There Is Another Way

By Selwyn Figueras

On 1 February this year, I had the privilege to speak at Gibtalks about the impact and dangers of smartphones and social media for children. What follows, given the context of the publication of draft legislation to ban smartphones from school a few weeks ago, is a shortened version of what I said that afternoon…

“Good afternoon everyone.

At this point in the day, you’ll all be sitting a little less comfortably than when you walked in this morning. And that’s ok. Because what we’re about to discuss isn’t particularly comfortable either.

I know I will find these next few minutes tough. Because talking about smartphones and social media use by children—what they do to childhood and how they affect kids—is deeply uncomfortable.
But it’s not as uncomfortable as the feeling you get, as a parent, the moment you realise you’re losing your child to social media.

That shift often happens within days of children getting their first smartphone. Brightness fades. Conversations change. And too often, parents are left watching, helpless, as the light in their children’s eyes goes out.

So whilst talking about this is uncomfortable, it’s not dangerous. Social media IS dangerous though, it is particularly damaging for children, and the kids are not ok.

As parents, as responsible adults, this isn’t our fault. But we can do something about it. We HAVE to do something about it.

Is it really that bad?

I’ve spent a long time reflecting on why social media is so bad for us—especially for children. At first, it almost seemed silly. A crusade against memes, TikToks, and jokes? Just harmless fun, right?

But that’s the trick. The ‘sh*ts and giggles’ are just the decoy.

The memes and jokes hide the sinister and inescapable truth - social media is addictive by design. Beyond being addictive, the real danger for children is in the way it rewires how children measure their self-worth.

We’ve replaced internal validation—self-assuredness—with external validation.

Children today seek validation from the crowd.

A brutal, unrelenting, and unforgiving crowd.

They are being taught that their worth depends almost entirely on the approval of anonymous strangers, amplified and manipulated by machines.

Social media represents the weaponisation of validation in the pursuit of profit.

It is the return of the public (social) execution. Ask any child excluded from a WhatsApp group how that feels and then argue that it isn’t an execution.

Social media leaves them nowhere to hide. No privacy. No emotional safe space.

Even at home, phones follow them—to the bathroom, to the bedroom, demanding attention. Harassing them from the moment they wake up to the last moment before they fall asleep sleep.

And they can never get enough.

No amount of likes is ever, or ever will be enough. It’s like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Then there’s the illusion of belonging. Social media promises connection, but it only isolates.

Kids today aren’t connecting with others, they’re performing for them.

And when they make mistakes—as all kids do—social media makes sure they’re punished for it.

Their mistakes become content, amplified and never forgotten. A permanent and unforgiving record of a bad moment in time.

Smartphones were meant to work for us. Instead, with social media, they have enslaved us.

But it’s not our fault. Big Tech wanted it that way.

At first, they gave it to us for free—just like the street dealer offering the first hit ‘on the house.’

But of course, there is always a price. The price is our attention, our anxiety, and our children’s mental health.

Adults are wracked with self-doubt, yet can’t stop scrolling. Taking 1,000 selfies to find the one that might go viral. Hoping, desperately, for validation.

It’s a vice. Like alcohol. Like smoking. But unlike those, kids are left to fend for themselves with technology that’s tailor-made by some of the world’s leading brains to be the most addictive, currently legal, technology known to man.

They make most addictive technology, but they shirk responsibility for the consequences of its use. As far as they’re concerned, it’s the parents who don’t properly control access to it that are problem.

This is not entirely dissimilar to the idea of the community drugs kingpin saying that the addiction is down to mothers hooked on crack not managing their children’s own habit.

Since big tech doesn’t want to accept responsibility, the impact on children is something we have to talk about.

Because we had time to grow up offline. They don’t.

We remember a time before social media—a childhood of play, discovery, and freedom.

They’ve been robbed of that.

How much more do we need to see or hear before we act?

We know this is a crisis. The evidence is overwhelming. Only the tech companies are spending money to persuade us it isn’t.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, explains the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one.

For generations, childhood was about real-world play and exploration. Kids spent time outside. They took risks. They figured things out. But gradually, parents became more afraid of what might happen. So children stayed indoors. Then came the smartphone. In 2007, the iPhone was born. And in the early 2010s, things changed drastically.

Global mental health presented as fairly stable until 2012. The world had what were considered normal levels of mental health challenges until that point. Then suddenly, after 2012, all figures of perceived and reported mental health crises shot up. Everywhere.

But why? Well now the smartphone had a selfie cam. Wi-Fi and data became widely accessible. ‘Like’ and ‘share’ functions were deployed. And then came the algorithms and the news feed functionalities.

Since then
• Teen depression rates have doubled in the US, UK, and elsewhere.
• Anxiety disorders have doubled.
• Self-harm among girls is up nearly 200%.
• Suicide rates among girls have nearly tripled.

This isn’t coincidence. This is CAUSATION.

A recent study in The Lancet found that hospital admissions for eating disorders among girls have increased by 500%.

