Our daughter starts secondary school this year. She won’t be getting a smartphone. Here’s why.

September ushers in a big year of school moves in our family. Our eldest goes into year 10 marking the start of his GCSE years, our middle kid leaves behind her primary years, and many of her friends as she starts secondary school and our youngest makes his school debut and joins reception. It’s a lot to process! 

 If you have siblings and are perhaps even the eldest, you may recall the frustration of your younger siblings ‘getting away with more’. Younger siblings often get things their older siblings had to wait longer for, work harder for and sometimes weren’t allowed full stop. It’s a common scenario; parents tend to be more concerned with doing things ‘properly’ first time round and things get a bit more relaxed each time a new kid enters the scene. As a mum of 3, I can attest to this. Last night whilst putting our youngest to bed as he munched on a banana during storytime, I remarked at how he’s managed to completely bypass the ‘no eating in bedrooms rule’ everyone else adheres to! He seems to operate on his own third kid terms. However, when it comes to digital games, content and devices, rather than getting more relaxed with each kid, I find myself doing the reverse. The more experience I am gaining with parenting a teen in a digital world, the stronger I feel about holding onto stronger boundaries. 

Our eldest (now 14), has had to put up with being a guinea pig, as we released the digital reins, and then pulled them back when it didn’t work out. As a young child we clocked that watching unboxing videos on repeat on YouTube sent him literally loopy so that was the end of YouTube and ipad access. Early in primary school we noted how Roblox took him into weird spaces so it was straight back to Zelda. And toward the end of primary, when boy-culture at school was unhealthily dominated by fornite, we stood strong and sat that one out (he plays now without the hype and it’s a casual and enjoyable part of his play world). All of these things have and will be invisible to his younger siblings. There is so much incredible entertainment around we have learned from these experiences and don’t need to revisit. We lucked out with him as the guinea pig, he’s been a good recipient to experimenting and has coped well with subtraction, it’s helped build trust between us and create a norm that things can be taken away and new habits formed. 

He got his smartphone because of covid. It felt like a lifeline rather than a lifestyle choice and it was a very useful way to connect and maintain friendships. I’ll be the first to say that I didn’t think about it as much with him as I am now with his sister, it felt just the norm of what happens after primary school. His experience has been ok. He has an unusual competitiveness about keeping his screen time down and although it’s been distracting at times we’ve always managed to wind it back. That said I’m not naive enough to believe he hasn’t issues on there I’m probably not aware of along the way. I’m relieved I recently managed to extract TikTok from his device. Following an incident, I spotted an opportunity and took my moment choosing 3 apps and offering him the choice to pick which one had to go (permanently) in order to get the phone back. I gambled and suspected it would be TikTok, and it was. Deleted. Banned. Jackpot. End of the brain rot app. 

It’s too late now to even consider taking the phone away from him. I realise that could be challenged, but at 14 and the way his social group communicate, I feel that would be very isolating. But it’s not too late to keep adjusting the boundaries and behaviours with it and I think there’s more to come on this yet. We focussed on making sure the majority of his time has been spent in ‘real life’. I believe it is easier to have a healthy use of devices when the majority of your fulfilment takes place in the real world. That means friendships take place in person most of the time and time is invested in activities which can't be done with a phone in hand. I know this to be true for myself, so I’ve used that as a template for setting up the rhythm of life. I hope it’s been enough for him.

For my younger children though, I can do things differently. Secondary school is when a lot of kids in the UK get their own smartphone device (although data suggests that’s increasingly trending downwards). I believe this is where we’ve made one of the biggest errors in how we approach kids and tech; introducing a leap from zero to a squillion. Having the internet in your pocket, access to multiple social media channels and endless games is not having a phone, it’s becoming part bionic. I am not exaggerating when I say that. It’s how I feel as an adult smartphone user. Even when I’m trying to get through my day committing to little or no phone time, there is always some genuine need or addictive pull back to it. This is what we should consider when we put a smartphone into our kids’ school uniform pocket - they are becoming part bionic. 

