Generation Anxiety: smartphones have created a gen Z mental health crisis – but there are ways to fix it

From the article:

How do we escape from these traps? Collective action problems require collective responses: parents can support one another by sticking together. There are four main types of collective response, and each can help us to bring about major change:

1. No smartphones before year 10
Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones with limited apps and no internet browser before the age of 14.

2. No social media before 16
Let children get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to an avalanche of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.

3. Phone-free schools
Schools must insist that students store their phones, smartwatches, and any other devices in phone lockers during the school day, as per the new non-statutory guidance issued by the UK government. That is the only way to free up their attention for one another and for their teachers.

4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence
That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Re No. 4 - I've been saddened to see how different the lives of children are now to when I was young, although my life was far from perfect.

I did however have a lot of independence, so much that perhaps it was neglect.

I went out to play from a young age and stayed out all day (I had one friend when I was under 12 and a lot of time was spent at his house in his garden) but when I was 12 we moved to a council estate and I used to just stay out all day with whoever I knew (a gang I seem to remember) and we would play on old bomb sites and building sites.

It's not ideal but it is incredibly different.

At school we played actual games like hopscotch, skipping and ball games.

A lot of rhymes were sung - I am trying to find a video of these - if I do I will post it here.

I thinking the 'self-governing' part of this is very true.

I grew up to be a pretty independent thinker.

My observations as a person in school 5 days a week*

Around a fifth of the kids are sufficiently compelled by their phones that they can't resist them. There's a 'no phones except at breaktime' rule, but it's ignored by them, particularly, and they're routinely asked to put their phones away. 

A significant group in each class want to spend their time chatting, social peer interaction is at least as important to them as their phone.

The rest of them pretty much get on with it. 

From experience, these behaviours are difficult to change by the timethey get to secondaryschool, and in general, they'll carry them all the way to their GCSEs.

There are probably multiple factors influencing behaviour, of which access to phones is just one. 

There's talk nationally of banning phones in school, as if that would be a simple fix - I'm not sure it would. 

*But not for the next 2 weeks!

Pegg said:

There's talk nationally of banning phones in school, as if that would be a simple fix - I'm not sure it would. 

The simplest solution would be to have a signal jammer operating in the classrooms - it would render the phones unable to connect so remove most of their attraction for that time.

What could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong?