Giving your child a smartphone is like gifting them a hand grenade, says BEL MOONEY. Here are the terrifying studies that show what it’s really doing to their brains

It’s never been easy to be young. Misunderstanding and irritation between generations is documented by exasperated oldies in Ancient Greece and Rome, and feelings of rebellion are normal when young bodies change and minds develop.

It can all be a painful process – accompanied by slammed doors, shouting and sullen silence. No wonder so many rueful parents recognised the now-classic Harry Enfield comic character, Kevin the Teenager.

But there’s nothing remotely amusing about the chronic crisis in mental health that is afflicting this country’s young people – and equally, those of the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Actress Sophie Winkleman – married to Lord Frederick Windsor, cousin to the late Queen – caused a stir by revealing she pulled her daughters, now aged nine and seven, out of two schools over the use of technology in the classroom

One of the schools was £20,000-a-year St Thomas’s in London’s Battersea, which also taught Prince George and Princess Charlotte

Last year, the Chinese social media platform TikTok was fined £12.7 million for contravening its own rules on protecting children under 13 from potential online harm.

Since then actor Sophie Winkleman – married to Lord Frederick Windsor, cousin to the late Queen – caused a stir by revealing she pulled her daughters, now aged nine and seven, out of two schools over the use of technology in the classroom. One of the schools, which Winkleman says gave iPads to six-year-olds, was £20,000-a-year St Thomas’s in London’s Battersea, which also taught Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

Ofcom research shows that 20 per cent of three and four-year-olds have their own mobile phones. By the age of nine that number rises to 50 per cent, while almost all 12-year-olds have their own device.

And a wide-ranging and highly authoritative study has proved beyond doubt that the mental health of teenagers – especially girls – fell off a cliff roughly ten years ago.

Believe me, there is a connection between those two things.

Let me start by highlighting just one example from that survey – titled ‘The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International’ and written by social psychologists Zac Rausch and Jonathan Haidt – published last year. Since 2010, in this country, hospitalisations for self-harm in girls aged between 10 and 12 have increased by 364 per cent. For boys the figure is 155 per cent.

These are not teenagers but children who have deliberately injured themselves by cutting with razors, scissors or other sharp objects, so severely they needed to go to hospital. That terrifying and tragic statistic alone should be enough to make us all sit up and ask: what on earth has gone wrong?

This serious question has tended to be dismissed as ‘moral panic’ by the liberal Left, and patronised by those on the Right. The first group have always laughed at concerns about pornography, film classification, sex education and so on.

Meanwhile, those right-of-centre have a tendency to view it all as a self-indulgent fantasy manufactured by neurotics who see a ‘mental health issue’ in an everyday upset.

Both are wrong. They are making light of young people’s pain.

Of course, any parent of teenagers (and in a year’s time I shall become the grandparent of teenagers) knows they tend to follow their peers in order to fit in. We do see ‘clusters’ of behaviour.

But this is different. When an eleven-year-old child, who not so long ago might have been choosing stickers to decorate her notebook and writing in coloured felt tips, is slicing into her own arm with a pair of her mother’s nail scissors because she hates who she is… that is not nothing. It is harrowing and unprecedented.

In case you are in any doubt that there is something seriously wrong, take note that in America, Australia, Canada and (worst of all) New Zealand there are similar spikes in serious self-harm among young females.

Girls are far more susceptible to anxiety over their appearance, especially in the social media world where people enhance their looks with filters

For example, in America teenage girls are hospitalised for deliberately injuring themselves at three times the rate they were in 2010. Since 2012, increases in anxiety and depression in all five countries are off the scale.

Rausch and Haidt leave us in no doubt as to cause and effect.

Haidt is co-author of an important book called The Coddling Of The American Mind (2018). This argued that the US, Canada and Britain have seen a rise in the idea of ‘safetyism’, which displayed one of its worse manifestations in the shouting down of speakers deemed to be ‘harmful’ at universities.

Those students had been over-protected and indulged by their parents and teachers: they cried for ‘safe spaces’ because their minds had been coddled.

To continue his disturbing findings, Haidt wanted to find out more about the ‘epidemic of mental illness that began in the early 2010s’: what caused it and whether it was international. He tasked Rausch with the mammoth job of researching mental health statistics in all five Anglo countries. A mind-boggling array of graphs and sources is evidence of the complexity of this research – and yet the conclusion is chillingly simple.

To quote Haidt: ‘[The] findings are momentous and should cause an immediate global rethinking of what children need to have a healthy childhood, and what obstacles to development arrived around the globe around 2012’.

Let’s go back to that year – and our 11-year-old girl (call her Jade) with her felt tips and special notebook. She has a couple of best friends who sometimes hurt her feelings, but she loves them. A tomboy, Jade happily goes shopping for jeans with her mother, has no interest in trends, quite likes a particular lad with dark hair in her class but only as part of her little ‘set’, and really enjoys bouncing on the trampoline and kicking a ball around with her little brother.

Although Jade is growing fast and already knows everything about periods and babies, her life is still what one might call playful. Like her friends, she’s looking forward to becoming a teenager yet gets on fine with Mum and Dad, likes to re-read the stories she enjoyed when a bit younger and still reckons it would be fun to have a magic wand to send the bad things away: ‘Expelliarmus!’

