In just over a year, families, professionals and public opinion have converged on the same demand: to postpone the arrival of smartphones until the end of adolescence.
Board member of Adolescència Lliure de Mòbils Catalunya and ethics professor at IQS – Ramon Llull University.
Recently, Josep Angel Guimerà, a professor of communication at the UAB, told me, while we were having a coffee, his surprise at the social moment we are living in: for the first time since the emergence of digital technologies and the internet , society has stood up and asked to review the adoption of a technology . It seemed that the vector of digital innovation was in one direction, but, in an unprecedented way in thirty years, society is questioning whether we have not gone too far and is demanding to postpone the arrival of the smartphone. Right now, its presence is around 80% among 12-year-old children . Is this possible? Will we know how to go back and limit its use according to age and space to promote better development of minors? So many things have changed in a year and a half that some of us dare to respond with a timid, but forceful, yes.
We are not talking about an ephemeral or only local dynamic. When, in November 2023, a group of families from Poblenou in Barcelona wanted to respond to the discomfort that an entrenched social consensus was generating in us (the idea that the transition to secondary school was the established time to give a child a mobile phone) and tens of thousands of families across the country joined in, we did not think that we would get this far. On a global scale, there had already been active movements for some time, such as Wait Until 8th and others that were added taking advantage of the wave , such as Smartphone Free Childhood . And here, once the fuse was lit, different groups have gradually joined in, starting with the pediatric profession, which has issued different statements recommending the arrival of smartphones at the end of adolescence, or the commission of experts of the Ministry of Youth , which explicitly states that 16 years of age is the right time for the arrival of this technology.
At this point, no one doubts that the smartphone is a source of unnecessary conflict : it increases distraction, makes concentration difficult, is a free door to access pages with harmful and inappropriate content and has a negative impact on school, sociability and family. And even if this does not always happen, what we can certainly say is that it means an enormous opportunity cost for a teenager who today, on average, spends more than four hours a day on the phone. The mistake has been ours, for being too naive, uncritically assuming any technological novelty, fascinated by its promises of hyperconnection. And also of digital companies, which have taken advantage of this gateway to the intimacy of a 'gadget' like the mobile phone, which has already become an appendix to our body, to take advantage of each and every one of our vulnerabilities.
Some consider that proposing a mobile-free adolescence is a step backwards, that it is like going back to the caves. Quite the opposite: a movement like this shows that technology must be at the service of people and that it is not technology (or the interests hidden within it) that should set the pace of technological adoption. By saying no to what seems dehumanizing to us, we are reminding ourselves once again that we are sovereign over the future we want to build. It is about remembering, with common sense and humility, those universal constants inherent to the human condition : the need to be able to develop the capacity for attention, to limit a dynamic of acceleration that has become anthropologically indigestible and to do so in those stages of growth in which the person is most vulnerable and needs stable references to hold on to.
Right now, a commission at the Catalan level promoted by the Ministry of Education is assessing the suitability of the regulation that makes schools mobile-free spaces. The challenge, obviously, is to guarantee good digital education and skills in computing, algorithmic and abstract thinking, essential today, but which must be able to be transmitted without the need for our children to carry a smartphone in their pocket. This also implies reviewing all the changes in digital innovation that have been made in classrooms in recent years and which, it seems, have not had the expected results, quite the opposite.
Obviously, the key to all of this still lies with families , who are the ones who give digital technology to their children earlier than would be advisable. For this reason, we must continue to promote better training, knowledge of the associated risks and a commitment to the creation of pacts between families. These pacts allow the social pressure so that our child is not excluded from the group of friends to disappear. We are receiving news from some schools and institutes where, as a result of having implemented these pacts, at the beginning of ESO almost 80% of the children do not have their own smartphone.
We often forget that, although the environment has changed a lot, human beings remain the same as they were hundreds of years ago and that the most basic and fundamental things (learning to relate to each other, to be critical, to read and write, to make mistakes and acknowledge them) remain a challenge today , just as they were then. Our relationship with technology, therefore, should not become an escape forward or an excuse to forget the difficult task of humanization that lies ahead of us, but rather a new opportunity to reflect on what is truly fundamental in education and upbringing. Putting technology in its place, giving ourselves the time and space necessary to integrate it into our lives with judgment - or denying it if we believe it is better for us - will be the only way to guarantee our well-being, our future and that of future generations. And today, everything tells us that postponing the arrival of the smartphone until late adolescence is the option that makes the most sense.
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