Phoney War.

We are feeding our children poison. And then panicking about the shape of the spoon.

I’ve read two of Alwyn Turner’s books.  ‘All in it Together’, about the Cameron era, and ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ about life in Thatcher’s Britain. I heartily recommend both, especially for readers of my generation. (Basically anyone who can remember Terry and June.)

Turner’s latest, ‘Little Englanders’, covers a period a little before my time. Britain at the turn of the 20th century. From 1900, so, around the death of Queen Victoria, up until 1914, the outbreak of the First World War.

Simon Heffer’s review in the Spectator makes it sound like a fun read. I’ve bought it on Audible.

One particular line from the review jumped out at me.

‘The older generation worried about the minds of the young… being warped by the flood of cheap fiction from America.’

This brought back memories from my own childhood. When youngsters like me were actively encouraged to read any books, cheap American fiction included, just so long as we stopped spending all day, staring, slack jawed, at the Idiot Box.

Back then, the older generation, also concerned for the minds of the young, were convinced that too much television was rotting our brains. And that prolonged exposure could potentially lead to the 1970s most deadly affliction, not polio, TB, or rickets, but Square Eyes. (Yes, younger viewers. TVs used to be square(ish).

Of course no one actually got Square Eyes. And technology marched on, bringing us VCRs, Walkmans, ‘home’ computers, and eventually, via the sqwarking medium of glacially slow dial up, the internet.

Nowadays of course parents, would, for the most part, be delighted to see their Square Eyed children ensconced all night in front of the good old telly.

Anything really, as long as they got off their bloody phones.

Mesmerising, addictive, sense sapping conduits for self harm, pornography, and poor lip syncing, phones are without doubt the chattering classes’ most reviled bogeyman, since late stage Boris Johnson.

Apparently our kids’ phones are to blame for everything, from a reduction in school standards, to a rise in hate crime. From a surge in misogyny, to an epidemic of mental health disorders. From the decline of our civilisation, to a plague of neck ache, and bad posture.

Phones, or more accurately smartphones, with the invective on the ‘smart,’ are responsible for it all.

And who is going to deny that phones, and specifically the social media apps on them, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and the rest, pose a generational threat, cause ADHD, lead to depression, and have created a catastrophic, and ongoing, mental health crisis?

Certainly not me. There’s literally no way I’m taking on the wrath of Mumsnet.

We’ve heard these arguments before. But they seem especially current for a couple of reasons.

Recently one of Britain’s last surviving, actually Conservative MPs, the redoubtable, Miriam Cates, has been calling for a ban on phones for the under 16s. A demand echoed by the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey.

I’m not going to get into the details of that tragic case here. This child’s death is already being used as a political football. And I’m not about to join in with the kickabout.

I have no criticism of Miriam Cates. Or Brianna Ghey’s mother. And like any parent, I am sympathetic to their concerns.

Likewise, I have a great deal of respect for Johnathan Haidt, who has done brilliant work mapping the rise of phone ownership among young people, to a growing mental health crisis.

And of course our own Katherine Birbalsingh has achieved amazing results at the Michaela Community School she runs, in part by prohibiting smartphones.

There is no doubt that there is a link between mental health and social media use. And I’m certainly not denying that phones are a constant distraction, and probably best kept out of schools completely.

And yet. And yet.

I’m not convinced that we should be blaming phones for the entirety of our kids’ problems. There is a danger that we are falling into the same trap as the Edwardian book doubters, and would-be opticians from the 1970s.

By assuming that we have birthed an entire generation of uniquely weak minded, malleable, and especially vulnerable children. Young people whose unformed, fragile, baby brains, are unable to cope with the siren call, the addictive charms, and the moral vacuum, of the latest innovation.

With every new technological development presented as exponentially more dangerous and threatening, than the last.

And each Chicken Little generation seemingly forgetting, how they themselves somehow proved capable of navigating the insurmountable dangers, which their own parents assumed, would destroy their tiny minds.

Yes. But this time the threat is real. This time it is different.

Yes. But is it?

Or is this, in part, just the narcissism, of believing we are special people, living in special times?

I’m not being dismissive of young people, many of whom, are going through real hardship right now. I get it.

