Our kids are not okay - we must legislate to protect children from the impact of smartphones and social media
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the impact of smartphones and social media on children.
In this country, we often take the physical safety of our children for granted, but imagine if our streets were so lawless that it was unsafe for children to leave their homes. Imagine if, on their daily walk to school, our children had to witness the beheading of strangers or the violent rape of women and girls. Imagine if, when hanging out in the local park, it was normal for hundreds of people to accost our child and encourage them to take their own life. Imagine if it was a daily occurrence for our children to be propositioned for sex or blackmailed into stripping for strangers. Imagine if every mistake that our child made was advertised on public billboards, so that everyone could laugh and mock until the shame made life not worth living. This is not a horror movie or some imaginary wild west; this is the digital world that our children occupy, often for hours a day.
Our kids are not okay. Since 2012, suicide rates for teenage boys in the UK have doubled. They have trebled for girls. Incidents of self-harm for 10 to 12-year-old girls have increased by 364%. Anxiety rates for the under-25s have trebled. Feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, loneliness and despair are growing among our youngest citizens. In just 15 years, childhood has been turned on its head.
These trends are not unique to the UK; they are happening across the western world and particularly in Anglophone and Nordic countries. In the first decade of this century, life was generally improving for children across the developed world. Educational attainment was rising, and depression and anxiety were stable or falling. But something happened in 2010 to change the direction of travel, and then from 2014, the decline accelerated rapidly. Whether we look at data for suicide, self-harm, gender confusion or anxiety, or at education scores across the western world, all these trends showed an inflection point in 2010 and a sharp rise from 2014. So, what happened in 2010 and 2014 to so seriously undermine children’s welfare?
As the US psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt has charted in his recent book, “The Anxious Generation”, there is now overwhelming evidence that all these tragic trends have been caused by the rise of smartphones and social media. The iPhone with a front-facing camera was introduced in 2010, and by around 2014, smartphones and social media had become ubiquitous for children. These products were never tested on children or certified as safe for children, yet 97% of British teens now own a smartphone and half of nine-year-olds use social media. In the US, the average 11 to 14-year-old spends nine hours a day online.
Smartphones and social media affect boys and girls differently. Some platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, have particularly negative effects for girls. These apps exploit natural female tendencies for visual social comparison, but instead of just comparing themselves with classmates, girls are now judged by millions of others against often fake images of what the female body should look like. Where boys are more prone to physical aggression, girls are more likely to employ relational aggression. It is bad enough to be on the receiving end of bullying in the school playground, but when friends and strangers can send hate-filled messages at any hour of the day or night, it is unsurprising that the wellbeing of girls in particular has collapsed as a result of social media.
Sir William Cash MP
May I congratulate my hon. Friend, and everybody who works with her, on the amazing work that she has done? It is a remarkable achievement, and I want to thank everybody who is associated with it. I am also grateful for what was done on the Bill that became the Online Safety Act 2023, which actually provides for imprisonment for tech bosses who wilfully make mistakes and deals with the situation in the way in which my hon. Friend and I have tried to solve the problem. I congratulate her.
Miriam Cates MP
I deeply thank my hon. Friend and I will come later in my speech to some of the improvements that he himself made to the Online Safety Bill.
As well as being more susceptible to visual social comparison, girls are more susceptible to sociogenic transmission or what we might call social contagion, which explains the acute impact of trans ideology on girls. We have seen a 5,000% rise in referrals of girls to gender clinics. Girls are also, of course, more subject to sexual predation and harassment, with younger and younger girls being coaxed or threatened into sending intimate images and even filming their own sexual abuse. In 2022 the Internet Watch Foundation found 141,000 child sexual abuse images of 11 to 13-year-olds, the vast majority of which were self-generated. The front-facing smartphone camera provides the world with an open door to our little girls in their bedrooms.
Boys are less affected by visual and social comparison, but where social media destroys the self-confidence of teenage girls, gaming and porn rewire the brains of adolescent boys. Having 24-hour access to pornography superficially satisfies the sexual desires of young men, but it leaves them isolated, lacking in relationship skills and, tragically, searching for more and more extreme material to become aroused. The average age for encountering online pornography, much of which is violent, degrading and deeply disturbing, is 13 years old, just when boys are forming their expectations about sex. Nearly half of young people now believe that girls expect sex to involve violence.
