We need to wean teenagers off this digital junk food
It’s not often that a piece in The Daily Telegraph makes me roar with dismay. That’s what other newspapers are for. But yesterday’s article by Robert Hannigan, arguing that it was worthwhile for children to spend their summer on a digital device, made me hopping mad.
“The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging,” says the former head of GCHQ. The country is desperately short of engineers, he argues, so we need young people to spend the vacation “exploring, experimenting and breaking things digitally”.
Apparently, dim technophobe mothers like me don’t understand that life online and “real” life are not separate: they are all part of the same experience. “Gaming and social media can be as sociable as mooching around the streets with a group of friends,” he said.
Sorry, but no. I am not some Luddite in a mindless moral panic. Only this week, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, warned that children become addicted to social media “in the same way as junk food”.
Never mind chicken nuggets, I would compare the iphone’s demonic power with cocaine. Ofcom reported that British three- and four-yearolds were spending eight hours, 18 minutes a week online, rising to 15 hours for children aged five to 15. And the rest.
If you want to know what parents are up against, please read a hair-raising piece in
The Atlantic called “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” where Jean M
Twenge, a professor of psychology researching generational differences for 25 years, believes that smartphones and social media have precipitated a catastrophic mental-health crisis in children born between 1995 and 2012 (the igen). Rates of teenage depression and suicide have rocketed since 2011.
Members of the igen, including my children, are much less likely to leave the house, have a relationship or meet up with friends every day. Nor do they take up paying jobs as their parents did to fund their independence. They have lots of leisure time but “are on their phone in their room, alone and often distressed”.
The research could not be clearer. Or more alarming. If your child is a heavy user of social media they increase their risk of depression by 27 per cent. Teenagers who spend three hours or more a day on electronic devices, comparing themselves with more popular peers, are 35 per cent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide. “All screen activities are linked to less happiness; all non-screen activities are linked to more happiness.”
If that isn’t enough to make you sneak into their rooms and confiscate the damn phone, I don’t know what is.