When should you give a child a phone? Calls to ban under 14s from owning a smartphone

An online pledge that proposes withholding smartphones from children until they turn 14 has gained thousands of signatures from parents across the UK .

The petition was started by the grassroots Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) movement, which grew out of a WhatsApp support group of parents encouraging each other to hold off on buying their children smartphones.

They argue there are several reasons why children shouldn’t have access to such devices, from their links to mental illness and their addictive nature to the presence of harmful content online and cyberbullying.

Ofcom data suggests that by the age of 12, 97 per cent of children in the UK already have a mobile phone. Last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called for smartphones to be banned in schools .

Their report found that removing devices from schools in the UK, Spain and Belgium “was found to improve learning outcomes”, especially for students who were underperforming compared to their peers.

According to The Guardian , a quarter of schools in the UK have already signed the SFC’s petition, alongside around 37,000 parents.

The petition isn’t the first time that concerns have been raised around children’s access to smartphone devices.

In August, EE - one of the UK’s largest mobile network providers - told parents that children under the age of 11 should be given “non-smart” devices with basic features, similar to the brick phones of the 90s and early 00s. The recommendation, which was given to “improve children’s digital wellbeing”, came after the network received an increase in the number of parents asking for advice about giving their children smartphones.

Earlier this year, primary school head teachers across St Albans issued a joint letter to parents advising them to refrain from giving their children their own smart devices. “As head teachers, we have committed to promoting our own schools as smartphone-free,” they wrote.

“We believe we can all work together across St Albans and join the growing movement across the country to change the ‘normal’ age that children are given smartphones.”

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