A child psychologist is warning parents to take away the cellphones they have allowed their children to have because of the “sheer devastation” they are “wreaking on our young people’s mental health.”
Psychologist Emily Sehmer took to the pages of The Guardian last week to deliver a stark warning about the harmful influences on our children of too much screen time.
Sehmer noted that “The majority of children over 10 I see at my NHS clinic now have a smartphone. An increasingly large proportion of patients have difficulties that are related to, or exacerbated by, their use of technology.”
Sehmer added:
We are seeing profound mental illness stemming from excessive social media use, online bullying, screen addiction, or falling prey to online child sexual exploitation. We are seeing children who are disappearing into online worlds, who are unable to sleep, who are increasingly inattentive and impulsive, emotionally dysregulated and aggressive. Children crippled by anxiety or a fear of missing out. Who spend hours alone, cut off from those who love them, who spend hour upon hour speaking to strangers.
She went on to say that open and unfettered access to harmful ideologies and practices that kids are not mentally equipped to deal with are flooding their minds through their phone. Most especially, young people are being flooding with ideas of “self harm,” she explained.
Children’s self-esteem and self-image is also at an all-time low, and levels of depression and suicidal thoughts have never been higher. It is no secret among mental health professionals that there is a direct link between smartphone use and real-world harms.
The high amount of attention kids spend on smartphones is also sending them into isolation and away from family and friends. This is also bad, Sehmer properly points out.
The average time that teens spend with friends each day has plummeted by 65% since 2010. For hundreds of years, adolescence has triggered a period of social “pack mentality”. Historically, that might have meant pressure to join a football team or go out with friends. But now, this socialising is happening more and more on WhatsApp groups and social media – with terrifying consequences.
Shemer advises parents not to allow their children to have smartphones until they are older than 16.
Personally, I would suggest they not have them until they are graduate from high school and on their own life as an adult.
Regardless, Shemer is right. Kids do not need internet-enabled smartphones. And as a parent you’d be doing yourself and your children a service by refusing to give them one.
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