Smartphone free childhood

In this special When in Frome Unfiltered episode, Sonia sits down with ocal campaigner Cordelia to talk about the growing movement for a smartphone-free childhood.

They discuss why many parents are rethinking when children should get their first smartphone, the impact of social media and screen time on young people and how families in Frome are coming together to support each other in delaying devices.

It's an honest conversation about parenting peer pressure and the challenge of raising children in an always-online world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm here with Cordelia Fellows, who is the Somerset representative of Smartphone Free Childhood. The Somerset regional leader, you said? Yeah. Okay. Can you please tell me what the movement is about? How large is it? What are its goals?

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Yeah. Okay, so it was started two years ago by two mums who were concerned about the pressure to get smartphones for their children. And in two years it's grown to an enormous organisation. It's now a registered charity. It's got over 450,000 parents and carers worldwide. And we have about 30 spin-off movements around the world in various countries. In the UK, nearly 190,000 parents and carers, including over 3,000 in Somerset and Bath, have signed our parent pact. And our parent pact is kind of what our goals are. Our goals are to discourage parents from buying smartphones for their children before the age of 14 or allowing them access to social media before the age of 16. And we also are very much against smartphones in schools, and so as a result of a lot of these different variations of our campaign, we've had hundreds of mentions in parliament and the press, and we've been endorsed by celebrities and healthcare professionals and MPs.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Okay, so why has this movement come about? What are the potential harms around smartphone use? And is there any evidence to back that up?

SPEAKER_00 1:28

So the negative impacts of smartphones are so numerous and cover so many different aspects of young people's lives that I'll just give you a few kind of key statistics. So, in terms of opportunity costs, teenagers on average are spending 35 hours a week on their smartphones, which is the equivalent of a full-time job. In terms of grooming and coercive behaviour, 80% of teenage girls have been put under pressure to provide sexual images of themselves. Um, in terms of bullying, amongst children aged 8 to 17 who were bullied, 8 out of 10 of them experience it through a device. We know that teenagers are losing the equivalent of one night's sleep each and every week. And I would argue that that's actually quite conservative for a lot of the young people that I know and work with. Um, when a large group of 15-year-olds were questioned recently, 74% of them had seen a beheading video, which obviously has PTSD and all sorts of other uh results are coming from that. And over a third of parents that were surveyed of children with smartphones have cried over their child's smartphone obsession. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Okay. So yes, it's the potential harms are affecting both children and parents. Yeah. Okay. And so you are the Somerset regional leader. Yeah. Why is Froom a really particularly good place to create a good example?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah, and that's where I do most of my work because it's the community that I've lived and worked in for um seven or eight years now. I think it's a very diverse community and I think it's a generous one. We've got over a hundred community interest companies in Froom. So places like Fair Froome, Purple Elephant, The Key Centre, the Good Heart Cafe, the Froome Learning Partner Learning Partnership. There's so much support for families that I feel that if you are the parent of a child who is at an age where they maybe you're thinking about getting a smartphone, or perhaps they've already got a smartphone and you're struggling with their use, their overuse, I feel like there's a lot of support amongst the community in specific organisations, but in just the amount of families that are in Froome, that I think you can find alternatives to using devices. So we have the youth centre, we have loads of green spaces, we have um lots of free events pop up in Froome all year round, lots of affordable after-school clubs, and we've got the Kindness Festival coming up this month, you know, loads of things like that that are very unique to Froome. I know that every family has a different capacity to parent in a very hands-on kind of way, and lots of people have full-time jobs and all sorts of other things like that that can mean that handing over a device or a smartphone feels like the only option. But I would argue that in Froome you have an abundance of support and networks to hopefully offer alternatives to that. And maybe not everyone knows what those are, but hopefully, you know, we could highlight some of them in this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Freeman is definitely like all the things that you've mentioned. Yeah, we've covered uh bits of those over the year. This is we've actually this is our anniversary podcast. Oh, great, and it is such a brilliant place. There's so much going on in Freemium. We love it. And so, my I guess my last main question to you is what can you do as a parent or a carer to mitigate any harm from happening to your child through smartphone use apart from not having a smartphone at all? So, yeah, assuming the child already has a smartphone, yeah, you've been under pressure to buy one because all their friends have got smartphones, and if they don't have a smartphone, then they're excluded from their social media groups and all of that, so they need to have one. What can you do to mitigate the harms that you mentioned?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Okay, so in terms of if your child has a smartphone and you're concerned about their access, we would suggest definitely do not allow social media until the age of 16. There are certain platforms that are more harmful than others. Snapchat is probably the worst for grooming and for uh predatory behaviour. TikTok is the most damaging in terms of how it's affecting uh brain development and ability to concentrate. But if you're looking at just mitigating the fact that your child is maybe using a device a lot of the time and you're worried about what that's doing, then there are specific things that are really good for that part of the brain that's most affected by excessive technology. And things like team sports, running, learning a second language, learning an instrument, you know, analogue type activities. Yes. Um, sequencing activities, which are things that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, like the opposite of the infinite scroll. So cooking a meal together, okay, sitting down and eating a meal together without your phones on the table, obviously. Uh, gardening, things like that. So things that are gentle, slow, low stimulation, and in terms of keeping the phone safe, other than not having social media on it, we would just encourage lots of open conversations about the use. Look at your own use of your own smartphone use and try to model healthy behaviours in the home. Don't double screen, that's one of the worst things you can do for your brain.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

