Babbage: Teens and their screens
Babbage from The Economist
The Economist
4.8 • 807 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2024
⏱️ 45 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Ever since there have been smartphones and social media, there have been concerns about how they might be affecting children. Over the past decade, doctors have seen a decline in mental health in the young in much of the rich world. But whether that rise can be attributed to technology is still a matter of fierce debate. Nevertheless, demands are growing to proactively restrict teenagers’ access to phones and social media, just in case. How concerned should parents and teachers be? Or is this just another moral panic?
Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Tom Wainwright, The Economist's technology and media editor; Clare Fernyhough, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood; Carol Vidal of Johns Hopkins University; Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University and the author of “Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time”.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this episode of Babbage is available to listen for free, but if you want to listen every week, |
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| 0:15.9 | How can governments play a pivotal role as the world shifts. From decarbonising the economy to |
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| 0:29.3 | listening to Government Insights, the new podcast from E.Y. Parthenon. This series explores how government |
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| 0:41.3 | Government Insights is out now. Download today wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:49.8 | The Economist |
| 0:53.0 | The Economist. |
| 1:08.0 | My friend Daisy and I started a WhatsApp group in early February. |
| 1:11.9 | We've both got daughters who are coming up to secondary school age. |
| 1:16.5 | That's Claire Fernie Huff, whose daughters are seven and nine years old. |
| 1:24.2 | In the UK, the norm is that by 12, 97% of children will have a smartphone. |
| 1:27.9 | And we were looking into the future with absolute horror about the fact that they were either going to have to get a smartphone or we risk them being the odd one out |
| 1:32.5 | and them being ostracised. They aren't the only parents who are increasingly concerned about how |
| 1:38.3 | much their children interact with technology such as smartphones from a young age. At the top of their concerns is social media. |
| 1:47.0 | These platforms are designed by the brightest brains in the world to keep us all scrolling and clicking 24 hours a day. |
| 1:54.0 | That's their business model. That's how they want to make profit, of course, for their shareholders. |
| 1:59.0 | Many parents and teachers worry that screen time distracts children from schoolwork |
| 2:03.6 | and keeps them from playing outside or forming relationships in the real world. |
| 2:08.0 | They also worry about children staying up all night or accessing harmful content |
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