We need your help now
Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.
You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.
If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.
Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
By continuing, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
THERE WAS COLLECTIVE shock recently when it was revealed that parents are giving their nine-year-old children smartphones.
Mick Moran is an ex-Garda and CEO of Hotline.ie, which is the Irish national centre combatting illegal content online. He outlined the very tangible dangers of the virtual world, hidden beneath the shiny screens of these devices.
Speaking on Newstalk, he described how giving a child a smartphone out of the box is giving them “24-hour unfettered access to the internet,” and by doing so, parents need to realise they are “giving the world unfettered access to their child.”
The research conducted by Eir with input from CyberSafeKids, made for grim reading, finding parents were giving children phones up to three years earlier than they would have wanted to and were unsure how to access the phone’s in-built parental safety features. Something Mick Moran sees too often. He remarked that parents who give a nine-year-old a smartphone out of a box were “reckless.”
“Most parents don’t even realise that there are parental controls on mobile phones,” he said. “They don’t even realise it because they don’t bother. They are reckless, and it’s reckless parenting.”
Worryingly, the survey found that 71 per cent of parents believe their child can self-manage online activity and 80 per cent think their child would share negative experiences. Still, findings from CyberSafeKids Left To Their Own Devices report, suggest an even starker reality.
It found that 77 per cent of eight to 12-year-olds say their parents cannot see what they are doing online, and 55 per cent did not tell a parent when they encountered harmful content.
That harmful content could range from anything such as seeing hardcore pornography to the sexual extortion of children as young as nine, something Moran grimly, yet starkly outlined.
As a mum to a five- and eight-year-old, I nodded along in full agreement while listening to the interview. However, the irony of me listening to his words and reading the findings of the research on my smartphone with the device in my hand at that very moment was hard to ignore.
The ugly truth is that smartphones are here to stay. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle, and it feels hard to take the moral high ground when the thing is woven into the very fabric of our lives. I wince every time I get a screen time total for the week and reason it out by telling myself most of that was for work, wasn’t it?
When I sat down and thought about how often I use my smartphone every day, it brought home how insidiously it has implanted itself into my daily life.
First and foremost, it’s my alarm. It’s the first thing I touch when I wake up. I use it to make shopping lists for the family, add to the family calendars and keep track of all the kids’ school emails and after-school activities. I use it to Google answers to my boy’s MANY daily questions. I set timers for the dinner, WhatsApp messages, kids’ birthday invites, FaceTiming relatives, and paying for goods. That’s before I even throw in work emails, messaging friends, listening to music, podcasts and good old doom scrolling.
Why then are any of us surprised that children as young as nine are fully expecting to have a shiny, useful, attractive and powerful smartphone of their own, when they see us using them all the time?
Of course, I’m an adult, at least if nothing else, my own addiction to my smartphone is playing out on a fully formed brain. That said, the evidence around the effects of doom scrolling in particular on our brains is on the worrying side. Our ability to concentrate, for starters, appears to be one of the first casualties in the new smartphone-soaked world we’re in.
And that’s just the grown-ups, whereas one would wonder just what this level of smartphone use could do to one as young as nine. It is a terrifying thought, and yet this is happening.
Knowingly or unknowingly, there seems to be a chilling disconnect between the research and the reality of the situation. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand, hand out a smartphone to a nine-year-old, and go back to scrolling our own phones, thinking it’s grand.
It’s not grand. It’s pretty far from grand. And, yet, it’s understandable that parents say they give young children the phones because they need to be able to contact them, and it’s for safety. But why not give them a so-called ‘dumb’ phone that can make calls and texts but cannot get on the internet?
This is not about being anti-internet, either. The internet is a brilliant tool, and it’s part of our lives in an ever-increasing way. It’s part of our children’s lives too. But assuming children as young as nine are ready to navigate it by themselves is madness, yet that’s what putting a smartphone in their little hand does.
I get it, it’s hard to resist it. It’s hard not to give into the pressure of their wants, especially when their friends have them, and they feel they are missing out, but this is where we need to be the parents. We need to make the tough choices. Instead of hoping it will all be fine while we look the other way, we’ve got to start opening our eyes.
It can be overwhelming to know where to start, initiatives like the one from Eir called Smart Start, which helps parents set up phones safely in store are welcome, but educating ourselves and our young children about the risks is key.
Because even if you’re staying firm in your intention not to hand out a smartphone to your young child, there’s every chance he or she will see something on a friend’s phone or an older cousin’s device. The internet is not just confined to phones, it’s also available in their games and tablets. What we need to do is arm our young children in advance. Talk to them.
Ultimately, knowledge is power. If you start the conversation with them in an open way, they are more likely to come to you when they do see something that makes them feel uncomfortable down the line and make no mistake about it, that scenario is not an ‘if’, it’s a ‘when.’
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and wrangler of two small boys, who is winging her way through motherhood, her forties and her eyeliner.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say