Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
A year ago in Parliament, I asked a question of Rishi Sunak that provoked outright laughter from Labour MPs. Even some on my own side were pretty scathing, with a number of Conservative colleagues telling me in the tea-room queue: “You’ve gone too far this time.”
So what, readers will ask, was the question that provoked such a strong response? According to Hansard, I said:
“Since 2010 across the English-speaking world, there has been a marked increase in poor teen mental health, teen suicide attempts and children addicted to pornography. The United Kingdom has a strong tradition of legislating to protect children from serious threats to their safety and welfare. So does my Right Honourable Friend agree with me that it is time to consider banning social media and perhaps even smartphones for under-16s?”
Although most parliamentarians may have scoffed at the idea of preventing children from accessing social media and smartphones, the British people feel differently. A recent poll by More in Common found that two thirds of British adults support a ban on smartphones for under-16s.
And it’s not just the public who are waking up to this issue: Josh MacAlister, a newly-elected Labour MP, has introduced a private members bill to tackle addictive phone use by children, whilst the Conservative Party has laid an amendment to the Schools Bill seeking to put school phone bans in statute. Last week, Kemi Badenoch said in an interview that she believes under-16s should not have access to smartphones or social media.
The tide is turning abroad too. The Australian Government is in the process of setting a legal minimum age of 16 for social media use, a measure that has gained cross party support. Even Bill Gates told the BBC that he supports an Australian-style ban. And a growing number of countries are considering – or have implemented – restrictions.
The Overton Window has shifted. Yet while the public (and especially parents) are clearly supportive of a much more muscular approach, there remain powerful opponents to such a move. Politicians and policy makers of both left and right oppose social media restrictions for children, as do many ConHome subscribers (if the comment sections are anything to go by).
Dear reader, I want to convince you, as a good conservative, that you should care deeply about the current parlous state of childhood in Britain. There is frankly no point in being a conservative at all if the next generation is so damaged and weakened that none of the things we hold dear – a strong economy, tradition, cultural heritage, competence and innovation – can reliably be passed on.
I’ve heard many arguments against using law and regulation to protect children from smartphones and social media, some of which are set out below with rebuttals. Defending childhood must be a whole-society effort, so here is my attempt to convince you that concerns about an ‘online childhood’ are not just a moral panic. Perhaps you will disagree, but you can’t fault me for trying.
1) The problem isn’t real
Whatever metric one looks at, childhood is in crisis. Educational attainment, ADHD diagnosis, suicide, self-harm incidents, anxiety, gender confusion, eating disorders, young adults signed off sick, child sexual abuse, even knife crime… all have all been following an adverse trajectory over the last 15 years.
If you are an adult social media user of a certain age, you may never have seen a beheading, a gang rape, or been pressured online to take your own life. Your social media feed is likely full of kitten videos and advertisements for National Trust membership. But try signing up for Snapchat or X with a child’s profile; you will be served vile content within minutes.
Pornography in particular (average age of first viewing is 12 years old) is warping boys’ behaviour: a third of young women now say they have been strangled during sex.
Teachers of primary school children report shocking rises in children unable to concentrate, regulate their emotions or even use the toilet. The growing use of screens to babysit children is preventing their brains from developing language skills, impulse control and emotional regulation.
When so many of our children have been so starved of natural stimuli that they cannot follow basic instructions, their future, and ours, is bleak indeed.
2) The decline of childhood has not been caused by smartphones/social media
For very obvious reasons, this is what Big Tech would like us to believe. But this argument is hard to reconcile with the facts. If there were some other cause for the sharp deterioration in child welfare (such as the last Conservative government, as the Labour Party likes to claim) why would it have happened across the Western world, all at the same time?
From educational attainment to increases in self-harm, all these factors follow the same trajectory in Western countries, holding steady until 2010 (when the iPhone became mainstream) and then an inflexion point, followed by a continual worsening from 2014 (when social media became ubiquitous).
