‘I’m banning my children from having a smartphone until 16’, shadow Education Secretary tells LBC
https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/uk-politics/laura-trott-bans-children-phone/
by tylerthe-theatre
‘I’m banning my children from having a smartphone until 16’, shadow Education Secretary tells LBC
https://www.lbc.co.uk/politics/uk-politics/laura-trott-bans-children-phone/
by tylerthe-theatre
38 comments
They will find a way to get one. Kids under 16 get hold of worse things than smartphones.
Good luck with that. I expect the constant badgering from her kid(s) will drive her nuts, oh and the bullying that will come of them not having one as well.
> Laura Trott – who has three children under ten – insisted she’s seen enough evidence to see the harms for children of spending too much time online.
Yeah, she’s probably seen what spending too much time online has done to her party’s voter base!
Seriously though, I think the issue is less the phones themselves and more the shite that’s on social media. Compared to what I was watching back on Youtube in like 2007, the sort of stuff that’s on there now is significantly more ‘brainrot’. There have been plenty of studies which demonstrate that the format of a show can have a massive effect on the attention spans and information retention of children, and all the quick cuts and constant shouting in the sort of videos pushing front and centre by Youtube algorithms clearly aren’t doing kids any good.
I’d much rather be taking a long look at how much of our children’s time and attention we’ve handed to these huge and unaccountable companies like Google, rather than just blanket banning what is an incredibly useful piece of technology for children.
Canadian here. I know a ton of families who’s kids don’t have smart phones till they’re 16. It’s fairly common. Mind you ours graduate school later than your kids etc.
Agreed. There’s literally no reason why kids under 16 should be anywhere near phones
The comments in this thread so far are very silly. Kids don’t need smartphones. She’s not saying she’s banning them from the Internet completely, she also says she’s letting them have a “dumb phone” so they can call and text. That’s… pretty good parenting, actually? If I had kids I would do the same thing. People are acting like she’s locking them in a cellar or something.
Sorry kids, because I’m too lazy to use parental controls and keep up with basic Internet safety (and teach it to you guys), no technology for you.
Yea I know you’ll be even less prepared for adulthood if I coddle you and you don’t know how to cope with such things you’ll definitely encounter later in life but for the moment… let’s do this?
I’m not sure where I sit on this on one hand it’s nice to keep it from them but on the other it’s keeping them from functioning within society and trying to bring them up in a world that doesn’t actually exist..
You’d be far better to teach them about moderation noticing addiction etc.. infact I’ve convinced myself keeping phones from kids is dumb and actually just lazy parenting
Same here, in fact my kids can get one when they move out
I feel bad that there someone in this position of power is so tech illiterate that they think the only option is to ban their kids from smartphones instead of managing them sensibly. Both my kids have smart phone, but they’re blocked from social media and have time limits and locks on browser access too. They still use them for a lot (homework, audiobooks, chatting with friends, gaming and watching tv to name just a few). They’re now used to having it on their pockets and learning to deal with living life without using them 24/7 despite temptation.
I’ve rarely seen avoiding parenting go well, personally I find it better to provide guidance and boundaries. Smartphones are simply a tool that kids need to be taught how to use. Parents need to do their jobs and teach their kids, not give them one without oversight OR just avoid the issue entirely
I agree with the sentiment and I also think that all social media should be banned for under 16s but:
1. Its quite common now for schools to *require* the use of phones to access timetables, notices, school meal credit, class quizzes and other things. My cousins kids school are all about “mobile education” with full use of phone, tablets and laptops. How that works for pupils who’s families can’t afford such things, i honestly done know (I actaully suspect its a way of weeding out certain low income families from the school….).
2. All the tools and methods of communication have just moved on. I’m 38 and I can’t remember the last time I sent a txt. Its all WhatsApp and other IMs now and has been for about a decade. We forget that we are digital immigrants while our kids are digital natives. Its like having a modern car and being asked to go back to riding a horse just because that’s what our parents did. Yea sure you could do that, and a horse would get you there, but a modern car is just better and easier.
3. Much like alcohol, fast food and the like, learning control and moderation with our phones is often better than total enforced abstinence. What we need to do is to educate our kids and ensure that they regulate their use and apply parental controls as necessary.
Smartphones are damaging to kids. After covid, when the kids came back, lunch times at the school I work in were actually depressing, kids hunched over on benches watching youtube or playing games. No one talked.
We banned phones last year and it has made a massive difference. Football games are being played, friends are walking the grounds talking and overall behaviour has increased. If they want to phone parents, that’s what we pay the office for.
Phones should be banned in schools full stop and as the retention comes back, less and less kids will be reliant on them outside of school.
