There was a really interesting episode of “All in the Mind” on Radio 4 recently about mobile phones and young people which talked to two psychologists – Amy Oban and Linda Blair.
It pointed to current calls to ban mobile phones, claims phones are damaging children’s mental health that they are causing an epidemic among young People. Dr Amy Oben works at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge where she leads the Digital Mental Health programme. She has recently won a £2 million research grant into “Social Media Mechanisms Affecting Adolescent Mental Health”. She has published over 20 articles in the past 4 years on this topic. Amy has spent over 10 years researching the effects of mobile phones on young people and their mental health. Her research, involving a study of over 80 systematic reviews on mobile phones and mental health has shown such claims are largely unsubstantiated. She pointed out that today’s call for bans on children’s use of mobile phones are very similar to the historic response to the development of radio here it was claimed children were becoming addicted and faced becoming addicted. She drew an interesting analogy with children swimming – and the threat of drowning. We do not call for bans on swimming. Rather we teach children how to swim and put safety mechanisms in place.
That is the strategy she recommends for mobile phones. Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist pointed out how the current response is largely because older people had difficulty with change particularly when it affects young people. Mobile phones are not going to go away. They just aren’t Children are not going to stop using them. Why should they when adults don’t? Linda Blair has spent her career studying children’s mental health. She argued that adults banning phones from young people risks damaging the trust between children and adults – be it parents of teachers.
What we grownups need to do is to better understand young people, and start building strategies to support them in understanding how to use and not use mobile phones, but also to control where the real problem lies. In the media, the large tech companies, and the preponderance of misinformation.
Teaching-Maths 