What do you mean by double screening?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

So watching a movie while scrolling on your phone. It's probably one of the most harmful things you can do to your brain, especially when your brain is in a developmental stage. Um, parental controls are there, they're not great. Children can get around them, they're quite easy to get around. But what they're being designed now are starter phones, which are not quite brick phones and they're not quite smartphones, they're somewhere in between, and a lot of them are being designed specifically for children. So they've got built-in parental controls and built-in protections in them. So that market is starting to really boom, and there's masses of information on our website. So if you feel like your child needs a smartphone for WhatsApp, for example, Spotify, maps, things like that, there are phones that just have those things on them and are designed to be non-addictive and they will block things like pornographic content and they won't allow you to go on certain sites. But if you just give your child your old iPhone, you're gonna have a hard time keeping that a safe device for your child. That's why we don't overly as a movement talk about parental controls because we don't think they're effective enough.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Okay. Um, so you mentioned your website. If people want more information, yes, what is your website?

SPEAKER_00 7:41

So it is smartphonefreeschildhood.org, and that is just full of resources, evidence, what the issue is, how you can get involved as a parent, as a carer. We've got smartphone free childhood for teachers as well and schools. So if you're part of a school and you want to start educating your classrooms, your staff, you want to look at banning phones, we have so much support and so many resources, and it's all free. Everything's free. That's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Thank you very much. I would like to discuss some of those things a little bit more in depth.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

You mentioned that I can't remember the statistic now, but a horrific number of teenage girls had been asked to send like a nude cell images. Sexual images.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

80%.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

80% of teenage girls.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Are those requests coming from adult paedophiles out there or are they coming from young boys in their peer group?