Am I alone in thinking there should be a national ban on smart phones for under 16s? Solve most of the problems, would mean adults’ privacy wouldn’t need to be invaded as children wouldn’t have access to social media or encrypted messaging, would cover children whose parents are neglectful or who live in the care system. If no children were allowed smart phones the element of social pressure would be removed, too.
I am annoyed that the only legislation the government seems to be doing affects adults.
I sort of agree with this but I would reduce the age to 13, and I would look for a smart phone that I can control heavily what is on it with parental controls. Nothing wrong with WhatsApp or Gmaps, but if I had 24-hour access to the internet, YouTube and TikTok when I was that age, my brain would be complete mush. I watched a lot of cartoons and played a lot of video games when I was that age, but I was at least limited to daylight hours and being back at home with my mum to rain me in. I am not saying I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but if those same sites have had such an effect on adult me then I can’t imagine the impact it would have had on me at an early age. People need to learn to be comfortable being bored. I don’t believe that is possible if you have the internet at your finger tips every waking moment.
Good call. I remember back when I was a young teenager in 2007 when my parents were anxious about me getting access to the internet. Back then, I thought they were overreacting, but looking back they had good reason to be worried. Things are a lot worse now.
thats how you make your child get bullied and be unable to contact their friends. “oh but they can still call and text” yeah, via sms. No one uses SMS any more.
All these people in this thread are really showing their age. “There’s no need to have a smartphone at XYZ age”. Firstly, you’d be hard pressed to go about your everyday life even outside of school without a smartphone – try getting reliable bus timetables and updates, try getting directions to somewhere you’re not familiar with, try talking to your friends and family. Oh, what’s that, just text or call them? That might work for your parents or whoever, but for a lot of young people, people simply do not use standard texting and the like to keep in contact, they’re using things like Discord, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Instagram messages. By not having a smartphone, you simply do not have the means to stay in contact with most of your friends, and just going about your day becomes measurably more difficult when you can’t find out that your bus has been cancelled or is going to be late, you can’t find your way to the place your friends arranged to meet up, and you can’t take a picture of some notes the teacher put up on the board for people to grab a picture of.
Half of the responses to comments like this are also just as absurd. “Just completely rearrange society so that smartphones are no longer useful”. Uh, no? They’re useful in and of themselves, not just because old things have also moved to them. It’s completely delusional to expect that you would be able to access every possible thing you’d need to access in modern society without ever interacting with any technology beyond the 90s’. That isn’t going to change, and for many things, there’s absolutely no need for it.
And finally, there’s the fact that much of this boils down to “A, B and C apps/websites are harmful to use”, like TikTok, Instagram, etc. But instead of addressing these specific harmful things, the response from many in this thread and for many parents is to blame all technology involved and try to ban kids from using or having it. It’s the modern equivalent of banning your kids from having paper because somebody was using it to post mean notes to someone. The base technology is not the problem, it’s some specific uses for it. And you can literally, easily, directly address these issues on both the government and personal level. Just because you as a parent cannot be arsed to look up how to use parental control settings and apps to prevent the use of specific apps and the like doesn’t mean that your kids deserve to be socially isolated from many of their peers and to be prevented access to the huge amount of just massively useful tools that come with smartphones and the like. Learn to take responsibility instead of going “technology bad, kids can’t have it” and ignoring every other piece of information available to you.
GOOD.
Lucky enough to be a part of the generation where smartphones only really came out in secondary school; not even affordable until about sixth form. I cannot imagine handing a child the device I went to university with.
I mean, chronological timelines were at least manageable. You just opted in to seeing what **you** wanted — be it adding friends or following specific celebrities.
But now with algorithms it’s more or less, these days, the opposite — you see _everything_ by default.
I cannot tell you how many dead Russian soldiers I saw on my Insta feed when the war escalated in 2022. I also made a fresh account last year — hadn’t followed anybody and even made it from a separate device — and the explore page just defaulted to voluptuous breast content and some of the most calorific recipes, with a zest of luxury technology/jewellery sprinkled on it.
It’s as if that’s what we’ve boiled this media down to. We started with high quality ingredients (a need to connect with old friends and post wholesome, helpful content) and reduced it to just greed, porn, and living (or, at least, pretending) a lavish lifestyle.
Shit’s so sad. And the people that actively post on these are even sadder.
Keep this stuff away from schoolchildren, _my god_.
And so condemning your kids to being outcasts in their peer group and having to endure several years of relentlessly having the piss taken out of them at school. That’s bullshit, and a cop out.
How about bringing your kids up so that you know they’re sensible, and you being close and open enough with them to know they can be trusted to use their phones responsibly?
The internet is essentially a giant strip club casino at this point. Why would I allow my children into it. If we can’t make the internet safe for kids they shouldn’t be on it. Clicking I’m over 18 isn’t security.