In the UK, there was a 65% increase in the number of 5 to 18-year-olds admitted to hospital for a mental health crisis in the decade to 2022. That’s nearly 40,000 young people per year.
Admissions for starving children with eating disorders rose by 514%.

This is because social media has rewired body image, social status, and attention. Social media is reprogramming young minds.

Beyond self-esteem, another great danger is the unprecedented radicalising power of social media. Radicalisation isn’t just religious anymore—it’s ideological, misogynistic, violent.

Take the case of Axel Rudakubana. In January the 18-year-old was sentenced to 52 years in prison for murdering three children and attempting to murder eight more—at a Taylor Swift dance class in the UK.

He hadn’t been flagged as an extremist. He was just ‘fascinated by killing’. That fascination was likely fuelled by algorithmically-amplified content online.

One of his victims, Bebe King, was stabbed 122 times.

How much more do we need to see?

And what happens when you take phones away?

A school in the UK recently removed smartphones from students for two weeks. What happened? Kids started talking again. Playing. Laughing. Sleeping better.

So now we understand how bad it is. We know the children are not okay, and we also know who’s responsible—Big Tech.

And we can’t expect them to act. WE have to act.

And we can’t wait either. This is a more dangerous and more immediate threat even than the climate emergency.

And the good news is that we CAN do something about it.

For parents asking what they can do, the answer is simple:
Delay. Delay. Delay.
Start setting limits from the very moment your child is born. The sooner you set those rules, those expectations, the easier it will be to protect your children.

It’s not easy—but it’s not as hard as we think.

In our family, the turning point was learning about Molly Russell’s death in 2017, when our eldest was not yet 6years old..

Molly had had dinner with her family one night, packed her school bag for the next day, said goodnight (giving no hint at anything being wrong) —and never woke up in the morning. She took her own life after consuming harmful content on suicide and self-harm online. That consuming social media was the cause of Molly’s death was a landmark verdict.

Not much solace for her parents though, right? I met her Dad last year when he came to Gibraltar to take part in GibSams mental health awareness week. Meeting Ian was something I wanted to do and dreaded in equal measure. I didn’t expect I’d manage to keep it together when I did. I was right.

After the news and analysis around Molly’s death had sunk in, I let my children know that they would not have smartphones “for a very very long time.”

I explained why. I was very honest and clear. As parents, we modelled the behaviour. Phones down at dinner. Time for conversation. Boundaries.

Because that’s the elephant in the room - many adults don’t want to acknowledge this issue as a problem because if we’re going to ask kids to put their phones down, we’re going to have to put our own phones down too.

Then, when our eldest moved to secondary school, we gave him a ‘dumb’ phone.

It wasn’t always easy. But he’s thriving. We still have the parenting challenges you would expect, but he sleeps. He focuses. He talks. He’s present.

One Friday evening, we were out to dinner. My son looked around and said, “Dad, look at the tables around us.”

Everyone else was on their phones.

That was the moment I knew we were doing something right.

Smartphones have no place in schools. Yes, that’s right. There is no NEED for smartphones in schools. That the technology is beneficial in many ways is beyond question, but the trade off in attention, focus and behaviours is too costly.

It is time to ban smartphones, from bell to bell, in schools. [I’m delighted the Government recently published an amendment to legislation which will have that effect, subject to some reservations about the general nature of one of the exemptions.]

Every country and school that has moved in this direction has seen massive benefits—better attention, better behaviour, less bullying.

It just makes sense.

Public support is strong—more than three-quarters of UK voters want social media age limits raised to 16. More and more community leaders are calling for it. We are on the right side of history. This is Big Tech’s tobacco moment.

There is another way

Remember this is just about delaying—not denying. No smartphones till 14. No social media till 16.

We won’t stop the tide from coming in. But we can keep moving up the beach as it does.

Some tech companies get this. Like Nokia, now owned by HMD.

In early 2024, I contacted their CEO with an idea: a transition phone. No social media. Just essentials. Safe out of the box.

He said they were ‘already working on it.’ Weeks later, the Better Phone Project launched—a global collaboration between HMD, parents, and experts created as a forum for parents and the tech company to understand how we had to deal with this challenge of our time.

A so-called ‘transition phone’ is coming this summer. I can’t wait to see how it begins to help children and parents together to face the social crisis of social media.

As this demonstrates, we need everyone working together—tech companies, governments, telecoms companies, schools, and parents.

So in conclusion, what happened is that we embraced technology as it came down the line because we saw the value it represented. We didn’t see the downsides as we adopted it. But we know them now, So this isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of change.

Delay access to smartphones. Push for safer tools. Model the behaviour.

We owe our children time. Time to grow up. Time to build intrinsic self-worth. Time to belong to themselves. We owe ourselves time too.

The time for US to be the ones who teach them, to watch them grow as we guide them in their first steps, in the good and the bad moments.

Above all, the time to love and be close to them.

Before, all too quickly, all the grown-up stuff takes over, and the most special time you will have ever had with them, is gone.

Selwyn Figueras is a barrister and father who has campaigned about the use of social media and devices amongst young people.