roots in the online world. At the same time, within these important debates, there has been an acknowledgement that our teenagers communicate with each other primarily through online forums and that it’s impossible to turn back the technological tide. It’s a minefield to negotiate.

But giving a six-year-old a smart phone isn’t a minefield: it’s standing squarely on the explosive and inviting it to do its worst. So it’s worth drilling down into the statistics and trying to figure out why so many parents are ignoring the obvious risks. Alex Cooney, chief executive of CyberSafeKids, as shocked by the Amárach survey as any other right-thinking person, blames ‘peer pressure’ and parents trying to keep their children occupied. With respect, I don’t accept that peer pressure is a real thing for six-year-olds, most of whom don’t know which way is up most of the time. One of the joys of six-year-olds is their ability to change their minds every ten seconds: they’re gloriously incapable of organising anything even approaching a trend.

ANOTHER excuse for handing small children live grenades in the shape of smartphones, cited yesterday, is a desire to be able to keep tabs on them at all times. But, again, how often are six-year-olds left unsupervised for any serious length of time in this era of helicopter parenting?

Which circles us back to parents trying to keep their children occupied. All of us who’ve had children will understand that. But there’s a world of difference between playing a Peppa Pig video on your own phone to a child in a restaurant so you can enjoy your coffee in peace, and purchasing an entry point to most of the modern evils in the world and handing it over to your six-year-old.

You might as well give them a gas cooker and protest that it’s fine because they can’t reach the buttons.

I don’t know what we do about this. All of a sudden, those animated conversations about whether children should be allowed spend their First Communion money on mobile phones seems quaint.

I am a firm believer that it is never possible to go backwards where technological developments are concerned, but we clearly need to have a very grown-up response to this frightening trend.

The same Amárach survey also found that around 12% of five-year-olds also have their own phones. That, indeed all of this, is an absolute failure of parenting and, worse, it’s incredibly dangerous. Only one cohort of people will be rubbing their hands in glee at the discovery that so many small children now have unrestricted access to the internet, and that, conversely, that cohort has access to them.

The parents should have lied. Deadly seriously, they should have lied.