Social Media Use: Minimum Age

Caroline Voaden Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I pay tribute to Kim and the other petitioners for bringing the petition to the House. In the Government’s response to the petition, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology referred to

“a systematic review by the UK Chief Medical Officers in 2019”

that

“does not show a causal link between screen-based activities and mental health problems, though some studies have found associations with increased anxiety or depression. Therefore, the government is focused on building the evidence base to inform any future action.”

That review is six years old now, so how much evidence do the Government need? Things have changed radically in the past six years, and we live in a very different digital world from 2019.

The evidence I read in preparation for the debate included a 65% rise in mental health admissions to hospital among under-18s, a staggering 638% increase in admissions for eating disorders among girls aged 11 to 15, a 50% rise in childhood myopia, a 56% increase in ADHD diagnosis since the widespread adoption of smartphones, a 27% increase in just the last two years in the number of children with speech and language challenges, and a rise in obesity that means that about a quarter of children leaving primary school are now judged to be overweight or clinically obese. The evidence comes from the UK, Japan, Canada and Australia—it is all there and is growing.

As many other Members have said, we protect our children from smoking and alcohol. We do not allow them to buy those products because we know the damage they can do. Just because mental health damage is not as visible as a damaged lung or a damaged liver due to cirrhosis—just because we cannot see it, measure it and photograph it—that does not mean the evidence is not there. We can see it all around us.

This morning I spent time talking to the mental health leads in Devon about children’s mental health. They talked about the difficulty in employing enough psychologists and psychiatrists to cope with the mental health crisis among children in Devon, because of the vacancies they have and the ever-increasing need for children’s mental health support—it just grows and grows. Although it is right to give children the mental health care that they need, which they and the parents ask for, we surely have to look at this the other way round and say, “We have to stop this rising trend and to look at the cause. We have to turn it on its head; we owe it to our children.”

As the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) said, all the graphs show that the change started in 2012. For the sake of our teachers, who are trying to cope with the ever-increasing pressure of special educational needs, autism spectrum disorders and so on, the time has come for us to act and not look for more evidence.

It is time we used the precautionary principle for smartphones. That enables decision makers to adopt precautionary measures when the scientific evidence about an environmental or human health hazard is uncertain but the stakes are high—and we know the stakes are high for our children. Some may see that as unscientific and an obstacle to progress, but to me it is an approach that can—and, in this situation, must—be used to protect the health of our youngest humans. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the Online Safety Act

“puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search services, making them responsible for their users’ safety, with the strongest provisions in the Act for children.”

Platforms

“likely to be accessed by children will have a duty to take steps to prevent children from encountering the most harmful content”—

such as—

“pornography and content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide.”

We all know that we cannot trust the tech companies to do that. It is not in their interest. They have developed addictive apps to keep our children on them, using them hour after hour; it is not in their interest to do what is required to protect our children. Where, in the code, is a restriction of content that perpetuates the myth of the perfect body, that is not hardcore content like online pornography or suicide videos? The subtle stuff of social media—the addictiveness—is really dangerous. My concern is about the long hours that children spend on screens, and the time spent indoors instead of playing with friends and making real human connections.

Although we are talking about teenage use, what is even worse is the fact that 25% of three to four-year-olds in the UK now own a smartphone. Tiny children are looking at a screen rather than interacting with other humans. Children are not learning to speak and communicate, because babies do not learn from a machine. They are captivated by the videos, but they are not learning how to communicate with other humans. Older children are not experiencing boredom. We all remember standing at bus stops, right? We did not have a mobile phone; we got bored. We looked at the sky, around us and at other people. It is part of the development of the human brain. Has anyone ever seen a teenager standing at a bus stop now getting bored? It just does not happen.

I would like to leave the last word with John Gallacher, professor of cognitive health at the University of Oxford. He said that he found

“a linear relationship between higher rates of anxiety and depression and time spent networking on social media sites…In the most extreme cases, we had young people reporting they were spending up to eight hours a day using these sites.”

We must find a way to change that for our children. I do not believe in a ban on smartphones—that is not workable—but we must raise the minimum age for social media use. We must change the conversation and give parents the support they need, so that there is peer pressure not to have phones rather than to have them. We must support all the brave schools trying to eradicate this problem for their teenagers. I fully commend the petition and, cross party, we really need to do something about this.