Negotiating smartphone use in the family is an explosive issue, as many parents will testify. When to allow a child to have a mobile, how to police what’s on it, not to mention trying to get them to put the damned thing down without descending into a screaming match – it can feel like an all-consuming battle.
There has long been a drive to stop children using phones in lessons and many already lock them away on the classroom.
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In a town in Wicklow, however, they’ve gone one better. Indeed, almost the whole town – 95 per cent of the 22,000-strong community in Greystones and neighbouring Delgany – has agreed to withhold phones from their children, until at least the age of 12, meaning that the vast majority of the area’s 3,500 primary school pupils are today phone-free.
No phones in the classroom, and no pesky phones at home, either.
In a world where many parents are battling to prise devices from the fingers of children as young as five, this feels revolutionary – hence, a succession of camera crews from around the world descending on this picturesque Wicklow town.
‘I’ve had calls from Australia, camera crews from the US, France, Scandinavia,’ says Rachel Harper, principal of St Patrick’s National School who spearheaded the initiative. ‘On one level it’s amazing as we’re just this little school, but on the other hand it tells me that this is a global issue: it doesn’t matter where you live, parents have the same concerns.’
The worries around mobile phone use hardly need spelling out: smartphones are a gateway to connectivity and information, but also to the emotional pressures inflicted by cyberbullying and social media and exposure to unpoliced, adult content.
Mobile phone use also impacts concentration: a recent Unesco Global Education Monitoring report showed children can take up to 20 minutes to concentrate once disturbed by a notification on their phone.
Yet most of our children are desperate to get their hands on one, not least my tenyear-old daughter Connie. Some of her classmates have had smartphones for a couple of years, and now in her final year at primary school, the pester pressure is ramping up.
My husband Duncan and I settled on a compromise: determined to hold out until at least secondary school, we purchased a small, Nokia app-free ‘dumbphone’ from which Connie can call and text us when she starts to walk to and from school by herself but cannot access the internet. It has bought us some time, though I imagine the novelty will wear off quickly in the face of ongoing chatter from classmates about their TikTok videos.
On my school mums’ WhatsApp group, the talk of whether, when and what kind of phone has been rumbling for months, and the angst is palpable: no one wants to give their daughter nor son a smartphone, but how much longer can they stave off the inevitable?
One, who has a son in Connie’s year and an older teenage son who has had his own device for two years, is the ghost of Christmas future. ‘Once they have got one that is it – they’re gone, and you won’t get them back,’ she warns. ‘Hold off as long as you can.’
The peer pressure aspect is something headteacher Rachel recognises all too well: ‘Parents were telling me their kids would come home and say they were the only ones without a phone. Before you know it, only three in the class don’t have phones and then those parents end up giving in because they don’t want their children to be the odd one out.
‘Then they can blame the school. So I thought ‘how about making school part of the solution, not the problem?’
As a principal for 12 years, four of them at St Patrick’s, the charismatic and amiable Rachel has seen the transformation wrought by technology on children with her own eyes. While she doesn’t have a family of her own, the evidence has been right there in front of her in the classroom.
‘We’ve never allowed phones in the school, but that doesn’t mean that what’s on them isn’t entering the playground,’ she says. ‘I started to notice that children, even those around eight years old, were a lot more conscious of their bodies when they went swimming. Some girls had calorie counting apps on their phones. It just felt like their childhood was getting shorter and shorter.’
Other children would talk to her about influencers they wanted to emulate – ‘really, the only people they should be looking up to at this age is their parents’ – while some of the 11-year-olds in her school confided that they were messaging on WhatsApp groups at 11pm or midnight. ‘So you can see how they creep into the bedrooms and disturb sleep,’ she says.
Then there’s the access to adult content. ‘We have 17 Ukrainian kids who are doing brilliantly in the school, but it also means there’s a lot of talk about the war in Ukraine, and by giving them a phone, at a click of a button, children can research it and find stuff that’s very disturbing,’ she says.
‘The problem is that kids are so clever, and they just know how to manoeuvre their way around these phones, but they are not emotionally ready to navigate what they find.’
All this, together with anecdotal evidence from parents telling her their children were requesting smartphones at an ever younger age, convinced Rachel she had to act. What she came up with is a voluntary code, she insists, not a ban on mobiles: ‘The moment you say a ban, that’s when you get resistance,’ she says.
The wider community had already established an initiative called It Takes a Village, set up by the community’s eight primary schools to address the notable increase in anxiety levels among pupils returning to classrooms post-Covid. Given the risks posed by smartphone ownership, addressing their use seemed like the natural next step.
