Are We Giving Children Smartphones Too Soon?

Something rather strange has happened to childhood.

It is 2026, and we have never been more conscious of keeping children safe. We strap toddlers into increasingly sophisticated car seats, watch babies sleeping through cameras and have transformed safeguarding in our schools.

And yet a few years later, we put a smartphone into those same small hands.

We carefully control the physical world children encounter, while giving them access to a digital one of almost unimaginable scale – often long before they have the maturity to make sense of everything they will find there.

Except even that doesn’t quite describe what has changed. Our children aren’t simply accessing the online world. The online world is accessing them.

Algorithms seek their attention; strangers can enter their bedrooms without opening a door; and other people’s opinions, lifestyles and judgements follow them home from school.

After more than 30 years in education, I don’t believe the fundamental needs of children have changed. But the world in which they are growing up has – and we should not assume that will leave children unchanged.

We are seeing significant concern about anxiety and other mental health difficulties among young people. It would be too simplistic to blame smartphones alone, but equally foolish to ignore growing evidence associating aspects of online life with anxiety, disrupted sleep, social comparison and poorer wellbeing.

Four years ago, I was sitting around our dinner table with my daughter, now 26, and her friends when they told me they thought theirs might be the last generation for whom “likes” had never really mattered.

One had a 16-year-old sister whose adolescence, they felt, was fundamentally different. Social media wasn’t something she used alongside her life; increasingly, it was where part of that life was lived.

That conversation has stayed with me.

Growing up has always involved working out who you are. But today’s young people are doing that in a culture where everyone can broadcast an opinion – and algorithms determine which opinions they will hear most loudly.

We also need to talk about addiction. Not every child who loves their phone is addicted, but compulsive patterns of use are real. I am not sure parents always realise quite what their children are being asked to resist. We ask developing brains to exercise self-control against sophisticated systems designed to capture their attention and learn how to retain it.

And every hour captured displaces something else: sleep, reading, conversation, physical activity, family life, even boredom.

We see this particularly clearly on school trips. My school, Pipers Corner, has always been phone-free during the school day, and more recently we have extended this to trips. Without phones competing for attention, pupils engage more, notice where they are and, perhaps most strikingly, seem to enjoy themselves more. They talk to people they might not otherwise have spoken to.

Previous generations had plenty of “screen time”. Families sat around a television together. Children saw things they didn’t understand, but an adult might explain, challenge or simply say, “That’s nonsense.” The screen became a conversation.

Yet a smartphone in a bedroom is different: private, portable and personalised. Children can encounter things they don’t understand privately and repeatedly, with nobody else even knowing that a conversation needs to happen.

So, I welcome new restrictions such as overnight social media curfews and turning off addictive features that keep children scrolling into the night – but perhaps not for the obvious reason.

I don’t believe regulation alone will solve this. Some of the world’s most powerful technology companies have built hugely successful businesses around capturing and monetising human attention, including children’s.

What I welcome is the message regulation sends to parents: we have learned something about risk.

When I was a child, I was allowed to sit on my mother’s lap in the passenger seat of my father’s car. My parents weren’t reckless. It was simply normal. Then our understanding of the risk changed, regulation followed and eventually parental behaviour changed too.

I wonder whether we are approaching a similar moment with smartphones.

Restrictions give parents permission to pause and to say “not yet”. But ultimately restriction isn’t enough, because children must eventually navigate the digital world independently.

I tell parents of 11-year-olds that their daughters will drive one day. They will learn the rules, develop judgement and eventually drive perfectly safely.

Nobody suggests we should therefore hand them the car keys at 11.

We protect children, then teach them, then gradually allow greater freedom as their judgement develops. Why should the digital world be different?

Our job is not to tell young people what to think about technology, but to teach them how to think about it.

Government can help create safer roads. Technology companies should be required to build safer vehicles. But parents and schools still have to teach children to drive.

And perhaps we need to be brave enough not to hand over the keys quite so soon.

Helen Ness-Gifford is Headmistress at Pipers Corner School in High Wycombe.