I’m just saying that being a teenager has always come with its share of trauma. I still have folders full of bloody awful poetry to prove it. (Please subscribe, or I’ll post some of it.)

But never before has simply becoming an adult, been considered a mental health emergency.

Young people seem to be struggling mentally and emotionally with events in their lives, which previous generations would have accepted as just routine, an inevitable part of growing up.

One reason might be that we are no longer teaching our kids resilience and self reliance.

Every child must be kept in a safe space, smothered in cotton wool and coddled. Unable to do anything for themselves, encouraged to ‘speak out’ at the least slight, to run to authority at the tiniest provocation.

The idea of ‘snowflakes’ might be a cliché at this point. But in many cases it is perhaps a better description of the timorous parents, rather than their, straining at the leash, children.

Our society is increasingly one which encourages victimhood, creates a hierarchy of hurt, and places a weird, perverse value on damage and disadvantage.

It seems like all the middle class mums are climbing over each other, like shoppers at the Boxing Day Sales, to have their special child diagnosed with some disorder or other.

If yours is not at least gluten free, on a spectrum, afflicted with ADHD, dyslexic or ‘mildly’ autistic, then you are not really in the game.

That’s not to deny these conditions exist. Just that they cannot logically be anywhere  near as prevalent as we are led to believe.

Let’s take one example. According to NHS Digital one in six British kids are suffering from some kind of mental disorder. One in six! So we’re saying that 17% of normal everyday kids are on some level mentally incapacitated? By life? Really?

If that’s actually the case I wonder what figures they’d come up with for kids living in Ukraine. The Yemen. Or Glasgow.

Or autism. Between 1998 and 2018 the UK experienced an increase in autism diagnosis of 787%. In twenty years! How is that even physically possible?

Maybe there really are that many more sufferers. Maybe it’s simply that more cases are being recorded. Or maybe we’re just expanding what we mean when we say someone is ‘autistic’.  And now use the term to include everyone, from kids with severe life impeding difficulties, to children we would have once simply described as ‘shy’.

And please. Don’t get me started on dyslexia.

Whatever.

The numbers for all these conditions have gone up significantly. Along weirdly (not weirdly) with the level of public funding and charity support, available for dealing with them.

Of course I’m not suggesting that a lot of unscrupulous people might be making money out of exaggerating, and exploiting, teenagers’ perfectly normal levels of anxiety and distress.

Oh hang on. Yes I am.

The main target for the phone blamer’s venom is undoubtedly Chinese micro vlogging site TikTok. It’s insidious algorithm pumping a filthy torrent, an infinite scroll, of mindless dance videos, cat clips and risky challenges straight into the unblemished, virgin hippocampi of our blancmange minded children.

Well yes. On one level that’s true, but in other ways TikTok is the same as anything, books, video games, TV. Or Coldplay records.

Most of what’s available is dross, bits of it are good. While some of it, is actually pretty great actually.

But one thing’s for sure,  if you’re reading this, then it’s probably not for you.

Kids aren’t on Facebook. Not because it doesn’t host enough silly dance videos. But because you’re on it.

Mums have Facebook. Influencers own Instagram. We have Substack. While teenagers get Snapchat, which, with its SnapMaps feature, is literally just LinkedIn for kids.

And everyone, please, for the love of sweet baby Jesus, stay off Tumblr.

Teenagers just want their own spaces, away from their parents, adults and authority figures. They always have. It’s not personal (OK. It’s a bit personal) It’s what growing up is all about.

And online or off, those kid-only spaces aren’t always the healthiest, safest choices.

That’s why I spent much of my teenage years, sitting in a sports centre car park, smoking cigarettes and drinking cider. It could have been worse Mum. Most of my mates were on glue.

I don’t want to go all ‘lived experience’ on you. But I recently sat down with my teenage daughter to watch a YouTube documentary on TikTok.  It was well produced, engaging, and scathing.

It was also terrifying, filled with horror stories about TikTok addiction, with millions of children being swept up into an all pervasive subculture of ‘trends’ where kids challenge each other to snort carpet cleaner, make themselves faint, and punch frogs in the face.

My daughter laughed at the absurdity of it all. She said she was on Tik Tok all the time, and claimed she had never heard of any of them.