We could be at the very beginnings of winding all this back and I’m very much here to be part of that movement. In his much talked about book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, has laid out an action plan to rolling back smartphone dominance in kid’s lives: 

1. No smartphones before high school 
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. More unsupervised play and childhood independence 

These make complete sense to me both as someone who has studied Gen Z and Gen Alpha and as a parent. Number one on this list is a no brainer; all three of our kids will tick this box. But no social media before 16 I won’t be getting a clean sheet on! Our eldest uses Instagram for one purpose - skateboarding. He has an awesome profile, loves editing clips and it’s a massive part of the skate culture. He’s worked on a lot of it with his Dad too. If kids are in a creator role on some of these platforms, versus a consumer, and their mental health is in a good place, there can be positive benefits where it can elevate their interests, but it’s a very fine line. For him, for now, I’m cool with this. I will hold off on social media for as long as possible as my daughter enters high school. She will be allowed a phone, but it will have no social media / YT / internet etc, a dumbphone as it’s called. Our son has been relatively unscathed so far, but I’m not ignoring the nuances between the experiences of girls and boys. If you interview a bunch of girls who have TikTok and then go speak to a group who don’t (which I have done), the difference between the two is incredibly eye opening. That app has the power to change how girls think and behave. It strips away a layer of playfulness and naivety and focuses the mind on more material and superficial interests. Put simply, the kids on it are much older (or pretending to be). Personal style and how we look is a natural focus for young people in puberty, and there is a way for beauty and fashion to be wholesome, fun, creative and nourishing. But TikTok diverts them from this, creating a lot of issues that then need to be unravelled before they can get to that joy. Are there creators who are inspiring, educational, wholesome and worthy of their attention? Yes. But if you were put into a % of how much of these types of people their eyeballs are looking at versus everything else, I don’t think it’s worth it. 

Number three on the list, phone free schools, I feel is slightly out of my hands. At the moment their school does allow kids to go to school with a phone, but it’s to be in the locker during the day. I would be happy for them to go to school without a phone, but again I’m not sure I’ll have a clean sheet here as this probably needs to come from the school directly. I will be contacting the school to ask if they are joining the schools that are pledging to the phone free movement as it’s encouraging to see how many are doing so. 

Number four is unsupervised play and independence and I was really pleased to see this included because way too much focus has been on ‘screentime’, a pointless pursuit of a magic number of minutes which doesn’t exist. We should have spent more time paying attention to the importance of time with friends in childhood versus their academic achievements and time log of devices. Free unstructured time together not led by adults should be sacred and protected and done in stimulating, safe environments. For our family, that has required a bit more effort compared to how I grew up.  I am living a much more middle class life compared to how I grew up, and as a result, in combination with changing times, my play life was very different. I was a street play kid; we owned the street and had a lot of freedom. I understand the rich value this gave me and have always sent my kids out to play, but there has always been one key thing missing: other kids. We live in a beautiful part of the country, but our neighbourhood is what I’d call a ‘play desert’. To play in the way that is encouraged by psychologists like Haidt, kids need other kids. Unstructured, free play is where kids form mini societies outdoors and make their own rules. You can’t do that without a group, ideally of mixed aged children, and that’s not something my kids have access to on our doorstep. So we’ve had to manufacture more of it and make sure it is built into our lives. We supported our son’s love of skateboarding and through this he became motivated to find his people and mobilise to get them together. He confidently uses the bus and also has a Saturday job helping kids learn to skate - I worked from age 13 and am a huge advocate for kids having little jobs! We have always allowed lots of kids' friends to the house and sucked up being a part time uber driver to get them to places where it’s safe for them to be a bit feral! Would I like it to be more organic and readily available? Yes. But we have to look at the reality and make adjustments. I know I will need to be more brave with my daughter getting to this level of independence, and am preparing to coach myself through that! The risk of not being independent is just as scary. 

All of this is absolute minefield, but the main purpose of writing this to encourage parents that you can change behaviours, you can do things differently once you’ve learnt and experienced what doesn’t go well and as a collective group of parents we can support each other and work together towards making the world more enriching and less lonely for kids.