The only solution Europe’s governments seem able to come up with anymore is to ban anything and everything. From nicotine, to alcohol, to junk food, to nasty words, our technocratic overlords have no better suggestion than to outlaw anything deemed harmful.
Children, of course, are no exception to this. Rather than trusting parents to get on with raising their own offspring—or, indeed, addressing the structural problems that might be having adverse effects on the youth—our nannying governments would prefer to simply make illegal anything that could be detrimental to a child. Social media and smartphone bans are the perfect example of this. Right now, it seems like every nation is competing to enact the widest-ranging and most drastic laws to stop minors from getting online.
Yesterday, the European Commission announced that member states would be able to introduce national social-media bans in new guidelines under the Digital Services Act. This comes after many countries have threatened to act on a national level if the European Union proved unwilling to implement bloc-wide legislation. The Netherlands is pushing for a ban for under-15s, while the Greek government wants to introduce parental controls to access websites if users are under a certain age. The UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) is similarly putting in place sweeping measures, like age verification and large fines for rule-breakers, to ensure that children (or adults) are not exposed to anything unpleasant online.
Meanwhile, Portugal is bringing in broad legislation to ban smartphones in all private and public schools for children between the ages of six and 12. There will be certain exemptions (such as for pupils with limited Portuguese and those with medical conditions) to keep ‘dumb phones,’ which can make calls but not access the internet. France has gone even further by not only banning social media for children under 15, but also forbidding screentime for kids under the age of three. From this autumn, tablets, TVs, and smartphones will be forbidden in nurseries, hospitals, and childcare settings, in an effort to cut back on French toddlers’ access to screens.
None of this is to say that preventing children from having smartphones in certain spaces or stopping them from accessing certain online content is the same as the EU’s censorious attacks on adults’ free speech. No 10-year-old has a human right to a TikTok account. But the danger lies in how easily these policies spill over into the adult sphere. As we’ve seen in the UK, the Online Safety Act, which was ostensibly aimed at protecting kids from seeing inappropriate things online, has led to vast restrictions on the internet for everyone—including shutting down completely harmless forums and websites. Such restrictions can also be easily weaponised by those wanting to silence dissent online, even if ‘protecting the children’ remains the overt goal.
At the same time, no one can dispute that giving a three-year-old an iPad for hours on end is bad for him. Or that allowing a young teen to have unrestricted internet access will likely cause her harm. Nor can we deny that children across the continent have suffered a marked decline in literacy and numeracy in recent years, as well as in basic social and developmental skills. As of last year, performance in reading, maths, and science had dropped to record lows among 15-year-olds across the EU. One study found that one in three pupils couldn’t do basic calculations. One in four were underachieving in both reading and science. In the UK, there have been reports of four- and five-year-old children starting school still wearing nappies and being unable to walk independently. More and more pupils are requiring extra help to be able to talk properly and socialise with their peers.
Much of this is blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the widespread use of smartphones and social media, combined with an abdication of parental responsibility. But the role of the COVID-19 lockdowns cannot be ignored, either. Keeping kids quarantined inside their homes, interacting and learning almost exclusively via screens, for some of their most formative years was always going to be a disaster.
In many cases, however, the decline in educational standards was a trend since before COVID and was drastically exacerbated after 2020. Even before nations were plunged into lengthy quarantines, schools were failing to fulfil their most basic function. In many countries, education has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, ditching the old Western canon in favour of ‘relatable’ texts that are more contemporary and easier to digest. A focus on coaxing high grades out of kids and getting good marks in school inspections means that actual education is left by the wayside. Combine all that with the recent push to ‘decolonise’ virtually every subject, from history to science, and the result is a school system incapable of teaching anything of value. Instead of confronting the far more difficult and uncomfortable issue of lockdowns and crumbling education systems, many governments have chosen to place the blame squarely on screens. In doing so, they not only ignore the true problem but also risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Banning smartphones in schools could well cause more harm than it prevents. Yes, some studies and pilots have shown that classroom bans do improve kids’ grades and mental health. Plenty of others have found the exact opposite. Besides, there are practical concerns to be taken into account here. What happens if the child has already grown up on social media? What benefit is there to abruptly taking it away, rather than helping him to navigate the internet sensibly? Any kind of outright social media ban runs the risk of creating a generation that has no idea how to behave online or how to tell fact from fake news. No doubt, there will also be mandatory ‘online readiness’ classes in the works for kids to be put through, complete with tips on how to spot supposed far-right propaganda and how to dob in their peers if they see them posting anything suspect.
