I was really struck this week by the irony of an Instagram advert for an app which turned my smartphone into a simpler one with less functions, apps and access to social media. Coupled with the recent press coverage around smartphone usage in schools it made me stop and consider what this meant for my own children but perhaps more importantly for me.
At the Centre for Emotional Health our vision is for everyone to live an emotionally healthy life. We know that our emotional health is influenced by the relationships around us and how we connect to ourselves and each other. Having good emotional health is also a crucial element in helping people develop and maintain supportive relationships. This got me thinking about what role do smartphones have to play in those relationships around us and, importantly for our young people, each person’s relationship with their smartphone?
Whilst it’s hard not to recognise the potential benefits of a smartphone for educational purposes (homework, apps, information from the internet) it’s also crucial to ask ourselves what else is going on whilst each and every one of us is engaging in the myriad of content at our fingertips that sits within each and every smartphone. Is it taking us away from the real world? Is it affecting us, either in a positive or negative way?
We know the world of largely unregulated social media platforms is both appealing and addictive but also full of potentially harmful content. The danger for everyone but particularly our young people, whose brains are still developing, is having the ability to know when to say ‘enough’. As highlighted in the recent report we produced with Demos, emotional health and relationships are intertwined. As stated in the report, it’s been well established that a range of social factors, including negative social relationships (which includes relationships with our phones) can be risk factors for mental health disorders and can contribute to poor emotional wellbeing.
Children learn from the behaviours of adults around them and so we need the adults around children to build their capabilities in this area. It’s important to ask ourselves what relationships do we as parents/carers/educators have with our smartphone and what impact might this be having on each and every relationship we have? In a recent National Parent survey of 5490 parents conducted by Parentkind, 47% of parents say screen time causes arguments within their households and more than a third of parents say their child is missing out on sleep because they spend too much time on screens.
With all this in mind, we have been thinking about things we can do to help ourselves and children form healthy relationships with phones and the digital world within them.
Conversations – It is vital that you are having open age-appropriate conversations with them about their usage and what they are accessing.
Self-awareness – As one of the building blocks of The Nurturing Programme, it’s so important that we are developing our own self-awareness, and that of our children, around the amount of time we are spending engaging with content on our smartphones. Encouraging ourselves and our children to acknowledge when we’ve been on it for too long and recognising when it’s distracting from our relationships around us will help support building a healthy relationship with a phone or indeed the internet more widely.
Family agreements – Supporting healthy relationships with our smartphones goes further than just switching off the router. We know that discussions with the whole family to set out healthy boundaries and family agreements around usage can be really helpful. These boundaries might include age-appropriate screen time limits, agreed times when as a family you aren’t on phones e.g. mealtimes and at what point in the evening they no longer used from.
I’ve been thinking about my own smartphone and social media use, how am I using it to connect with others and in what ways might it be causing a disconnection from my relationships, particularly with my own children. Perhaps we all need to carry out our own individual and family or community audits of smartphone use?
Luce Carter, Education Lead at The Centre for Emotional Health
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