Have your say! Should children own smartphones?

Smartphones, apps, and social media are blamed for a variety of problems - but that hasn't stopped almost every teenager owning one

Smartphones, and the apps and easy social media access that come with them, are blamed for a variety of problems - but that hasn't stopped almost every teenager in the country from owning one. They're just as valuable as a tool for children as they are to adults, but it can seem like a futile effort to protect them from harmful content.

Have your say! Should children own smartphones at all? Do you, or someone you know, refuse to give a child a smartphone? Should they come with restrictions built-in - and what would they look like? Comment below, and join in on the conversation.

There seems to be no way to put the genie back in the bottle on children owning smartphones - parents, schools, the government and tech companies are left scrambling to solve the problems that it had created. Government research released earlier this year says that by the age of 12, 97% of children own one.

A lot of the burden has fallen on schools to safeguard children against the problems that they cause, which can range from anything between the anxiety caused by maintaining social media friendships or disruption in class, to cyber-bullying and accessing harmful content on the internet.

One school has had success with a hardline "no phones" policy, as reported by the Mirror. Boston Grammar School in Lincolnshire reported that before their ban, about half of incidents that put a pupil into isolation were connected to smartphones - after the ban, there were none.

"We want to be a safe place where you don't have constant access to what might have happened outside of school," deputy head teacher Peter Barnsley said.

"Those things can be magnified through the use of mobile phones and group chats and so on," he added. "We wanted to remove that toxicity from our school day. What we've found is a significant reduction in the amount of normal incidents that would have been made worse by mobile phones."

Policies can come from parents and at home, too. Thousands of people have joined Smartphone Free Childhood groups to raise awareness about the pitfalls of giving children "access to an adult product that opens the door to harmful content, addictive algorithms and the anxiety machine that is social media". At the same time, they recognise that not having a phone could alienate a child from their peers, so they push for local and national conversations on safety.

The influence and role of social media companies is often a target for ire when something bad happens to a child on the internet, and they have been under pressure for a long time to provide solutions. Instagram, owned by Facebook's parent company Meta, have recently introduced new protections for children in the form of "Teen Accounts", which aim to restrict public access to their accounts and more tightly control what content they can access. It remains to be seen what effect these and other initiatives can have on curbing the negatives of a smartphone.

Have your say! Should children own smartphones at all? Do you, or someone you know, refuse to give a child a smartphone? Should they come with restrictions built-in - and what would they look like? Comment below, and join in on the conversation.