Of course, all this is based on the assumption that kids won’t be able to find a workaround for these measures. In reality, bans will likely do very little to stop a determined teen who knows how to use a VPN, lie about his age, or borrow an older friend’s device. Pushing the problem underground will only make it harder for parents to safely supervise and guide their children. And, worse still, it infantilises the internet for the rest of us. I can think of few things more irritating than having to whip out your driving licence or passport and give up sensitive information every time you want to access normal, everyday websites. In any case, a 14-year-old will probably be able to figure out how to get through it. A 74-year-old might not.
What these invasive measures represent is not care, but rather control. The state believes it is far better placed to parent children than their own parents can. We’ve seen this logic creep into other areas, too—nutrition, education, and even morality. Increasingly, it is the state that decides what children should eat, learn, and believe. The assumption is that parents can’t be trusted, that they are too negligent or dangerous to look after their own children.
In some regards, it’s not surprising that parents feel helpless so much of the time. For the past few decades, they have repeatedly been told that the only way they can do right by their children is to follow endless lists of complex, and often ever-changing, ‘expert’ parenting guidance. They are repeatedly guilt-tripped over letting their kids have too much screen time, but also told to be deathly afraid of letting them play outside. Parents are told to be hyper-conscious of their children’s early education, while also being warned that too much stress at school can be ‘traumatic.’ They are taught that smartphones are evil, and are then guilted for not knowing where their child is at every second of the day. No wonder so many parents have seemingly handed off their duties to schools and to the state. The situation is an impossible one.
If governments want to empower parents, they need to start trusting them to know what’s best for their children. That means allowing parents to be the ones who decide if kids have smartphones, whether they can visit social-media sites, which ones, and how often. Blanket bans might offer an illusion of safety, but they come at the cost of dramatically undermining parental authority—something that is already on its last legs as a result of COVID lockdowns and the scourge of the parenting industry.
Children don’t belong to the state. They belong to their families. It’s time governments started acting like it.
Why Banning Smartphones Attacks Parents
Mircea Iancu from Pixabay
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The only solution Europe’s governments seem able to come up with anymore is to ban anything and everything. From nicotine, to alcohol, to junk food, to nasty words, our technocratic overlords have no better suggestion than to outlaw anything deemed harmful.
Children, of course, are no exception to this. Rather than trusting parents to get on with raising their own offspring—or, indeed, addressing the structural problems that might be having adverse effects on the youth—our nannying governments would prefer to simply make illegal anything that could be detrimental to a child. Social media and smartphone bans are the perfect example of this. Right now, it seems like every nation is competing to enact the widest-ranging and most drastic laws to stop minors from getting online.
Yesterday, the European Commission announced that member states would be able to introduce national social-media bans in new guidelines under the Digital Services Act. This comes after many countries have threatened to act on a national level if the European Union proved unwilling to implement bloc-wide legislation. The Netherlands is pushing for a ban for under-15s, while the Greek government wants to introduce parental controls to access websites if users are under a certain age. The UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) is similarly putting in place sweeping measures, like age verification and large fines for rule-breakers, to ensure that children (or adults) are not exposed to anything unpleasant online.
Meanwhile, Portugal is bringing in broad legislation to ban smartphones in all private and public schools for children between the ages of six and 12. There will be certain exemptions (such as for pupils with limited Portuguese and those with medical conditions) to keep ‘dumb phones,’ which can make calls but not access the internet. France has gone even further by not only banning social media for children under 15, but also forbidding screentime for kids under the age of three. From this autumn, tablets, TVs, and smartphones will be forbidden in nurseries, hospitals, and childcare settings, in an effort to cut back on French toddlers’ access to screens.
None of this is to say that preventing children from having smartphones in certain spaces or stopping them from accessing certain online content is the same as the EU’s censorious attacks on adults’ free speech. No 10-year-old has a human right to a TikTok account. But the danger lies in how easily these policies spill over into the adult sphere. As we’ve seen in the UK, the Online Safety Act, which was ostensibly aimed at protecting kids from seeing inappropriate things online, has led to vast restrictions on the internet for everyone—including shutting down completely harmless forums and websites. Such restrictions can also be easily weaponised by those wanting to silence dissent online, even if ‘protecting the children’ remains the overt goal.