Multiplayer video games hack into boys’ competitiveness and physical aggression. Again, the games superficially fulfil natural male desires, but they leave boys lonely, withdrawn from the real world, lacking in real skills and unable to find enjoyment or stimulation away from the screen. For boys and girls, time spent on social media represents an enormous opportunity cost. Hours of doomscrolling are hours not spent gaining physical and relational experiences that will equip them with the resilience they need for real life. We have substituted a phone-based childhood for a play-based childhood with tragic consequences.
Even our schools do not provide a safe haven. Recent research by Policy Exchange found that only 11% of secondary schools have an effective phone ban, with the overwhelming majority of children still able to access their devices at school. Interestingly, the schools that had implemented an effective ban were significantly more likely to be rated outstanding by Ofsted and achieved on average one or two grades higher at GCSE, despite being more typically in deprived areas.
Forty-three per cent of older teenagers say social media has distracted them from school work enough to impact their grades. One child told a Parentkind survey:
“I can't focus on my school homework because every 5 minutes I get distracted and go back onto my phone. Occasionally, I’ll see triggering content on social media such as suicide or gory images.”
Social media offers constant, instant gratification, with a dopamine hit and a new distraction every few seconds. Is it any wonder that children are less and less able to concentrate and focus on the intellectually demanding task of academic learning? For the first time ever, IQ is falling across the western world. Programme for international student assessment data shows that maths, reading and science scores have all declined since 2014.
Some question the causal relationship between social media and smartphones and the decline in adolescent wellbeing. Many blame the financial crash in 2008. But why would those trends affect only the under-25s? Some blame the UK Conservative Government, but how can localised economic, political or social conditions account for the collapse in childhood wellbeing across the western world all at the same time?
Caroline Ansell MP
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important and timely debate and on the excellent speech that she is making. She talks about the scorching number of hours that children and young people are online and the very high percentage who engage in the virtual world rather than the physical world. But there is one group of children who are shielded or protected from the influences that she describes: the children of tech moguls and those who work in the industry. Does she think that that is very telling and, in equal measure, absolutely damning?
Miriam Cates MP
My hon. Friend is right. It is hugely significant that those who really know how these apps and algorithms work firmly believe that they are not safe for children. When asked if the iPad was addictive, Steve Jobs famously remarked that he assumed so because he had designed it to be so.
On the causal links between social media and smartphones and the decline in childhood wellbeing, Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge present compelling causative evidence of the harms of social media. On his Substack, Haidt describes six experiments that found that when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls. Not one study failed to find a harmful effect. It is now impossible to deny the devastating impact that smartphones and social media have on our children. Some say that it is a parenting problem and that parents need to pay more attention to their children’s phone use. But in a survey of older teenagers, half said they had found ways to bypass parental controls.
It is not just screen time that is so difficult for parents or children to manage; it is all but impossible to control the content to which children are exposed. As whistleblowers Arturo Béjar and Frances Haugen have testified, social media companies knowingly use algorithms to feed children harmful and addictive content.
Eddie Hughes MP
I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate and bringing us together to discuss this important topic. Going back to the problems that parents have, if their child is the only kid in the class who does not have a smartphone, the parent will suffer the peer pressure we are trying to protect children from. Does she see a way round that?
Miriam Cates MP
My hon. Friend is right. There is a problem of collective action: the costs of being the only child or the only parent without that phone are too high—far too high for ordinary parents to resist. I will come to what I see as some of the solutions later, but he is absolutely right to highlight that issue.
Even if the material being viewed is benign, smartphones and social media are highly addictive and provide a constant off-ramp to our mental focus and erode our concentration. I wonder how many hon. Members in the past 11 minutes have thought about or looked at their phone; I certainly have. As I said, when Steve Jobs was asked in 2011 if the iPad might be addictive, he remarked that he had designed it to be so.
We know as adults how difficult it is to control our own phone use, but the average child gets 237 notifications a day. That is a concentration-busting, addiction-fuelling dopamine hit every four seconds of waking time. If there were no laws against the sale of tobacco, drugs or alcohol to children, we would not expect parents to be able to defend their children from the might of big pharma or big tobacco, yet somehow we do expect ordinary parents to be able to protect their children from the vested interests of the likes of Meta, TikTok, X and Apple, the wealthiest and most powerful countries—sorry, companies—the world has ever seen. In fact, they are more powerful than most countries. Apple has $3 trillion in the bank, which is as much as our GDP, so they are more powerful than many countries.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) remarked, parents could refuse to give their child a smartphone, but the fact that 97% of teens and half of nine-year-olds have one gives an indication of the extreme pressure and social isolation experienced by the only child in a school or class without a phone. We surely cannot believe that 97% of parents are bad parents.