SPEAKER_00 8:44

I think both. Yeah, I think both. I mean it's hard to be entirely conclusive when it comes to is that a paedophile or is that a young boy, because you'd have to follow all of those lines of communication, and that's where uh platforms like Snapchat are particularly damaging because they actively promote becoming friends with your friends' friends. So you once so if you are a predator, for example, and you've managed to ensnare a young girl, you will people, the Snapchat will then suggest that her friends befriend you. So without making any effort at all, you've made you've got access to potentially dozens of young people. But it is something that peers are asking. Yeah, it's totally been normalized now. This very sexualised behaviour online, asking for nudes, asking for sexual acts to be formed online. Um, sextortion is the fastest growing scam in the Western world. And sextortion is something that primarily targets young boys, but girls are affected by it as well. And it's basically where somebody will pretend to be an attractive girl, for example, you build a bit of a relationship and then they say, Send me a nude selfie, or let's have a video chat and I want to see your naked body, and then they will extort them for huge sums of money. Because they'll be recording the conversation, and and the technology that these gangs, and they are gangs, there is an entire handbook for how to sex dort um a young person via Snapchat that circulated online. They are huge gangs with hundreds of phones, hundreds of accounts between them. It's all highly organized. The technology that they have is incredible, and anybody who's interested in this, I would suggest watching The Sextortion Killer on BBC iPlayer. It's about a 50-minute documentary about one of these gangs, and it's uh such a brilliant documentary, terrifying. I mean, I watched it and sent it to everybody I knew that had a teenage son because I was so frightened by just how advanced the the things that they were using. You know, they made it look like this boy was talking to his his the the lover, the girl, just by technology. Yeah, well, from the photograph he recognised, yeah. It's really clever what they're doing, and it's so it's such a big problem that I think the only way to kind of uh yeah, I think the best way to deal with it is to have a bit deeper understanding of it. But sex torsion is definitely one of the biggest problems, but grooming generally online is is becoming huge, and you are now 60 times as a young person more likely to be groomed online than you are to be abducted from the street, and the increase in primary school age children being coerced into performing sexual acts online has increased by a thousand percent in the last six years. That's heartbreaking in the last six years. That's absolutely heartbreaking. I this is what I mean about the statistics that I told you are just a dozen statistics. If you go to I took all of them from our website, by the way, if anybody wants to fact-check anything that I've said, it's all updated with multiple studies. Um, Jonathan Hayes' book as well, The Anxious Generation. A lot of the studies that we quote are from his book. And the evidence is so overwhelming now because the first generation has grown up with smartphones, they're in their 20s, they've been around for 16 years. So this isn't just something that we're figuring out now. A lot of people have been worried for a long time. It's just now it's in the zeitgeist, now we're talking about it. But actually, the evidence, the studies, they're umbiquitous. There's there's so many of them. Yeah, and and that's why I can I can only talk about as much as I know. But actually, if you choose to do a deep dive on any of these areas, you'll see quite how big the problem is.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Do you have any advice for parents? Uh, you know, that they're again their child's got a smartphone, but you're trying to convince them. I mean, I I can also imagine for some parents it once the smartphone's there, yeah, to then sort of dial it back and say, Oh, hang on a minute, now I'm having second thoughts. Yeah, really, how can we restrict this? Um do you have any advice for parents to to how to have that conversation about dialing it down and taking maybe sort of not necessarily, oh gosh, it's like taking away, taking away the child's toys or sweets or something, but you're you're essentially you've given them something and then you want to take it.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

It's a really hard situation, and this is why one of the reasons why the movement started is because we recognise that parents are not to blame. This is not about blaming or shaming parents or young people. You we have all been put in a lose-lose situation. Do I give my child this highly addictive device that could potentially cause lots of harm, or do I isolate them from their peers? Because they're not going on knocking on each other's doors anymore to say, Do you want to come out? They're they're making these arrangements by social media.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

You're so parents don't want to necessarily let children just go outside on their own anymore because it's not as safe. And we've all grown up with that where you know, you don't want to let you don't know who's out there, but essentially you're inviting you're what we're saying is you're inviting the predator actually in your home. We would not realise that.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

