If you have kids, you need to watch Swiped – and see how sick their phones make them | Simon Jenkins

Ereal parent of a school-age child must watch Swipedthe Channel 4 documentary about smartphones shown last week. It was devastating. It told of a secondary school’s experiment in Essex in response to what they saw as an increase in anxiety and stress among 11-year-olds. A group of them agreed to hand over their phones for three weeks.

The parents’ stories were familiar: children who could not make eye contact with adults, could no longer talk easily, were alone for hours and stayed awake until the small hours. Some spent five, six, even nine hours a day on their phones. They made ‘friends’ with total strangers, received hate mail, had panic attacks and went from normal to self-harm. Surveys claim a quarter of British eleven-year-olds have now viewed pornography online. One child died under tragic circumstances closely related to their social media use.

The investigation was thorough. A monitoring team from the University of York scanned the children’s brains and noticed that many were suffering from deteriorating gray matter, despite being articulate, intelligent, normal children. We see them drop their phone into a glass box and watch the first symptoms of withdrawal. They were acutely bored, quiet during meals and had disturbed sleep.

Yet the tests and interviews with both children and parents over the weeks were unmistakable. Just three weeks without phones saw a marked 17% drop in symptoms of anxiety and depression. Children had an average of an extra hour of sleep and a 3% memory improvement. A girl’s panic attacks stopped. Most striking was the children’s eerie sense of normalcy. ‘I thought a part of me was gone… I came downstairs… I did things with my family… I found my mother… One day children’s phones will be banned.’ Parents also reported a brief period of family happiness and feared ‘the return of the telephones’.

There is no argument here. Britain has experienced a surge in mental illness in children. One in five young people He is believed to be suffering from a mental disorder, with a 53% increase in emergency referrals in three years. Half a million children are waiting for psychiatric help. If this had been a physical health epidemic, it would have been a sign of a crash program for treatment and prevention. It is a mental health epidemic and therefore unfashionable in medical circles.

The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his bestseller The fearful generationhas shown an identical rise in the rate of mental illness in the US. This clearly dates back to the advent of social media in the mid-2010s. Facebook, WhatsApp and now TikTok have disconnected young Americans from their social context and placed them in a strange, potentially dangerous world.

TikTok, apparently the worst offender, is the subject of a proposed ban in the US from January. Prohibitions are now in place in countries such as France, India, Canada and parts of Australia. Britain, where Whitehall is notoriously vulnerable to lobbying, is soft. Social media regulator Ofcom belatedly published one this week code of practice. This attempts to limit children’s access to online pornography, material that promotes suicide and abuse by strangers. Such restrictions are notoriously ineffective.

Fining social media providers is like swatting flies. That includes the wider movement to ban phones in schools – and even nightclubs in Manchester. Swiped showed that the power to solve an addiction now embedded in homes and in parents and children alike must lie elsewhere. The fear of missing out is the most powerful social poison. The smartphone has the kind of hold on the mind of nine or ten year olds that alcohol and drugs can have on adults. Parent groups such as National online security These are forming across Europe, but they tend to occur in communities that are less at risk. That’s parents one answer for this challenge, but not for the solution.

Smartphones must sooner or later be universally banned for young people under the age of 16, with the same cruelty as cigarettes, drugs and knives. A technology that has been praised for so long is now dissolving the bonds that should be at the core of a child’s family and friendship relationships. This must be wrong, but nothing is being done about it. In any case, watch the program.