For years, smartphone over-use among children has been framed as a parenting inconvenience, or a bad habit to be managed with controls and screen-time limits.
It’s time to call it what it really is. In the words of Nova Eden, founder of One Collective Power, “the harm being done to young children is a public health emergency… It’s a global crisis. I believe we’ll look back at this stage of children having smartphones with the same horror we do towards smoking on an aeroplane.”
Constant connectivity is affecting attention spans and sleep. It’s also creating real physical risk among children and teenagers. And, even more concerningly, it’s causing a mental health crisis with tragic effects.
The physical danger of smartphones
When listing the plethora of issues with childhood smartphone use, reduced attention spans and an inability to concentrate would likely be among the most cited. But this isn’t just a matter of digital habits, it’s one of basic safety too – and children are increasingly facing physical danger when their phones are in hand.
Charlotte Ashton, journalist and co-founder of Generation Focus, shares an impactful fact: “We surveyed 16-18 year-olds in England and Wales, and 41% said they had been distracted by their smartphone when crossing the road. In my local area alone there have been tragic incidents of children being hurt in road traffic accidents. It's too much to expect children to concentrate on the road with the world’s most powerful distraction tool in their hands."
Eden concurs, highlighting that pouches don’t protect children from danger either, as their phones come out as soon as the school bell rings. “Even if you look at a school with pouches, the children come out and within a couple of seconds they’re all staring at their phones. They’re crossing the roads, not looking around, and they have no awareness of what’s happening.”
“Beyond the danger of physical distraction, phones can create other health concerns too. There can be an impact on children’s eyesight: a major review found that every additional hour of daily screen time was associated with 54% higher odds of myopia progression among those already short-sighted. There can also be impacts on children’s posture,” says Jane Rowland, co-founder of SafeScreens. “Children need these devices out of their lives.”
Childhood mental health crisis
It’s long been documented that smartphones are impacting mental health population-wide. Research from King’s College on problematic smartphone use (PSU) confirmed the link in young people, with more than half (56%) of 13-16 year olds reporting symptoms of depression as a result of PSU. A key contributor to this is undoubtedly the content children are able to access, and unregulated conversations they’re able to have.
“The figures of kids in A&E with broken bones have really decreased, because kids aren’t climbing trees or riding bikes,” says Arabella Skinner, director of Health Professionals for Safer Screens. “Instead, we have kids in there with mental health issues, who participated in online challenges or who self-harm.”
Skinner also raises concerns that the content young people can access is desensitising them to sinister acts. “Kids are seeing things like animals being abused, and 50% of 18 to 24 year olds say they have participated in strangulation [during sex]... all driven by early exposure to extreme adult culture, and they think that is normal… most people don’t recognise how children are being desensitised.”
What’s the solution?
Rowland believes an age limit is key to preventing the sinister physical and mental effects of smartphones. “We’ve got a set of regulatory proposals, and we’d say for smartphones the end of secondary school - Key Stage 4 - is ideal. That’s naturally when a child is usually 16. But it’s really important that it’s not on the 16th birthday, because if a child turns 16 in the September of Year 11, they’re going to have a smartphone in school… and then you continue with a peer pressure cycle because one has it and others don’t.”
Kitty Hamilton, co-founder of Set@16, concurs: “It's going to be very difficult to remove smartphones from teenagers who already have them because these products are so addictive. As with addiction, it's better not to start than to stop. The Xplora One has enough useful functions to keep children off addictive smartphones until they've finished their GCSE's. They could have communication without smartphone complications, and ensure time is better spent on things like homework, sport and real friends and family time.”
It’s a sentiment that we wholeheartedly agree with at Stick to Bricks. In a world where we set clear legal limits on driving, drinking and adult environments to protect young people while their brains develop, it seems wrong that we’re not applying the same duty of care in the digital world.
The time to act is now, and momentum is building. “We wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, which was signed by 650 child protection specialists who agree we haven’t had a child protection crisis like this since child labour… this is a safeguarding crisis,” says Ashton.
Jennifer Powers, founder of Unplugged Coalition, agrees that pressure should be put on regulators and the government. “We’ve let the tech companies steal a generation of children’s childhood. We need Ofcom to step up… and the government needs to continue to put pressure on them to act.”
Xplora CEO, Sten Kirkbak, stresses the need for rapid action across the globe: “We believe a three-step process is necessary. First, governments should immediately establish clear age limits for social media use. Second, age verification should be required and implemented. Finally, technology platforms must be held accountable.”
However, Kirkbak believes children don’t necessarily need to be isolated from the modern world. “Parents still need a way to track, communicate with, and protect their children. The goal shouldn’t be to lock away technology or rely entirely on top-down bans, but to provide families with smart, practical alternatives that offer essential communication and safety features – without the weight of the entire internet or toxic social platforms.
“Technology should support childhood, not consume it. We must ensure parents have the right tools to bridge the gap between digital safety and real-world experience.”