‘In May I learned that one local school had brought in a voluntary smartphone code, and I thought how impactful it would be if all of us signed up to it at the same time,’ she recalls.
‘I put together a letter explaining to parents that It Takes a Village is promoting wellbeing, and one of the areas we felt would really help would be to delay access to smartphones. I asked the principals if they would put their signature at the bottom of it, because by putting all our names on the list it showed this was a community endeavour.’
She was well aware there could be a backlash. ‘There’s no right or wrong way to parent – everyone has their individual style, and there was a risk people could say ‘who are you to tell me how to raise my kids?’,’ she says. ‘So a lot of work went into talking to parents, really giving them the benefits.’
The response has been beyond her wildest dreams. Not only have young pupils at St Patrick’s – and seven other nearby primary schools – stopped begging their parents for phones, some who already had them, have handed them back. ‘I certainly didn’t expect that,’ she laughs. ‘Although it’s a very heartening development.’ Heartening? More like ground-breaking.
All the families taking part do so anonymously, so there is no risk of finger-pointing at those who haven’t signed up.
‘Ultimately, we can’t control everybody and nor do we want to,’ she says. ‘We can promote it and then the rest is down to group accountability. If you were in the class and 70 per cent had signed up and you’re in the 30 per cent, you’re more encouraged to go with the 70 per cent.
‘Either way there’s no judgment involved. Some parents come to me and say they’re one of those awful parents that got their child a smartphone and I say to them everyone is trying to do their best, we just didn’t see how progressive these phones were going to be and how addictive they were for children.’
None of this means that St Patrick’s is a ‘backwoods’ kind of school: they do use tablets in lessons on occasion and talk about the benefits of technology.
‘We’re not anti-technology, it’s part of our lives,’ Rachel says. ‘This is about making sure our kids are adequately prepared and equipped to handle the responsibilities that come with technology. We’re also trying to protect the children in future so that the age they get mobile phones doesn’t keep getting younger and younger. Some eight-year-olds had them already. Is it going to be seven-year-olds next, then six?’
The ship may already have sailed: recent research has revealed that 24 per cent of six year olds now have a phone of their own, and are already using them to watch streaming services, use social media and play games online. Is this like King Canute trying to hold back the inevitable tide? ‘The way I see it, any delayed smartphone purchase is a win,’ Rachel says.
If there has been any carping about her scheme, she is unaware of it. ‘The only criticism I have heard is that we are kicking the can down the road to secondary school, but I don’t agree,’ she says.
‘We are doing a lot of foundation work with the kids, talking to them about using phones in a sensible way. We just feel 12 is a much better age for them to be able to cope with a smartphone and all that comes with it.’
Little wonder that Rachel’s bold move has caught the attention of not just media crews but government ministers.
Last month Rachel met with then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to discuss the opportunity of rolling her initiative across the rest of the country. She would be thrilled if they did.
‘As another parent said to me, you wouldn’t let your child open the door to a stranger and leave them in this room,’ she says. ‘By giving them a phone unsupervised, that is effectively what’s happening. This just helps keep our children safer for longer.’
You would certainly struggle to find any criticism in the playground at St Patrick’s, where there seems to be universal support for Rachel.
Laura Bourne, 36, is mother to Noah, six, and Sophia, five, and while her children are still in the early years of primary school she says the relief is palpable among her cohort that a decision they had already come to dread has been removed: ‘It feels like it’s one less pressure to navigate – no one wants to be the parent of the kid who feels left out because they are the only one without a phone.’
It has been trickier for some parents of older children, where phones had already becoming an issue. ‘It has been a bit more of a struggle, the kids miss the games. But by tackling this as a community it means everyone is in the same boat.’
For stay-at-home mum Kim Harris, 41, mother to Daisy Murphy, aged ten, and eight-year-old Sam, it’s nothing short of a godsend. ‘While smartphones have their place in society, I look at my own childhood and it seems to me there are zero drawbacks to delaying children having them until they’re older,’ she says.
Christina Capatina agrees. The 38-year-old businesswoman, who runs a bespoke furniture company with her husband, is mother to Jane, 11, and eight-year old Rachel and had been fielding requests for a phone from her eldest daughter for several months.
‘It was a big demand in our house,’ she says. ‘I tried to push the conversation away as far as possible as I saw giving Jane a phone as the technological equivalent of taking her into a new world without the adult resources to cope with it – and once you open the door to that, it’s very hard to shut it.’
Rachel’s initiative has seen the pestering all but vanish: ‘Now, instead of sitting in the playground talking about what they’ve seen on TikTok, the children are exchanging ideas, chatting using their imagination. In other words doing what children should be doing.’