But. But. But, you say.

The Chinese invented TikTok but don’t allow their own children to use it for more than a few minutes a day. And what they do see on their version is not stupid lip sync videos, it’s enriching and educational. No wonder their kids are achieving so much, leading the world academically while ours fall woefully behind.

And this may well be true.

But Chinese kids aren’t sitting at the front of the global classroom because of a deficit. A ban, a prohibition on TikTok.

They are top of the league tables because of an addition.

The addition of a society which values academic achievement. The addition of school system which demands excellence. The addition of discipline. And the addition of parents who push their children, prize their academic success, and prioritise their advancement, in a way that many parents in Britain would dismiss as pushy, cruel, and frankly a bit odd.

The big difference is not their version of TikTok. It’s their culture.

It’s a culture shared here at home by asians, many Indians and of course by Jewish families. I wonder how kids from those communities do in relation to the average white British kid. 

(Figures for 2023 GCSE Results GOV.UK)

Oh look. They are literally streets ahead.

Of course blaming phones for both our children’s academic failures and their mental fragility is so much more reassuring than the alternative.

Blaming ourselves.

Tiny children did not put those insidious phones into their own, adorably pudgy, little hands. That was us.

We did it because it was convenient. Because it was easy. Because we lacked the attention span, to concentrate on bringing up our own kids.

How often do you see children in a restaurant or coffee shop, on a train or bus, plonked down and abandoned, to an iPhone, or iPad, watching (the admittedly charming ) Peppa Pig, while their parent sits opposite, ignoring them, and retreating into their own online world?

Maybe we should ban phones from our schools. Yes. I’m up for it. But only if we also ban them for mums in Starbucks.

How did our kids get to this point?

Well I’m no psychologist, but it might have something to do with the fact we locked them in their bedrooms during their most formative teenage years, and made it illegal for them to socialise in the real world.

Our children grew up being told, by us, that normal social interaction was not just bad for their health, but literally deadly.

We forced them to move their lives online. And now have the temerity to criticise them for spending all day on their phones, talking with their friends.

No wonder young people have mental health issues.

Of course the government supports restrictions on phone use among children. Not because it actually cares for their safety, (it doesn’t, if it did, it would never have allowed Rotherham, the Tavistock Clinic, and Heelys) but because it is authoritarian and censorious.

Online restrictions for minors become the ideal Trojan Horse, the perfect excuse to limit free speech, and access to heterodox ideas, for adults.

One reason today’s kids aren’t capable of thinking for themselves isn’t because of smartphones. It is because we now live in a society which actively, publicly and aggressively punishes people, for doing just that.

If the government really wanted to improve our children’s future. It would forget about banning phones. And start building houses.

And if we want to improve their mental wellbeing, we should stop terrifying young children by telling them that mummy and daddy will die screaming in fire, filth and sin if they don’t do their recycling properly.

We should stop telling them that not conforming to creakily old fashioned gender stereotype means they were ‘born in the wrong body,’ a tragedy only fixable by chemicals, and castration.

We should stop teaching them that capitalism, humanity’s undisputed, number one method of lifting people from poverty to prosperity, is the reason they will grow up poorer than their parents.

And stop baiting them into accepting that all the white people are oppressors, while all the black people, the oppressed.

And we must stop making them believe that ‘democracy’ just means picking which out of touch member of the elite, gets to spend all their Mum’s money, on stuff they don’t want, or need.

Our kids don’t need to stop learning their lessons from TikTok videos, on their phones. They need to stop learning their lessons from us, in the real world.

If we really want to make their lives better, maybe we should just stop feeding our children poison. Instead of spending all our time panicking, about the shape of the spoon.

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Thanks for reading Low Status Opinions.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Phones are a tricky and emotive subject. I’ve tried to be balanced, acknowledging the real problems they bring, while also identifying the moral panic which surrounds them. I hope I’ve managed to achieve that. A bit.

If you did enjoy this piece then please share it. Doing so is one sure way of helping this Substack grow.

Another is to become a subscriber. It’s free, though there is a paid option for those of you who enjoy the idea of me eating occasionally.

I usually post every two weeks.

As ever I look forward to seeing you in the comments.

All the very best

LSO.