Nick Fletcher MP
I thank my hon. Friend for her excellent speech. Does she agree that we could do the following three things? We could ban smartphones in schools, ban social media up to the age of 16 and, as adults, take personal responsibility, which I believe Conservative MPs do better than anybody else. Thus, when we are with our children, we should keep off phones, or at least spend an hour a day when we are not on our phones and can set an example to the next generation coming through.
Miriam Cates MP
My hon. Friend is completely right, of course. Studying this topic has made me think more carefully about my phone use. Seeing some of the apps that try to disrupt my concentration as big companies trying to take my time is a helpful way to look at it. As with alcohol, drugs and all sorts of other things, we need to recognise that there is a difference between adults and children. Adults should have free choice about how they use their time; this is about protecting children.
Whatever the solutions, this cannot go on.
The problems associated with heavy screen use are presenting younger and younger. A fifth of three and four-year-olds now have their own smartphones. A study last year published in the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA Pediatrics found that more screen time for children aged one is associated with developmental delays in communication at ages two and four. It is little wonder that more and more children are starting primary school unable to communicate, with behavioural and emotional difficulties.
This year, a quarter of school starters were still in nappies.
The economic cost of this assault on childhood will be devastating. We have record numbers of young people signed off work with anxiety. Waiting times for child mental health services are measured in years. Our economy and welfare state simply cannot afford to support mass worklessness among the young. There are huge geopolitical risks, too. We spend billions of pounds a year on defence and yet, through the Chinese-owned TikTok, we allow our political enemies direct access to our children in their bedrooms.
In China, under-14s are limited to 40 minutes a day on TikTok, and endless doomscrolling is interrupted by five-second delays. Chinese children are shown only specially selected and inspiring scientific, educational and historical content, but in the US and UK, TikTok feeds our teens stupid dance videos, hyper-sexualised content and political propaganda. TikTok is now the most favoured single source of news among British teens. Our emerging generation is being educated through indoctrination by foreign-owned social media, and the education is often anti-democratic, anti-western and anti-truth. Our enemies are rubbing their hands in glee.
Many people in Britain look to the Online Safety Act to address these enormous issues, and when fully implemented the Act will bring some improvements. It should make it more difficult for children under 13 to gain access to social media, and make it less likely that children encounter the most harmful content. However, even if Ofcom can hold tech companies to account in making the protections highly effective, children will still have free access to social media platforms from the age of 13. Though welcome, the Online Safety Act will not rescue our children.
But the tide is turning.
There is hope that the world is waking up to the enormous damage that smartphones and social media are doing to childhood. Governments across the world are taking action. In the US, Florida has banned social media for under-14s, New York has proposed legislation to ban addictive algorithms for children, and Congress is taking action against TikTok. New French Government guidance says that social media should not be accessible to under-18s, and President Macron has spoken eloquently about the need for an age of digital adulthood. In a speech just yesterday, our own Prime Minister raised concerns about children being exposed to bullying, sexualised content and even self-harm online.
Here in the UK, the parents of Molly Russell, Brianna Ghey and Mia Janin, who tragically lost their lives to social media, have bravely spoken about the need to act. Campaign groups such as Smartphone Free Childhood, Delay Smartphones and Safe Screens are organising despairing parents en masse, and calling for collective as well as Government action to preserve childhood. All of them are calling for children under 16 to be freed from a phone-based childhood.
The polling on the issue is decisive. Last week, The Sunday Times published polling by More in Common that showed that seven in 10 Brits think social media is having a negative impact on children, and seven in 10 support banning social media companies from allowing accounts for anyone under 18. Polling from Parentkind produced similar results: it found that 77% of primary school parents back a ban on smartphones for under-16s, and 74% of older teenagers themselves believe that social media is harmful.
Some in Westminster think that using regulation and legislation to protect children from smartphones and social media is an overreaction, or even an un-Conservative thing to do, yet in the country as a whole Conservative voters are the most likely to support strong action: 72% of Tory voters are in favour of a ban on the sale of smartphones to children, compared with 61% of Labour voters. Perhaps the only Conservatives who do not support such measures are those in SW1. The evidence is unequivocal: smartphones and social media are making our children sadder, sicker and more stupid. It is just not good enough to shrug our shoulders and fall back on tired clichés like “The horse has bolted” or “The genie is out of the bottle”. The demand for Government action is clear and growing.
What can be done? First, we must insist that tech companies use highly effective age-verification tools, so that no under-age children have access to social media or pornography. Secondly, we must raise the legal age to use social media accounts to 16. That could be done with a Bill amending the Online Safety Act. Thirdly, the Government should urgently fund phone pouches or lockers for all secondary schools, so that all our children can be free to make the most of their education.