In his book The Anxious Generation, psychologist Jonthan Haidt presents an extensive discussion of the psychological mechanisms through which smartphones and social media creates anxiety, loneliness and addiction in children.
That is not to say that there are no other contributory factors; as Haidt has observed, the shift away from an outdoor, play based childhood began forty years ago, and paved the way for an online life. A rise in family breakdown, and economic pressures that force parents to work long hours have also taken their toll.
But it is no longer tenable to claim that access to social media and smartphones is just a footnote in the story of childhood decline.
3) The genie is out of the bottle, the horse has bolted, and other assorted cliches
It is certainly true that we cannot ‘uninvent’ smartphones and social media, and neither would most of us want to. But every technological revolution brings harms as well as benefits.
Think about the first industrial revolution that brought great wealth but also great exploitation of the poor. Or the invention of the motorcar, which has given us incredible freedom but also requires complex regulation to minimise fatalities. It is frankly a cop-out to shrug our shoulders and say ‘nothing can be done’ in the face of such childhood misery.
It will not be easy to find a workable solution, but we know that technology exists to implement age verification on social media sites; otherwise, how would millions of people use secure banking apps every day?
4) We just need more education
We certainly should educate children about the potential and dangers of the internet, and we must urgently educate parents of babies about the dangers of screens to preschoolers. But we wouldn’t put drugs and alcohol in front of our kids and rely on ‘education’ to protect them.
You cannot ‘educate’ a ten-year-old to not click on an enticing thumbnail image. Children’s undeveloped brains are not capable of resisting temptation, understanding consequences, or spotting bad actors in the way that adults are.
Numerous studies have shown that smartphones are addictive, as our brains release a small amount of dopamine every time we check for new updates. The only effective way to protect children is to keep smartphones out of their reach.
5) This is just about parenting; it’s not the government’s job
It is absolutely a parent’s role to protect children. But parents do not raise children in isolation. If we are to be successful in keeping children safe, we need wider society to play a part in setting and upholding moral norms, and collectively challenge powerful commercial interests that threaten children.
Road regulation is an example of this. Of course, good parents teach their children to cross the road safely. But if there were no speed limits, no crossing places, no minimum age for driving and no criminal consequences for breaking the rules then no parent, however conscientious, could teach their child to cross the road safely.
Even the two per cent of parents who don’t give in to the immense pressure for smartphones can’t keep their children safe; I know a mother whose child was severely traumatized after being shown a violent sexual image on a friend’s phone. Increasingly, schools set homework and even classwork to be completed on smartphones, making it harder and harder for parents to protect their children.
There is a compelling argument for government to act, as it has done in the past to prevent children from working down mines, or being sold as prostitutes. In an industrialised society, law and regulation have an undeniable role in child protection. As conservatives, we can sometimes be so preoccupied with resisting state overreach that we fail to notice the much greater (and far less democratic) control that Big Tech now has over our lives.
6) This is a crackdown on free speech
The opposite is true. The Left wants to remove ‘harmful material’ from the internet for all users, adults and children. This is indeed a license for censorship, because one person’s ‘harm’ is another person’s sincerely held belief.
Yet unless we can successfully prevent children from encountering damaging content, calls for censorship will grow. Like with alcohol or sex, we should set an age limit for social media access and then leave consenting adults alone. This is the only way to protect free speech; a clear age limit will take the wind out of the sails of those who would advocate for censorship.
All societies in history have tightly controlled access to their children. This is the only way to ensure that they are protected from predators, brought up to know right from wrong and to understand their cultural heritage, and trained in the skills and virtues to become fruitful members of society.
But through the internet we have lost control of who and what influences our young, and exposed millions to abuse, exploitation, and addiction. Smartphones and social media were launched with no assessment of whether or not they are safe products for children, and tech companies have now become the wealthiest and most powerful corporations the world has ever known.
If we as a nation want to secure our future – if we want the next generation to be mentally and physically well, hardworking and capable of achieving their potential – then we must take back control of childhood. This is a fundamentally conservative agenda, and we should own it.