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BARCELONA, Spain — When your child asks for a smartphone, try saying “no” and the response that follows will likely follow a line that any parent anywhere in the world can relate to: “Everyone else has one, why can’t I?”
But what if none of the pre-teens around you have smartphones, and it’s odd that they do? That’s the goal of parents across Europe, concerned by evidence that smartphone use among young children puts their safety and mental health at risk, and convinced of strength in numbers.
From Spain to the UK to Ireland, parents are not only banning smartphones from schools, they’re also teaming up to flood WhatsApp and Telegram groups with plans to refuse to buy their kids smartphones before or even into their teens.
Inspired by a conversation she had with other mothers in a Barcelona park, Elisabet García Permanañer set up a chat group last fall to share information with families at her children’s school about the dangers of children’s internet access.
The group, called “Adolescence Without Mobile Phones,” quickly spread to other schools and then across the country, and now has more than 10,000 members. The most proactive parents have formed activist pairs in schools across Spain, lobbying fellow parents to agree not to let their children have smartphones until they turn 16. After organizing online, they facilitate real-world discussions among interested parents to take the movement further.
“When I started this, I hoped I would find four families who thought like me, but it just grew and grew,” Garcia Permanier says. “My goal was to join forces with other parents to delay the adoption of smartphones. I said, ‘I’m going to make sure my child isn’t the only one without one.'”
Promoted with the support of the Spanish government
It’s not just parents.
Police and public health experts have warned that children are increasingly being exposed to violent and pornographic videos on mobile devices, and the Spanish government took notice, banning smartphones entirely in primary schools in January. Currently, in high school, where students start at age 12, smartphones can only be turned on if teachers deem them necessary for educational activities.
“If we adults are addicted to smartphones, how can we give one to a 12-year-old who is not equipped to handle it?” García Permanier asks. “This is out of our control. If the internet were a safe place for children, that would be fine, but it’s not.”
The movement in Britain gained momentum this year after the mother of Brianna Gay, the 16-year-old murdered by two teenagers last year, began calling for children under the age of 16 to be blocked from accessing social media on their smartphones.
“It seems like we all know it’s a bad decision for your kid, but social norms just haven’t caught up yet,” Daisy Greenwell, a mother of three children under the age of 10 from Suffolk, England, wrote on Instagram earlier this year. “What if we changed the social norms so that in our school, in our town, in our country, giving your kid a smartphone at 11 is a strange choice? What if we waited until 14, or 16?”
She and her friend Claire Reynolds started a three-person WhatsApp group called “Parents for a Smartphone-Free Childhood.” She posted an invite on her Instagram page. Within four days, 2,000 people had joined the group, forcing Greenwell and Reynolds to set up dozens of separate groups by region. Three weeks after the initial post, there was a chat group for every county in the UK, one of the organizers said on WhatsApp.
It’s uphill
As parents rally together to keep smartphones away from young children, there’s still a long way to go in changing what’s considered “normal.”
Statistics from the three countries show that by the age of 12, most children have a smartphone. Look a little more closely and the figures become even more stark: in Spain, a quarter of children have a mobile phone by age 10, and by age 11, almost half have a mobile phone. At age 12, this proportion rises to 75%. Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, said that in the UK, 55% of children between the ages of eight and 11 own a smartphone, and that figure rises to 97% by the age of 12.
Ofcom added a new statistic to its report last year: one in five children aged three or four owns a smartphone.
Parents and schools who have succeeded in flipping the community paradigm told The Associated Press that change was possible the moment they realized they weren’t alone. What began as a tool to stay in touch with friends has morphed into something more worrisome to keep kids away from. Parents argue it’s similar to things like tobacco or alcohol.
That moment came in Greystones, Ireland, after all eight principals at the town’s primary schools signed and posted a letter last May urging parents not to buy smartphones for their kids, after which parents themselves voluntarily signed a pledge to keep their kids smartphone-free.
“The debate disappeared almost overnight,” said Christina Capatina, 38, a Greystones parent of two preteen daughters who signed the pledge and who has few smartphones at school this school year. “Now, if my kids ask, I say, ‘We just follow the rules. It’s our life.'”
Monica Marques of Barcelona didn’t need a signed pledge to get the same results: She surveyed parents in her daughter’s class two years ago and was surprised to find that “99 percent of the parents were as scared as I was, or more scared.”
Sharing the survey results, she said that when her daughter started high school this year, not a single student in her grade had a smartphone.
And as for the excuse that parents need smartphones to keep track of their kids, Marquez says old-fashioned mobile phones with no internet access, like the one her daughter has, are a perfect substitute.
Close monitoring
A consensus has developed for years among institutions, governments and parents that smartphone use among children is linked to bullying, suicidal thoughts, anxiety and reduced focus needed for learning. China took steps last year to restrict smartphone use among children, and France banned smartphones in schools for children between the ages of 6 and 15.
Spain’s move to regulate smartphones comes amid a surge in notorious cases of children watching online pornography, sharing videos of sexual violence and even taking part in creating “deepfake” pornographic images of schoolgirls using artificial intelligence generation tools. The Spanish government says 25 percent of children under 12 and 50 percent under 15 have already been exposed to online pornography. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain was facing a “real epidemic” of pornography targeted at minors.
Threats also include adults taking advantage of minors they meet online – for example, two “influencers” were recently arrested in Madrid for allegedly sexually assaulting an underage girl who followed them on TikTok.
These dangers have led to school smartphone bans and online safety laws, but they don’t address what kids do after school.
“One thing I try to stress to other principals is the importance of working with neighbouring schools,” says Rachel Harper, principal of St Patrick’s National School, one of eight schools in Greystones encouraging parents to limit their children’s smartphone use. “It gives a bit more power in that parents in the community are all talking about it.”
Parents’ concerns are wide-ranging. Some dread the day when their young children will ask for cell phones like their friends, while others regret following the crowd in a naive era when teenagers had cell phones and screens were simply a way for kids to have fun and chat with friends. Parents say they’ve come from a state of total ignorance about the Internet.
Isolation at home during the COVID-19 pandemic has offered a first-hand glimpse into the ways kids stare at their screens and cleverly hide what they see and what might be trying to find them.
“Screens were seen as an escape route for adults to work and keep kids busy, whatever that means,” says Mac Christofor, who started a group of concerned parents in Malaga, southern Spain, after hearing about the burgeoning Barcelona parents’ group. “Then I wondered, where are we heading? We’re hostages to screens.”
Kapatina said she saw her 11-year-old daughter getting changed after coming home from the playground that day, and that a girl who was there recorded the incident on her smartphone.
“Panic, panic, panic,” Capatina recalled of her daughter’s reaction. “Nothing major happened, but I could see the pressure and anxiety level was higher than it was before, and I thought this is not healthy. My child shouldn’t have to worry like that.”
But if kids don’t have smartphones, do parents cut back on their own online time? That’s hard, several parents say, because they also manage their families and work lives online. Ms. Capatina, the interior designer, said she lets her kids see what she’s doing online (such as her work and schedule) “to hold me accountable.”
Greystones mum Laura Bourne, whose children are five and six and have never used a smartphone, said she recognised the need to model online behaviour and perhaps refrain.
“I’m doing my best,” she says, but just like with the kids she’s raising, the pressure is there — and it’s not going away.
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Kelman reported from London.
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