I would argue that you're much they're much less safe online, and I would argue that in a town like Froome, you know, I'm not saying that bad things don't happen in Froome, they do, of course. But as somebody who has worked in this community for many, many years closely in this community, there aren't an overwhelming amount of incidents, not by any stretch of the imagination. Not even compared to neighbouring towns, you know, we're doing all right here. You know, we don't have the best police presence, and that's not their fault, that's because of cuts. But my my colleague and I, we do a walk around every Wednesday evening for an hour and a half, engaging with young people. Feeling unsafe is not something that we're hearing too much from young people. This is not to say that it's not happening, but we would argue that if you're gonna, you know, if you've got strong ties in your community and your friends have got good, you know, good friendship groups, then I think it would be safe for them to play outside and to play in a one of our many parks. But in terms of staying safe online and being put in that really difficult position where you're like, I don't want to isolate my child, I feel like a smartphone's the only way forward, or for a lot of families I know they got a smartphone for the older kid when we didn't know the harms as much as we do now, and then by the young time the younger kids get to an age, they're like, Well, it's my turn now, I get a smartphone, and I get it, it's a really difficult position to be put in. So I think with those kids, it's just about having those conversations, watching documentaries. Um, there was a one on channel four called Swiped, um, about kids giving up their smartphones in school for a few weeks. Um, that was I think that's appropriate for pretty much all children to watch. There was one small part about suicide you might want to edit out. Um there's the social dilemma on Netflix, that's another really good documentary to watch, which is about some of the founders of uh big tech. Um I don't really I I think open conversation is is the only way that I've this is the main way that I've done it with my own daughter. Um and reading reading lots of books myself, kind of educating myself to the issue, things like that.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

So it's yes, it's interesting to note when you're talking about the difference between it is a concern for parents to not want to exclude their children. Yeah. Through medical practice, they have a whole thing about digital exclusion, which is primarily aimed at people who aren't able to access a smartphone or a laptop in the first place. And so the you know, the opposite end of the scale is if you if you are cut off from that, it literally leads to, and I'm going to quote, um, it remains a critical issue with a lack of digital skills and access linked to poorer health outcomes and lower life expectancy, increased loneliness and social isolation, reduced access to jobs and education and financial exclusion. I mean, that's that's quite massive, and that's so it's massive.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

And I'd really I'd really like to know what study that your health is getting worse if you don't have access digital. Like, I don't I mean, in terms of being able to book a doctor's appointment and all of that, it's a nightmare if you haven't got even a phone. And I definitely agree that there are way too many families who only have phones, so the children are doing their homework on their phones. That's not okay. It's not good for your brain to be working on such a small device. But I'm interested in, I'm not saying I'm challenging it, I'm genuinely interested in studies that are showing that because I think that what one of the books that I brought that I would so strongly recommend to everybody is called Screen Schooled, which is a written by two teachers. And obviously, the title is what you suggest, it's more about educational technology, but they talk a lot about smartphones in this book, and it's a very accessible book, it's not loads of you know, kind of technical jargon that you can't get your head round. But they talk a lot about the fact that actually the technology that children are accessing in school, then going home and accessing technology, that sort of it's it's becoming so excessive that you're spending so many hours of the day facing a screen, the impact that that's having on their mental health. So I'm a little bit it kind of almost that's almost like the goes against this idea that you need a certain amount of digital access to have a certain sort of level of work.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

For me, reading that, obviously, I'm not one of the GPs at the medical practice, but when I look at that quote, for me the thing that stands out is the loneliness.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

So it's the social isolation, and I I think that probably has a direct knock-on effect to somebody's physical, mental well-being.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

Yes, absolutely, I agree. I completely agree with that. And that's true. And if you if you can't access, I suppose if you can't access the knowledge of um, sorry, if you don't have the knowledge of what kind of groups are available, what support is available, because so much of that is online now. I noticed when I went through medical practice, they don't have that big wall of leaflets anymore. Because I met with them to talk about smartphone free childhood, and I said, should I leave some flyers? And she said, Well, we don't have a place for flyers anymore. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So as if you're somebody who doesn't have a smartphone and you come into the doctor's office and maybe you're curious about what's available in your community, that's not something that you're that's not a physical leaflet that you're picking up anymore. Yes. And so you're and you're right, and I do agree that loneliness, well, I think that's been proven, hasn't it? That loneliness is one of the worst things for our mental and physical health. Um, but I also would argue that one of the reasons why social isolation is probably the top three problems that I see in young people today is because of smartphones.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Well, yes, I mean uh when I read that quote from the health connectors at the GP surgery, and that's clearly aimed at people who have no access to any kind of technology. And then you're coming from the the perspective of people who potentially have access to too much technology.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

