The House | Parents need online help – not judgment

Toy Story 5 PIXAR/Alamy

4 min read1 hr

When Pixar want to frighten us, they do not reach for monsters. In the new Toy Story 5, the villain is something familiar to many a family: a frog-shaped tablet called Lilypad, given to eight-year-old Bonnie by well-meaning parents who hope it will help her make friends.

It does the opposite. Bonnie becomes hooked. Her toys are abandoned in a drawer. The ‘friends’ the tablet introduces turn on her in a group chat. The film’s director, Andrew Stanton, put it bluntly: ‘When tech comes in, it wins. It happens to adults and kids. It just wins.’

Any parent watching will feel the recognition land like a stone. Government has seen this too – the impact of screens on mental health, sleep, and school achievement – and it has acted. Our Australian style ban on under-16s accessing social media is expected to reach Parliament before Christmas and it will have my full support.

A vast majority of parents support it too, and as a dad with two young boys, I understand why. It is a wild-west online with inappropriate and often dangerous content rife across the platforms children spend hours on each day. Since being elected, I have received well over a thousand emails from parents on these issues. Their desire for action is unanimous, and I am pleased the Government has listened.

But there are no quick fixes here, and we do families a disservice if we expect a ban to work on its own. Children are ingenious, workarounds are everywhere, and a child will one day turn sixteen and step onto these platforms with no more preparation than the day the ban came in. A ban does not build the one thing that actually protects children in the long run: a confident parent who knows how to have difficult conversations about content, models their own relationship with their phone, and provides boundaries and rules that stick. Restriction without guidance simply moves the problem to another day.

A social media ban won’t save childhood. A parenting programme for every parent might.

The solution to this can also be modelled on Australia too – where a digital programme providing advice, strategies and tips has been available for the last four years. Thankfully, we have pledged to roll out a similar digital programme for every parent – yet the rollout has been paused at a vital time. This would make guidance available to parents at their fingertips, at the moment they need it, wherever they live. That commitment is written into the Best Start for Life strategy in black and white – and I hope the value of this support programme for parents won’t be lost at a moment of political transition.

Finishing the job on the online parenting programme will cost a fraction of the effort that a ban will take, and the benefits will be vast. We know this because in Australia, the Triple P parenting programme has reached almost 700,000 families. Deloitte assessed the initiative to deliver up to $20 in benefits for every $1 invested over 20 years. Few policies in government offer that.

Australia did not choose between regulating platforms and equipping parents. They did both. Too often, parents who admit they are struggling are met with judgment rather than an outstretched hand. Modern problems require modern solutions, and the solution here is not to shame parents into fighting the tide alone, nor to imagine that a ban will do the parenting for them.

So, sure, banning access to the apps is an important part of this solution. But the new PM will also need to give parents a tool to work through this major change to family life. In the film, Bonnie eventually found a way to build friendships, re-discover joy, and allow herself to be ‘childish’ and play. We can, and should, do this for young people in real life, too.

Connor Rand, is Labour MP for Altrincham and Sale West.