How to tell if your child is addicted to ‘doom scrolling’ --[Reported by Umva mag]

Parents joke that smartphones are like ‘baby crack’, and if you’ve ever tried taking a toddler to a restaurant, you’ve probably at least considered swapping chaos for Peppa Pig. 

Phones and iPads are embedded into childhoods for many families, with data showing that a quarter of children aged five to seven own their own smartphone.  

With the explosion of the tech, however, has come concerns about the negative impacts.

Although phones can be a vital lifeline to keep in touch with our children as they gain more freedom, they open them up to the rest of the world too, and can even cause addiction. 

MPs will discuss the problem in Parliament on Wednesday, with a private member’s bill about the potential harms to children from using smartphones. 

The safer phones bill calls for phones to be banned during the school day by law across the country, as well as committing the government to a review of whether they should be sold to younger teens at all, and making it harder for tech companies to use children’s data to target them with addictive algorithms that lead to ‘doom scrolling’.  

Clinical psychologist Dr Marianne Trent told Metro that she is concerned about how overwhelming the tech can be for children, whose brains and impulse control are still developing.

While her eight-year-old still doesn’t have a phone, she bought her 11-year-old a smartphone when he started to go out by himself. It has a screen plan that automatically shuts down after 8pm to protect his rest, but many of his peers have no such restrictions, with notifications able to arrive night or day.

‘When he downloaded WhatsApp, I came to his phone one Sunday afternoon and there were 1,200 unread notifications in the two hours since he’d last picked up his phone,’ she said.

Her son is still frustrated he can’t have TikTok yet, but also admits that screen-free days are surprisingly good fun, with table football a recent success.

With the number of children and teens being treated for mental health conditions increasing, a University of Oxford study is looking at whether phones could be contributing to this epidemic.

Cognitive health professor John Gallacher, who is leading the work, told the Financial Times that initial results showed ‘a linear relationship between higher rates of anxiety and depression and time spent networking on social media sites’.

Dr Trent described some of the concerning signs that children have become dependent on smartphones, saying if parents spot these it may be time to make changes.

Bex Burn-Callander, 41, is a mum-of-two living in York and has already decided her children, aged five and two, won’t get smartphones until they are at least in secondary school.

‘A lot of my friends were having kids before I was, in the era when smartphones just exploded, and they were almost the guinea pigs,’ she told Metro.

‘Because I was having children a bit later, I saw how it became a battle, with mental health and social media cyber bullying, and I would hear about the daily trials that they were going through with their kids,’ she said.

The communications director for Build Concierge says she does let her kids use phones now and then, such as if they get delayed on a long journey, but this only reinforces her belief that it should be rare.

‘They absolutely love it – it’s like baby crack,’ she said. ‘If you put it into their hands, they just don’t want to let go.’

Although a phone can be an easy fallback for entertainment, the flipside is you can become like a ‘zombie’ just staring at it with little need to interact, unlike in previous eras when kids might have tried to avoid boredom by making up games or going outside. 

When children get phones early on, it’s easy for life to then ‘revolve around the phone’, whether that be for punishments with loss of screen time or rewards of ‘ten minutes more’, she said.

‘That’s sort of terrified me: Just how much they love it, because it’s all designed to set off rockets in our brains and make us feel like we’re getting those big hits of dopamine – and then the big crashes, when you come off.

‘I don’t think kids’ brains are built to withstand that. I don’t think my brain is built to withstand it either if I’m honest!’

She has signed up for the Smartphone Free Childhood pledge, where parents agree not to give their children a smartphone until they are at least 14.

After being set up in April, the grassroots campaign has seen massive success with over 65,000 people joining up. 

Daisy Greenwell, who founded it along with her husband and a friend, told Metro that studies show teenagers are spending up to eight hours a day on their phones.

This is ‘equivalent to a part-time job’ and means they miss out on doing more social or creative things because their time is spent on apps which are designed to be addictive,’ she said. 

The mum-of-three with children aged five, seven, and nine said: ‘There are children in my eldest two’s classes who have got phones already. 

‘As soon as one child gets one in the class, everyone else wants one and they feel left out if they don’t because suddenly the social life starts going online.

‘It’s really hard to resist that pressure as a parent.’

She has a family computer which her children use for their school work, but sees this as less concerning than phones, which are ‘like a precision-engineered supercomputer in their pockets 24/7’. 

Her children’s primary school has a no phones policy where they have to be handed in at the gate, and she would like to see this rolled out to more schools, in particular secondary schools where they often have a ‘not seen’ policy but kids can keep them in their bags. 

Not allowing them at all during the school day could help with the peer pressure aspect, and another solution could be the use of so-called ‘brick’ phones which allow children to keep in touch with calls and texts, but do not have the addictive features which make smartphones so concerning. 

Former teacher Josh MacAlister, Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington, will introduce the bill on protecting children from harms caused by excessive screen time on October 15.

Mr MacAlister, who led an independent review into children’s social care for the former government, said: ‘The evidence is mounting that children doom scrolling for hours a day is causing widespread harm. We need the equivalent of the “seatbelt” legislation for social media use for children.

‘Adults find it hard enough to manage screen time, so why are we expecting children to manage this addictive content without some shared rules? Parents are in an impossible bind over whether to ostracise their child from social media or expose them to the harms and addiction of content.

‘Countries around the world are now taking bold action and our children risk being left behind. It’s time to have the national debate here in the UK.’

MPs are expected to debate the issue in the new year.

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