STEPHEN DAISLEY: Technology has its place... but children should be raised by mums and dads, not iPhones and iPads
There are three unmistakeable signs of ageing. One, your knees make that clicking sound when you stand up or sit down.
Two, you not only listen to The Jeremy Vine Show, but you’ve considered phoning in.
Three, you find yourself muttering about the younger generations and everything that’s wrong with them.
Guilty on all three counts, m’lud.
Especially number three. I’ve become something of a grumpy millennial, shaking my head whenever I encounter Generation Z.
Zoomers, as they’re also known, are people born between 1997 and 2012.
And, I’m sorry, but they just rub me the wrong way. They’re so joyless and priggish and delicate – an entire generation of HR managers.
But nothing is quite as frustrating as their constant need to check their phones. You can be talking to one and, just a few sentences into the conversation, they are scrolling away.
Children need to spend more time with parents - and less time on their mobile devices
One Gen-Z acquaintance told me it was a coping mechanism for managing the anxiety of living in the Trump era. To which I mentally replied: OK zoomer.
Manners
I was ready to chalk it up to bad manners instead, that is until I stumbled across new research into the concentration crisis among young adults.
The latest AXA Mind Health Report reveals that 71 per cent of Britons aged 18 to 28 are unable to go more than two and a quarter minutes without consulting their phone. Four in ten report feeling a ‘strong urge’ to do so even in the middle of an in-person conversation.
Not because they are rude or inconsiderate. No, something much more sinister is at work. Sixty-three per cent of young adults admitted that they have difficulty interacting with other people face-to-face and use their phones as a way to escape the awkwardness.
But in doing so they end up spiralling into unhealthy behaviours. One in three report mental health problems as a result of checking social media before bed.
There is the phenomenon of ‘doomscrolling’, or overconsumption of shocking or upsetting content on social media, a habit the tech giants feed with algorithms that dump more and more of that content on the user’s timeline.
That’s not the only detrimental consequence. One third of young adults say they compare their physical appearance to that of others online.
This will be predominantly young females, and once again Silicon Valley has a sin to answer for. It’s nigh on impossible to open any social media app today without being bombarded by the idealised lives of influencers.
Perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect weight. The pressure on young women to live up to impossible standards is immense and, as we all know, extremely harmful.
No wonder one in every five zoomers say they struggle to focus or be productive. Their minds have been poisoned.
Notice a pattern here? Exposure to a habit-forming product creates dependency and causes withdrawal symptoms when the product is unavailable.
Social media dependency sounds so much like drug addiction. In the United States, campaigners against the China-owned TikTok platform have taken to calling it ‘digital fentanyl’.
While we should always be guarded against moral panics, which have accompanied every development in technology, there is plainly an issue with smart phones and the social platforms they grant access to.
Too much time spent on social media seems to rewire users’ brains in an antisocial direction. It’s no surprise that we are hearing more and more about mental ill-health among the young.
Unfiltered
It’s easy to decry Gen-Z and its hypersensitivity, but someone or something made them this way. That someone is the generation who raised them and that something is the smartphone, or rather the unfiltered, unmonitored access to smartphones they were allowed from the earliest of ages.
Zoomers grew up in a time when home computers were already commonplace and smart phones and tablets on their way to becoming ubiquitous.
They did not need to learn later in life how to navigate their way around tech products, as boomers, Gen-Xers and older millennials did.
For Gen-Z, digital literacy went hand-in-hand with traditional literacy. There were many advantages to this. A world of knowledge, hitherto locked up in dusty old books, was now at the fingertips of even the lowest-income children.
Youngsters were prepared for a global economy in which communications technology becomes more central by the day.
But adults were too busy gushing about the possibilities, or perhaps reluctant to broach a subject they considered dauntingly complex, to step back and ask whether there might be a darker side to all this.
Only in recent years has there been an acknowledgement of the dangers of juvenile radicalisation, not least by masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate.
There is a belated awareness, too, that allowing children smartphones and social media accounts without adult supervision meant a generation growing up with ready access to explicit and other dangerous content.
This was exacerbated by the pandemic. Shifting education to video call platforms ramped up the significance of digital devices at a time when the importance of real-world interaction was being driven down.
Immersion
Life became a succession of Zoom calls and WhatsApps, as teachers and classmates were replaced by a steady ping-ping-ping of their phone.
Now the effects of this digital immersion are plain to see. Unsurprisingly, parents are becoming more pro-active and restricting their offspring’s access to reduce the risk of them developing similar concentration complaints.
Yet they are having to fight an uphill battle to do so. Vanessa Brown, a teacher from Surrey, was arrested and thrown in the cells last month after someone reported her for confiscating her children’s iPads.
Police forces across the country appear to harbour some kind of hostility to law-abiding people, banging on their doors for criticising school boards on WhatsApp or posting intemperate opinions on X. Interfering with parental decision-making, however, is an outrage of another order.
Given what we now know about smartphones, the state should be helping not hindering parents in re-establishing authority over their children’s viewing habits. There have been calls for Scottish schools to ban smartphones during class time. Learning devices are necessary in the classroom, personal devices are not.
It’s no wonder Gen-Z’s concentration is shot, and their mental wellbeing along with it. The compulsive effects of social media can be devastating on adult minds, but zoomers were exposed to this pernicious reward cycle long before they were mature enough to recognise or resist it.
Something good can still come out of this. Their experience should motivate Gen-Z to become parents who understand the value of technology but also the urgency of setting boundaries.
Children should be raised by mums and dads, not phones and apps.