Dam my son is 10 and has a smart phone, mainly because he goes to the park with his friends and I can track where he is I can also control everything he does on it. Depends on the situation you are in really
Bring back MSN if you ask me, these kids won’t know how hard it is to get someone’s attention by logging on and off again 3 times…
Well you wouldn’t want normal, well-adjusted children, would you.
Banning a phone because some apps are bad is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Phones make a lot of things easier and safer.
I’m sorry but I just don’t feel comfortable with this
The area I live in is fucking dangerous, growing up, I was beaten the shit out of and was almost stabbed, had I not had my phone to call a friend for help, I would have been in a terrible situation not to mention how many young girls get kidnapped or raped, I’m not having my 12 year old niece walking without having a phone so that we can track her and she can call us in case of emergencies
Why is everybody oblivious to the fact that parental controls exist on smartphones? Parents can literally control which apps their children are allowed to use, restrict them from downloading new ones, filter adult content and violent language, allocate how much time the child can spend on each app every day, etc. With the right amount of tweaking, they can turn the device into a literal machine of productivity. Audiobooks, news, coding games, online courses, you name it. Additionally, it is also very important for kids to learn to leverage AI tools because almost all white-collar jobs are expected to use it in their profession in this day and age. And that’s without even talking about the essentials like calendar and reminders that help create a habit of always staying organised, and many other such apps that have various benefits.
Computers, especially laptops, had the same reputation as smartphones back when I was a kid. I definitely wouldn’t have been a high earning software developer right now if my parents hadn’t let me touch a computer until I was 16.
Balance is the solution, and the tools to achieve balance tailored to your needs are already out there. If you want, you can even essentially turn the smartphone into a 90s nokia phone, functionally speaking. So, why is everyone, especially politicians pretending that the solution has to be one extreme or another? These technically illiterate politicians don’t even realise how stupid they sound when they talk about passing down their illiteracy to their children.
My kids are getting a cheap ass Motorola for calls and music until they’re 15/16
Sounds good on paper but in reality you’re asking for your kid to have very little social life outside of school especially if they’re above 13. Kids use WhatsApp and social media to text and not the in built SMS, you can’t do that on a brick phone. Straight up disallowing them to have *any sort* of phone is bad news especially with how reliant we are on technology in modern times.
Not to mention being left behind and potentially bullied by other kids. Back when I was 12 I was outcasted for having a Samsung brick whilst 80% of my classmates had the latest iPhone 5S/5C.
Just put on monitoring apps and time limits for social media, it’s the only fair compromise.
What’s a 15 yr old boy to do?
Are jazz mags still a thing? Daily sport even?
I’d like to limit my parents access to certain news sites, the harmful ones that encouraged them to vote against my children being allowed to work in Europe.
My kids are 12 and have had smartphones since they were 11. They aren’t allowed social media and won’t be until they’re much older. We’ve discussed the reasons why and they don’t feel like they are missing out. They have WhatsApp and that’s it. The internet is part of daily life now it’s unavoidable, so I’d rather educate them to use the internet safely. They have no access to their phones at night and we have family link so phones are switched off at a set time each evening. Bar a few petty squabbles on WhatsApp we’ve had no issues. I also do random checks of the phones when they’re asleep. They both know any misuse of the phones will result in them being taken away.
I think it’s pretty good parenting with things as they are. However, she’s in government so ought to be shouting about the apps not the phone. As should everyone from every party. The phone is just a device. The apps are utterly addictive deliberately and push misogyny, child porn and disinformation (it’s, again, deliberate so it’s not misinformation). We need legislation to better control the content on the phones.
I was 19 when I got my first “brick” phone. Granted, this was back in 1998. But there’s no reason why **children** need smart phones.
I mean, i get the mentality behind this, as a millenial who grew up with the internet and phones i can understand wanting to make sure kids aren’t absolutely addicted to their phone.
But at the same time, smart phones do make things a lot easier to manage and are also a way for her to keep in contact of her kids when they’re seperated.
That so her kids can’t read the daily bile coming from party leader Robert Jenrick or seat warmer Kemi Badenoch?
That’s like banning teens from anything to do with sex, or about video games, or about alcohol. Simply a very very foolish move.
Even if their children can’t have smart phones, their friends will have them.
The reverse psychology also applies – the more you try to push them away from smart phone, the more they’ll want it out of curiosity or whatever.
Your best bet is to teach them how to responsibly use a smart phone. From what content to consume to never trust a stranger on internet, from how to self-control smart phone usage to what is social media and the danger of using social media and the people on social media
Sounds like the adult themselves aren’t very smart nor know how to use their smart phone either. It won’t end well.
It’s not the phone that’s the problem, it’s what they access with it. Parents need to be supervising that.
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