Banning smartphones before college to protect children, an idea to follow?

The screen war is declared at Greystones. In this small town in Ireland, which has just under 20,000 inhabitants, the parents of pupils from the eight primary schools in the town have signed a “pact”: they will not provide mobile phones to their children until they they do not enter secondary school, around 12 years old. The idea is to reduce the screen time of their children, in particular in a context not necessarily supervised by parents, and therefore to limit the risk of exposure to sensitive content or social networks. An initiative hailed by politicians in Ireland. Would a political decision in France be possible in this direction?

As in Ireland, “many children have a laptop before college”, underlines for 20 Minutes Marie-Claude Bossière, child psychiatrist and member of the Research and Innovation Institute. The time spent in front of a screen explodes earlier and earlier. “At the end of 2022, an Ipsos study showed that children between 0 and 3 years old spend 3h11 per day on average in front of a screen”, a figure which rises “to more than 6 hours among teenagers”, she recalls. Indirect consequence, 21% of boys aged 10 and 11 consult pornographic sites each month, recently noted Médiamétrie.

Ban or train?

Quoting several studies, the one who is also a member of the CoSE (collective Overexposure Screens) insists: “the more time children spend in front of screens, the more they have sleep disorders, attention, mood…” The solution would be ideal to protect children? “The problem with the ban is that we do not help the child to use digital tools”, relativizes Marie Danet, psychologist and teacher-researcher at the University of Lille.

The question of putting a phone in the hands of minors goes beyond the question of age. Admitting that screens are eliminated as much as possible up to 11 years old, be careful not to “give one overnight”. These children “will potentially be subjected to hateful content or inappropriate images that they will not have learned to manage”, explains the Lille woman, pleading instead for “digital education”.

“Parental control is almost counterproductive”

But who should be responsible for this education? At school, “digital is invading all spaces,” says Marie-Claude Bossière, including the relationship between school and parents. If the presence of touch tablets in the classrooms is still far from being generalized, the policy led by Emmanuel Macron goes in this direction, with for example the will to generalize teaching computer code to college. Conversely, “Sweden has put an end to all digital at school”, admitting that there is “no study which shows that children learn better with digital”, defends the child psychiatrist.

If the French school does not seem ready to let go of the digital ballast, parents must also be involved. “How to react to shocking content, how to be a digital citizen, who to turn to when you have been exposed” are all avenues to follow for Marie Danet. Far from defending an “almost counterproductive parental control”, she pleads in favor of an “open dialogue”, and of learning by means of a telephone or a shared tablet. “If the children are hiding, it’s difficult to ask for help,” she adds.

The fact remains that if the question affects the interior of each family, the challenge is collective, and so is the way of responding to it. “The tool itself is addictive” at any age, and as with other equipment, children “grow to consumption”, notes Marie-Claude Bossière. “If it’s prohibited collectively, it’s easier for the parents,” she says, echoing the testimonies of the parents of Greystones. “There is no major information campaign on the dangers of digital technology”, nor “regulation”, regrets the member of the Research and Innovation Institute. As for deciding to give a phone to his child, “it must meet a need of the parents and the child”, slice Marie Danet, more adept on a case-by-case basis than a collective ban. On social networks, in Ireland or in French playgrounds, the debate is far from over.

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