And it seems to me the answer to both questions is to not have them. Yeah. Just not have to go back to paper and pen. Or shared to have how we how we had back in the 90s when shared computer. It was, yeah, but we we would, I mean, I'm I'm of the generation where I think I was the last year at my uni to be able to hand in handwritten essays. Yeah. So it was it was just becoming computerised, and other departments in the university had already switched to, you know, you've got to hand in a typed, yeah, yeah, printed essay. And so, and we were just starting to get, you know, internet and emails and stuff like that was becoming more mainstream at that point, but it was still quite new, yeah. And and we have that memory of having to go out the out there into the world with nothing more than a£20 note in your pocket and and all our phone numbers remembered in our heads. Yeah, yeah. I knew all my friends' phone numbers and addresses, and I could walk to the phone box and call anyone that I wanted with.

SPEAKER_00 20:45

And you would wait, you would wait for 45 minutes if someone was late. You wouldn't text them after five minutes and say what happened. Exactly. You would just have to stand there and wait by the tube station or the bus station stop or whatever. And no, and it is a different world, and I'm not so naive as to say that it's just as simple as taking away smartphones because it's not, and it's not so simple as just saying to parents that you've just got to, you know, do this or that. Like it's it's so it's so complicated and it's so multi-layered and it's different for every family, and that's why this whole movement is about supporting families, it's not about judging anybody. There are people part of the movement whose children have smartphones, and we welcome them because that's part of the conversation. You can't just stick with people who are being really strict about this stuff, that would it wouldn't work. We have to have these types of conversation, and I think that ultimately having conversations with young people is where it's at because it is it is digitally, yeah, because it is different for them now. They do arrange to meet up primarily via WhatsApp, as far as I can gauge, because a lot of them, a lot of the young people I work with don't have social media, but they do have WhatsApp, or they'll have you know something, but they're not allowed access to everything for whatever reason. So most of them make their plans that way. Plus, you know, they go on call, they do video calls, they like to send each other photos. It's become, and that side of it, I think arguably. Can be potentially quite healthy, quite fun. But I think what happens with a lot of smartphone using is that it sort of takes over, and so suddenly you're not meeting up with people in real life as much, yes, and you're not engaging in other activities, and that's something that we've noticed. Even as an adult, I did notice, I think, particularly during lockdown.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Yeah, which technically sped it all up, didn't it? Absolutely. Yeah. Um, but it depended on which WhatsApp group you were in. And suddenly, when we came out of lockdown, it was really interesting. The people that I was in a particular WhatsApp group with, I felt closer to, and I'd kind of lost contact with the people who weren't in that WhatsApp group. And we were having, you know, and in this particular WhatsApp group we're having lots of banter and jokes and things, and you know, and and then people who weren't in that, when there was stuff going on, felt maybe a little bit excluded, like, oh, yeah, whatever WhatsApp group that was going on. I didn't hear about the party because you've noticed because it has been shared in the WhatsApp group, and you kind of you forget that there were there's friends who are not in there. Um it's not that you didn't want to invite them, you just forget that they weren't in the group. Um you've I don't know, created an event, whatever the thing might have been. But yes, I I noticed that those those little groups created pockets of particular friends, and so is even those groups on WhatsApp or Signal, Telegraph, whatever the platform is, that people want to use, are they necessarily that healthy? For me, the pinnacle of civilization was when we had our laptops at home, yeah, and we had those Nokia breakphones. So my daughter has, you can be really safe going around, and you can, I don't know, especially when I was travelling, yeah, yeah, being able to phone a travel agent or something from when I was in the middle of nowhere and find organised things that I needed to get organised. Yeah, yeah, but not having constant messages and stuff in my face.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

