How do we get teenagers off their phones? It’s a question that has defined the social media panic of the last ten years – and for much of this time has felt difficult to answer. For some, it has felt impossible to persuade young people to spend less time on the internet and live more of their lives out in the real world.
Some have suggested that we need to place limitations and rules on screen time; others believe we should focus on education and digital literacy, giving teenagers the tools to police their own screen time. To really minimise their time online, we have learned that we need to offer them something better: a more vibrant and satisfying offline life. This enrichment can come from sports, friends, food, art, travel. The rewards for putting down their phones – for adults as well as teenagers – must outweigh the endorphins released by scrolling.
This need for some kind of offline incentive is logical, even obvious. The benefits of a fulfilling offline life for young people are huge. But what happens when someone follows this advice and offers their child the chance of real-world stimulation? At the end of August, the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp shared that her 15-year-old son, Oscar, had just returned from an Interrailing trip around Europe with a friend after finishing his GCSEs. Allsopp said that, while she had fears around letting her kid travel without adult supervision, “in this increasingly risk-averse world it’s vital that we find any ways we can to give our children the confidence that only comes from trusting them”, and, “If we’re afraid, our children will also be afraid.” She argued that the risks of international travel were far slimmer than the public fears them to be, and that the rewards for her son, in personal growth and confidence, far exceeded them. Others agree: experts argue that children are more at risk of danger online than they are travelling around Europe.
You might think Allsopp would be applauded for giving her child a real opportunity for self-development. But the backlash was immediate: to thousands of people, she was a neglectful, irresponsible mother who had put her son in grave danger. The response was so extreme that Allsopp said she was eventually reported to and subsequently interviewed by social services for allowing her son to travel abroad. It’s fair to assume that those attacking Allsopp are also hand-wringing about the dangers posed to children by social media, and are desperately seeking ways to protect children from this growing threat. What then, if not a broadening real life, do they see as the alternative to all that time spent on smartphones?
Young people should get out and experience the world – the benefits are clear. Whereas social media presents a warped and/or sanitised version of the world, seeing it for yourself – while taking on the responsibility of navigating unfamiliar places and cultures – is immensely valuable for a young person’s growth. This is before considering what valuable new perspectives your mind is opened up to through travel – ones that are impossible to gain solely through a phone.
But something more serious than missed travel opportunities happens to young people when their world fails to stretch beyond around a screen. The less you do, the more difficult it is to do something new, which leads to an anxiety where even small challenges – be it a train journey to France or a shorter journey to a neighbouring town or city – can become insurmountable. This is especially true for children, whose brains are rapidly developing, but the same goes for adults too. Such intense wariness inevitably generates disproportionate fear around low-risk activities.
While it’s easy to blame young people (and even platforms) for kids opting to stay online rather than venturing out into the real world, our hyper-cautious culture only makes this problem worse. When teenagers are told that the outside world isn’t just different but dangerous, we can only expect them to retreat to the comfort zone of the screen. The result will be a generation of under-confident and anxious children who cling to their phones, while their parents are left scratching their heads, wondering why they can’t get their kids to stop staring at their screens.
There are reasonable precautions parents should take when allowing their kids to move through the world. Travel is not the only way to build character and teach responsibility (nor is denying your teenager an Interrailing trip – even if you have the means – neglectful parenting). But we can and should expect increasingly fearful generations of phone-addicted kids if we refuse to let them take calculated risks. They deserve the opportunity to be trusted, and to be told they can flourish offline. And they deserve adults who believe that they can.
[See also: The decline of wedding reality TV]
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