Saving Childhood Begins By Banning Smartphones

More and more studies show what parents have long suspected. Smartphones are damaging young people in ways we still barely grasp. They shorten attention spans and disrupt sleep. They heighten anxiety and drag children into a digital world they’re nowhere near mature enough to handle. Every year, more predators reach children through devices handed to them by well-meaning adults. The phone is modern parenting’s Trojan horse — attractive on the surface, ruinous once it’s welcomed in.

Actress and campaigner Sophie Winkelman has put it bluntly. She calls today’s online world a “horror film”, and she isn’t being melodramatic. In interviews, she describes teenagers navigating a landscape where judgment never ends, and classroom politics snap and crackle twenty-four hours a day. What used to be private adolescent angst is now a broadcast event. What used to be a stupid mistake is now a digital tattoo. Winkelman’s warning is powerful because it comes from a mother watching the insanity in real time. “It’s a different planet,” she says, and she’s spot on. The coordinates have shifted under our feet. The world our kids are growing up in is nothing like the one we knew.

Governments are finally waking up, though in the usual clumsy, slow-motion way. Australia recently banned social media for young teens, a step now being echoed elsewhere. France is openly weighing a similar restriction, while the UK’s terrorism watchdog has gone further, calling for a ban on social media use for under-16s on national security grounds. The impulse is understandable. The damage is no longer abstract. But the execution remains detached from reality. Australia’s ban, which I argued from the outset was doomed, rests on a fantasy of enforcement. Teenagers aren’t intimidated by digital barriers. Many already possess the technical instincts of Rusian cyber operatives. They will download VPNs, as millions already do, and step around the rule without breaking stride. What we are seeing is not a lack of concern from governments, but a lack of seriousness.

Banning social media alone is pointless, and it’s why the classroom phone bans already adopted in several countries barely scratch the surface. The real problem isn’t only what happens during school hours, but what happens in bedrooms, on buses, after midnight, and in the moments when no adult is watching. The only measure that would actually work is the one no government has yet dared to attempt: an outright ban on smartphones for anyone under sixteen. No endless committees. No half-steps. No timid talk about “balance” or “digital literacy”. A basic dumb phone is more than enough for safety and communication. A supercomputer in a child’s pocket is not.

Treat it like alcohol. Treat it like cigarettes. Treat it like any addictive substance that reshapes the brain. The comparison isn’t dramatic. When an object rewires the prefrontal cortex, drives compulsive behaviour, spikes dopamine, distorts self-worth, and exposes children to risk, it belongs in the same regulatory category as anything else that can maim or poison.

Critics insist this sounds authoritarian. But what, exactly, is the alternative? To keep doing what we’re doing? To let another generation grow up half-alive, permanently plugged in, socially stunted, and spiritually anaesthetised? Look around. The harm isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening right now.

We now have twelve-year-olds with burnout. Ten-year-olds with panic disorders. Teenagers who struggle to hold a conversation without glancing at a glowing rectangle every eight seconds. Children who experience reality through a lens and themselves through a filter. Human beings who can’t cope with boredom, silence, solitude, or stillness — the very ingredients that create imagination.

The objection that phone bans are “too extreme” would carry weight if the status quo weren’t already extreme. When classrooms fall apart because WhatsApp wars erupt between pupils; when online mobs form in minutes; when abuse circulates among minors with the speed of a sneeze; when predators glide through gaming platforms like sharks in shallow water — what is “moderation” supposed to mean?

Only the most naive or the most disingenuous could argue that children will grow sturdier as AI becomes more embedded in their lives. We already ask young minds to compete with algorithms engineered to hijack attention and maximise addiction. Now, we are adding AI companions, personalised content funnels, and hyper-targeted psychological manipulation into the mix. Does anyone seriously believe children will emerge more grounded, more resilient, or remotely well-balanced?

We can’t pretend we don’t see where this leads. When a six-year-old is consuming the most graphic pornography imaginable regularly, we have a duty to act. Sophie Winkelman is right. We’ve let a kind of everyday horror take hold, and it now shapes the soundtrack of modern childhood.

Parents sigh and say, “What can we do?” But the answer is staring us in the face. The most effective protections are often the simplest ones. Remove the device. Remove the dopamine slot machine. Remove the portal that delivers strangers into your child’s pocket. The dumb phone, mocked by some as primitive, might be the most humane technology we still possess.

Politicians fear backlash from Big Tech. They fear accusations of overreach. But what they should fear far more is the cost of another decade of digital childhood.

A society that can’t protect its young is a society mid-collapse. A culture that hands devices built for addiction to children who still need help crossing the street has already lost the plot. The smartphone is more than a tool. It’s an accelerant — of anxiety, isolation, self-harm, and predation.

A ban may never come, but it should. Children deserve a world where their minds can rest. A world where their sense of self can grow without constant comparison, and where their inner lives can stretch beyond the algorithm’s reach.