At the same time, no one can dispute that giving a three-year-old an iPad for hours on end is bad for him. Or that allowing a young teen to have unrestricted internet access will likely cause her harm. Nor can we deny that children across the continent have suffered a marked decline in literacy and numeracy in recent years, as well as in basic social and developmental skills. As of last year, performance in reading, maths, and science had dropped to record lows among 15-year-olds across the EU. One study found that one in three pupils couldn’t do basic calculations. One in four were underachieving in both reading and science. In the UK, there have been reports of four- and five-year-old children starting school still wearing nappies and being unable to walk independently. More and more pupils are requiring extra help to be able to talk properly and socialise with their peers.
Much of this is blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the widespread use of smartphones and social media, combined with an abdication of parental responsibility. But the role of the COVID-19 lockdowns cannot be ignored, either. Keeping kids quarantined inside their homes, interacting and learning almost exclusively via screens, for some of their most formative years was always going to be a disaster.
In many cases, however, the decline in educational standards was a trend since before COVID and was drastically exacerbated after 2020. Even before nations were plunged into lengthy quarantines, schools were failing to fulfil their most basic function. In many countries, education has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, ditching the old Western canon in favour of ‘relatable’ texts that are more contemporary and easier to digest. A focus on coaxing high grades out of kids and getting good marks in school inspections means that actual education is left by the wayside. Combine all that with the recent push to ‘decolonise’ virtually every subject, from history to science, and the result is a school system incapable of teaching anything of value. Instead of confronting the far more difficult and uncomfortable issue of lockdowns and crumbling education systems, many governments have chosen to place the blame squarely on screens. In doing so, they not only ignore the true problem but also risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Banning smartphones in schools could well cause more harm than it prevents. Yes, some studies and pilots have shown that classroom bans do improve kids’ grades and mental health. Plenty of others have found the exact opposite. Besides, there are practical concerns to be taken into account here. What happens if the child has already grown up on social media? What benefit is there to abruptly taking it away, rather than helping him to navigate the internet sensibly? Any kind of outright social media ban runs the risk of creating a generation that has no idea how to behave online or how to tell fact from fake news. No doubt, there will also be mandatory ‘online readiness’ classes in the works for kids to be put through, complete with tips on how to spot supposed far-right propaganda and how to dob in their peers if they see them posting anything suspect.
Of course, all this is based on the assumption that kids won’t be able to find a workaround for these measures. In reality, bans will likely do very little to stop a determined teen who knows how to use a VPN, lie about his age, or borrow an older friend’s device. Pushing the problem underground will only make it harder for parents to safely supervise and guide their children. And, worse still, it infantilises the internet for the rest of us. I can think of few things more irritating than having to whip out your driving licence or passport and give up sensitive information every time you want to access normal, everyday websites. In any case, a 14-year-old will probably be able to figure out how to get through it. A 74-year-old might not.
What these invasive measures represent is not care, but rather control. The state believes it is far better placed to parent children than their own parents can. We’ve seen this logic creep into other areas, too—nutrition, education, and even morality. Increasingly, it is the state that decides what children should eat, learn, and believe. The assumption is that parents can’t be trusted, that they are too negligent or dangerous to look after their own children.
In some regards, it’s not surprising that parents feel helpless so much of the time. For the past few decades, they have repeatedly been told that the only way they can do right by their children is to follow endless lists of complex, and often ever-changing, ‘expert’ parenting guidance. They are repeatedly guilt-tripped over letting their kids have too much screen time, but also told to be deathly afraid of letting them play outside. Parents are told to be hyper-conscious of their children’s early education, while also being warned that too much stress at school can be ‘traumatic.’ They are taught that smartphones are evil, and are then guilted for not knowing where their child is at every second of the day. No wonder so many parents have seemingly handed off their duties to schools and to the state. The situation is an impossible one.
If governments want to empower parents, they need to start trusting them to know what’s best for their children. That means allowing parents to be the ones who decide if kids have smartphones, whether they can visit social-media sites, which ones, and how often. Blanket bans might offer an illusion of safety, but they come at the cost of dramatically undermining parental authority—something that is already on its last legs as a result of COVID lockdowns and the scourge of the parenting industry.
Children don’t belong to the state. They belong to their families. It’s time governments started acting like it.
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