But what is Jade’s lifestyle in 2024? Well, unless she is very unusual indeed, she is in danger of adding to Rausch’s carefully accumulated statistics. Since the biggest change we have all seen in our lives is technology, we can be pretty sure that our little girl’s life now revolves around her mobile phone and social media. And because of that Jade is, in effect, no longer ‘allowed’ to be a child.

Jonathon Haidt wanted to find out more about the ‘epidemic of mental illness that began in the early 2010s’

No longer can the bad things be pushed away with Harry Potter’s disarming spell. No, the ‘Death Eaters’ are right there with her in her bedroom. As if by magic, they exist inside the necessary accessory that seems to unite her with her peers yet so often leaves her lonely, confused and afraid.

Without telling her mother she copied her friends, got herself on TikTok – and now all sorts of things pop up on her phone that she doesn’t really want to see. Yet she is addicted. She just has to look, to scroll endlessly through Instagram and Snapchat, just as she feels compelled to check the posts from the horrid girls in her class who have started calling her ‘ugly’.

If you think I’m making up an unduly alarmist scenario, think again. The Information Commissioner’s Office has previously found that the data TikTok illegally harvested from children ‘may have been used to track them, potentially delivering harmful content’.

What harmful content? With what effect? I strongly recommend catching up with the powerful Channel 4 drama starring Kate Winslet and her daughter Mia Threapleton. Called ‘I Am Ruth’ it’s the moving story of a desperate mother witnessing her daughter spiralling into depression and self-harm by the pressures of social media and the cruelty of her peers.

After co-developing the drama with writer Dominic Savage, Winslet called on the Government to ‘crack down’ on social media. After all, there is no lack of evidence.

Rausch points out that 55 other authoritative studies find a significant link between social media and mental health problems. If we just look back to those dates, and note the fact that incidences of depression, anxiety and self-harm rose steeply after about 2011, then the obvious question is why.

Rausch and Haidt lay it out with clarity:

1) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.

2) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalisations begins in the early 2010s.

3) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).

4) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).

Then they ask the key question: ‘Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries?’

In 2010 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 with the front-facing camera that would power the new Facebook video-calling feature. Facebook began in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006 and Instagram in 2010, with the word ‘selfie’ entering the lexicon in 2012.

The world had changed.

People wanted image-based content, and soon felt they couldn’t live without it. An Ofcom study in 2015 showed that the amount of time adolescents spend online more than doubled in ten years. Risky? Even as long ago as 2013 the American Academy of Paediatrics recommended that restrictions be placed on screen time.

But it was too late. Parents were – and are – caught between a rock and a hard place. They may worry about social media, yet know that to deprive their 13-year-old (and younger) of a mobile phone is like a sentence of exile. It has surely never been harder to be a parent, or a worse time to be a child.

Why does the situation seem to be worse for girls? Here, the Millennium Cohort Study followed 19,000 young people born in 2000 and found that teenagers became more depressed the more time they spent on social media – and the rates of mood disorder are far higher for girls than boys. In fact, boys who move from two to five hours of daily use see a doubling of depression rates. For girls the same increase triples.

Having brought up a son and a daughter (and now with three grandsons and one granddaughter) and spent a great deal of time in schools during my years as a best-selling children’s author, I know how different the sexes are.

Girls’ friendships are more intense, but so is the pain they suffer when they fall out. The social phenomenon known as ‘mean girls’ is all too real. When I was 12 I was bitterly unhappy at being sent to Coventry by schoolmates because I was ‘different’. Today I would be cowering in my bedroom as their bile endlessly pinged into my phone.

Girls are far more susceptible to anxiety over appearance, especially in the social media world where people enhance their looks with filters, where ‘influencers’ with swishy hair and trout pouts become ideals to copy.

A survey by the Mental Health Foundation revealed 25 per cent of young people (13 per cent of boys and 37 per cent of girls) said celebrities have caused them to worry about their body image, and 19 per cent (10 per cent of boys and 28 per cent of girls) said TV shows caused them to worry about their body image. A survey of 11–16-year-olds found that over half of young people had experienced appearance-based bullying, with over half saying the bullying had started by age 10.

Add to that the ubiquity of the most vile online pornography and the effect it has on boys’ behaviour towards girls; the pressure on girls to send sexy pictures of themselves and the terror that these will be shared; and hyper-sexualised ‘Relationships, Sex and Health Education’ lessons given in schools by highly-paid, unregulated providers claiming there are 74 different genders and that extreme sex acts are natural…

The pressure is enormous.

If they then have to cope with their first periods in ‘gender-neutral’ school toilets, knowing a boy might be listening… no wonder they collapse into a perfect storm of misery. No wonder they weep in silent confusion when the author of their beloved Harry Potter books is denounced as a ‘transphobe’ by bullies they dare not contradict.

For many liberals these dark realities are unacceptable because they challenge their assumptions. Common sense and parental concerns are decried as academics set out to prove there is no connection between mental health and social media – just as, for decades, liberal-Left commentators sought to disprove any link between screen violence and behaviour and the spread of pornography and attitudes to women.

It is hoped that the Online Safety Bill, which became law in October, will stop social media sites promoting self-harm content, as well as other extreme material, from pornography to suicide. But children will continue to be effectively coerced by the power of technology – for what child can resist? And what parent can fully understand that when they hand their beloved offspring a smartphone it can be like gifting a hand grenade?