I’m out to dinner with my 4-year-old daughter and she is becoming increasingly restless and on the cusp of a tantrum. Our meals have only just arrived. I reach for my phone and hand it to her with YouTube Kids already playing. Her mood calms and she settles back into the chair with her eyes fixed on the screen. Finally silence. Then a swift wave of guilt washes over me, what am I doing to her brain? am I setting her up for an unhealthy screen addiction?
This week a Uniting Church school in Sydney, Pymble Ladies College (PLC), launched an initiative that equip students with the tools and skills to safely manage their smart phone usage and social media engagement.
Commencing next year, The Wise Phone program will see students receiving free semi-smartphones with restricted application settings. The program aims to ease students into the pervasive and all-consuming digital universe which sits in the palm of their hands on a daily basis, gradually giving them access to more content as their emotional and interpersonal skills mature.
Talking to the Sydney Morning Herald, one PLC student, Jessica Spence, said she had struggled with an unhealthy attachment to her phone, saying at one stage she was using it as much as nine hours per day before winding back to one. Jessica said many of her friends were given smartphones in year 7 and found themselves quickly in the grips of TikTok’s clever algorithms.
The dangers of young people engaging with online platforms has become a popular topic in the media and among policy-makers, especially following youth suicides linked to online bullying, like that of 12-year-old Sydney student, Charlotte O’Brien.
Like every parent hearing about these tragic deaths, our minds go to our own children, we wonder if we would know if something was wrong, and how we could prevent it. I wonder how much more pervasive technology will be by the time my daughter enters high school in eight years’ time.
It was encouraging to hear the Albanese government announce plans to ban children under 16 from using social media, yet simultaneously doubtful how successful the policy would be. Given its ubiquity and prevalence, perhaps the key is to educate children on how to safely navigate the digital space rather than outright ban it.
Talking to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Jordan Baker PLC’s principal, Kate Hadwen, compared The Wise Phone program to teaching children to swim – “we don’t hurl them in the ocean at 12 without teaching them the skills they’ll need first, so why would we hurl them into the quagmire of social media or the depths of the internet?”
Parents have asked Hadwen if their sons can get a PLC phone, too. She hopes other schools will adopt the plan. ‘‘We’d love this to be a broader community initiative, which is really what sparked this conversation,” she said. ‘‘How do we encourage others to get involved in this movement, the more people who are in this the stronger it will be.”
Jo Maloney – Media and Public Affairs Consultant at the Uniting Church Synod of NSW & ACT