So I think I think you can still I think you can still do that today. So I think that that you can move a lot of stuff to your desktop on your computer, for example. So you can have like I've got quite a few friends now who've taken Instagram, for example, off their phone. I mean, I just have WhatsApp, I don't have any other social media. I did, I had it all and it wrecked my head, and now I just I can't deal with it. I can just about manage WhatsApp. Even that gets a little bit much sometimes if I'm in lots of groups. But I'm obviously quite sensitive to this stuff. But lots of my friends have taken Instagram off their phones and they just access it when they go on their laptops. And I think you can make that choice as an adult. Yes, not all people can. A lot of people who are self-employed running their own business, I get it. You need that like constant access, and people expect you to be available. But if you can move more things to a home computer, I think that's a really good move. And that's again, that's a move that you could share doing with your young person. And I don't I don't think it's about saying, I think, well, I think for some people are saying no to smartphones, some people are going back, and apparently, um, brickphones sold more in the September last year than they have done in like the preceding sort of three years or something.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Quite a few of my friends' kids who are now in their twenties are uh it seems to be there's a bit of a backlash against smartphones and then stuff because they have witnessed through conversations with us, and they're realising that actually maybe you guys did have a better experience than we're having. So maybe you just ditch this and go out and have a bit more freedom. Oh, I love that. I mean, also I mean I I can I don't think I would have got up to half of the naughtiness that I tracked and you know, experimenting, just getting out there and just making all the mistakes that we did. Yeah, yeah. If you thought someone was filming you gonna photograph you all the time.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

I mean, that must be and being tracked, being tracked as well. I think that you know, don't get me wrong, it's a personal choice, and I can fully respect anybody who decides that they need to track their child, that's totally up to them. But there is quite a lot of evidence that suggests that it makes children quite anxious, you know, it's that thing of you're kind of being followed and also makes you feel like I can't be safe. If I need to be followed, then it must be really unsafe for me. And again, I would argue that if your child children are just walking to and from school in Froome or to and from the park, to and from areas that are very familiar to you where you know multiple people, I would question does your child definitely need to be tracked? I can understand tracking your child on a bigger excursion, going into a big city, going somewhere that maybe they're really unfamiliar. But if you're doing the same roue and it's in the morning at the end of school, when there's hundreds of children everywhere, hundreds of parents and carers everywhere, is tracking something that you need to do? But it's one of those things that I think has almost just become a bit second nature. It's just something that we've kind of picked up without even meaning to. I have it with my own daughter, she's got a smartwatch which doesn't have a tracker on it, unless I wanted it to. I think I could program a tracker. And she disappeared once. We were walking in the woods a couple of months ago. She went one way, and me and her half-brother went another way. And um, and she and I had this moment of like, oh my god, I wish I I wish I could track her. Five minutes later, she came around the corner and I was like, oh no, no, it's all fine. But I I totally that recognise that instinct in myself. The technology is there, so you tend to use it. And I think it's the same with smartphones. I've gone through periods where I've had like barely any apps on them at all, but before I know it, they just creep back in because it's like, oh, that's so convenient. I could do that as well. But then it's another reason to check your phone, and another reason to check your phone, or you I don't know about you, but I go to check one thing and I end up checking eight things. Absolutely, absolutely, and then I'm like, and then I'm standing there and my daughter's like, What are you doing? And I'm like, I'm so sorry, you know, and I you know, it's that thing of checking yourself first, I think is a big part of this whole issue. You know, so many parents I think, you know, have I think get frustrated with their child's smartphone use. Um, but it's like, you know, we have to look at ourselves first. What are we modelling? Because I think that we're and if we're addicted at this point in our development, you can imagine how difficult it is for them. You know, they really don't have the tools, and that's something else I would say for anybody whose child does have a smartphone, try not to get cross with them if their smartphone use is getting out of hand because they really do not have the ability to manage something as addictive by design as a smartphone. The apps are designed to be addictive. There's all this meta documents now being leaked in the court case that's happening, and they are talking about it very, very openly. It is designed to be addictive. So when you give that to a young child of 11, 12, 13, and then they won't come off it, that's that's not their fault.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

So I think but that's I think that's what I was asking you earlier. Yeah, how do you have that conversation then? How do you, you know, when when there's destiny saying, No, I don't, I don't want to put the phone down. Yeah. What do you do then?