Fourthly, we must tackle the scourge of internet pornography. If platforms such as Twitter, which is the platform on which children most commonly encounter porn, cannot keep porn off their sites, they must be forced to ban under-18s from their platforms, and we must update the law so that all sorts of content that are completely illegal in offline pornography—non-consensual sex; violent, degrading and dangerous acts; and the appearance of minors—are illegal online too. There is no excuse for the lack of parity between online and offline porn. Indeed, 56% of the British public would like to ban online porn entirely.
Fifthly, we need a public health campaign to explain to parents of small children that smartphones and internet devices are not safe for babies and toddlers, and that screen use can cause irreversible damage and developmental delays. Sixthly, just as we have incentivised the research and development of new technologies in other fields, such as energy and agriculture, we should incentivise the development of a new phone that is suitable for children—one that allows one-to-one messaging, phone calls, satellite maps and utility apps, such as online banking, but that has no internet browser or ability to install apps. Seventhly, we should ban TikTok from operating in the UK.
I am not for a moment saying that we should not teach children how to use the internet safely on a computer, or that there are not huge advantages to smartphone technology. I, for one, would be lost—literally—without Google Maps. Yet the internet should be a tool to enhance our lives, not a means through which children can become addicted and be exploited. We should therefore not make the mistake of believing that all new technologies represent progress.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the tech companies will fight all the reforms. Just like the tobacco industry before them, big tech’s business model relies on getting children hooked on their products to provide a lifelong revenue stream. However, it is not only the tech industry that will oppose banning social media for children. There are many well-meaning people, organisations and children’s charities that will argue that social media has benefits for children, particularly vulnerable children such as those who are neurodiverse, have mental health problems or are LGB or gender-questioning. That is a desperately naive position because the more vulnerable the child, the more at risk they are online. If hon. Members do not believe me, they should try creating a TikTok, Discord or Reddit account in the name of a teenager with one of those issues and they will find their feed filled with porn, predators or pro-anorexia content, all to draw the most vulnerable children into a world where they are utterly defenceless.
So many children’s testimonies speak of a stolen childhood. As one girl told Parentkind,
“The other day I was on Instagram. Some random guy started saying I looked like a fat pig and no one likes me. When I tried to get past that I saw a short where a girl looked really skinny and spoke of body goals. I felt so useless and ugly that I cried myself to sleep.”
Dame Andrea Jenkyns MP
The mental health impacts are quite well known, but does my hon. Friend agree that we need to see academia, the NHS and health professionals looking more at the physical implications for the body? We know about the sleep disturbances, but what about the physical implications?
Miriam Cates MP
My hon. Friend is right that much more research is needed on the wider impacts. I believe a study was published just yesterday about the correlation between using a phone while eating and obesity, for example. There are a whole range of different issues that we could explore and I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation”, for a thorough exploration of all the global trends in the area under focus.
Defending children from this wild west is not the action of a nanny state; it is a moral imperative for Governments across the world. In the past, Britain has had a strong record when it comes to child protection legislation. There have been a number of moments in our history when a new danger to children has emerged, public outcry has ensued and Parliament has been called upon to act. In 1838, the Huskar pit disaster in my constituency led to the passing of the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, prohibiting the employment of children in mines. In 1885, after public outcry over young girls being sold into prostitution, this House raised the age of sexual consent to 16. Again, following public outcry over the sale of alcohol to children, in 1901, Parliament restricted its sale to under-16s.
We are now at a similar moment in history. We will look back and ask why we allowed paedophiles, predators, greedy capitalists and foreign enemies unfettered access to our children online. The evidence of harm is irrefutable and the public outcry is growing. Now is the time to act. The Government have less than a year left in office, but if we could pass the Coronavirus Act 2020 in just one day, surely we can use these next few months to introduce effective legislation to protect children from a real and present danger.
Indeed, is there any better reason to be in government than to have the opportunity and the power to rescue the next generation?
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I thank all hon. Members who have contributed so compellingly to the debate. I am hugely encouraged by the strength of feeling and the unanimity in the Chamber.
I want to make a final point: this is not a debate about liberty, freedom, parenting or technology; it is a debate about child development.
The human brain is not wired to learn from passive consumption; it is wired to learn from real-life interaction. That is how children learn. However safe we make the internet from damaging content, children will never gain the skills, knowledge and wellbeing they need from staring at a screen. They will always need real-life interaction. That is why we must restrict screens and ban social media for under-16s — because otherwise they will never learn.