SPEAKER_00 28:58

I think in that I think having boundaries in the beginning is probably the easiest way around all of that. So, for example, absolutely no devices in the bedroom. I think that has got to be the total um well non-uh negotiable, no devices in the bedroom because most uh self-harming and accidents happen overnight like that because of you know messages coming in in the middle of the night, you can't manage them so well, you don't want to wake your parents up, and so we've got a lot of cases of children really hurting themselves. So, no device in the at night obviously affects your sleep and all that stuff as well. Um, having boundaries from the very beginning is probably the best, and boundaries that everybody adheres to. So, for example, all phones go off at 8 pm, and that's same for everyone, mum, dad as well, yeah, or all phones go in a box between 4 pm and 8 pm because we're gonna have dinner and we're gonna hang out and we're gonna watch some teddy together, and then you can get your phone out for a couple of hours before bed, or something like that. You know, I'm not gonna tell you what your rules need to be, like they're different for everybody, but I think those types of things, and it might not happen overnight, and there might be some pushback, but I think I would say that children need us to set these boundaries because, as I just mentioned, they do not have the mental capacity to manage this stuff themselves. And children tell me, and I've been working with young people most of my adult life, but particularly in the last seven years, I've worked almost exclusively with teenagers, sort of 11 to 18-year-olds, and they tell me how much their smartphone is doing their head in, and that they find themselves on it, but they don't want to be on it, and they're just infinitely scrolling and they don't even know why, and it's keeping them awake at night. And that's the feedback I'm getting a lot. And like you just said about your friends with older kids, yes, they're saying, Oh, it sounds like it was really good back in the early 2000s, you just had those brick phones, but they don't have they but but giving it up voluntarily is beyond them because of all the reasons we've mentioned that it's you know it's connection, it's maps, it's your music, it's I mean it's your blooming torch, it's your diary, it's you know it tells you all this different stuff. So I do think that just like we are expected to put boundaries in for children around drinking, smoking, drug taking, risky behaviours, and of course, some children are going to break those rules. I think if we put those rules in place with smartphones, it would it's it does take on, and that's why you know the both the the ban in schools, it'll probably be really hard for kids who are in school now who are used to having access to their phone, but you have to think about the kids that are growing up and how it will benefit them, yeah. Um, and the social media ban as well. Kids who've got social media now at 14-15, they're probably gonna figure out a way to get around the ban. But kids growing up now will hopefully come to realise that social media is not something for under 16-year-olds and it'll be more normalised for them. Yeah, so it's not it's not gonna be that a one size fits all, you know, it's gonna be different.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

We're definitely in a transition phase, aren't we? I think everybody's learning as we're going because technology is just advancing so quickly.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

So quickly, yeah. And we were in the dark about it.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Certainly, you know, legislation around not just smartphones, AI, all of it. All of it, a whole lot, it's just not keeping up with the advancement in technology. So it's great that there are I think it it's brilliant. There's a that it's a two-pronged attack because it needs to come from the top down and from the bottom up. I agree, I agree. Um, so it's brilliant that there's organizations like the one that you are spearheading here in Somerset.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Um I think that's and a great point of reference for parents to be able to reach out to.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yes, definitely. And I'd be really happy to hear from parents. Like I'm always up for having a chat. I think um it's it's really I love talking to other parents about this stuff, like whatever their opinions are. Um, there's also a lot of other organisations that are kind of passionate about this stuff. I feel like Smartphone Free Childhood is one of a few. Um, but I think that we are probably one of the biggest, and so I think if you feel like you need a bit of support because you're feeling like I don't know how to navigate this stuff, then I would suggest finding um your local WhatsApp group and joining that and just getting chatting with everybody, you know. It's and like I say, lots of parents who are part of the movement, their children have already got smartphones, but they use the movement to help navigate those difficult decisions like what should they allow on the phone? Yeah, what should the boundaries be? What is a sensible time to hand your phone in at night, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

And how do people find those WhatsApp groups again through your website?

SPEAKER_00 33:22

All on the website, yeah, which is again smartphonefree childhood.org. Brilliant. Okay, thank you very much, Cordill.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Thank you.