‘Don’t give dad and mom extra to do to maintain children protected on-line – they need assistance, not homework’

“Parents have said they need more support with online safety, but a ban for under 16s plus plans to issue guidance might not be the help we need”

View 5 Images

Parents who said they want more help keeping their kids safe online might regret asking what they wished for.

Because it sounds like we are about to get a whole lot more homework without any of the real support families and young people need. In an interview with Radio 4, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, said children and young people had told her they did not want a ban on social media.

But she said children also felt they spent too much time on their phones or screens, that they had seen ‘awful stuff’ and they wanted adult help to make online life more manageable. The response to this reasonable request from kids? Produce guidance to be given to parents of 5-16 year olds covering all aspects of online safety, from screen time to appropriate smart phone age.

And bam, just like that, another thing has been added to the parent to-do-or-be-guilty list. Now, along with the worries families already have about online life, parents will be tasked further with even more management of children’s digital use.

I can’t wait for the 70 page handbook to come out.

My flippancy is not in response to the risks online platforms pose to young people – I am all too aware of how harmful online spaces and addictive screen time without limits can be, not just for children but for all online users.

I also know that parents are crying out for help – the numbers taking part in the recently closed government consultation ‘Growing up in an Online World’ tell us as much. Almost 40,000 took part in the parent survey, with more than 116,000 responses to the consultation in total. There’s no doubt this topic matters to parents, young people, educators and safety campaigners.

Research by the Mirror earlier this year found 45% of parents of 11 to 15-year-olds were worried about addictive screen time and 80% of all parents who responded said they wanted a social media ban. But during the consultation period, coverage by the Mirror also saw concerns repeatedly raised by online safety experts, campaigners and children’s charities that a social media ban would not work and that it risked pushing young people into dark, unregulated online spaces.

The consultation responses and the government plan is now being assessed, but with current political disruption of potential leadership challenges to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the intense national scrutiny of the two-horse race between Reform and Labour in the Makerfield by-election and Labour’s reasonable fears of facing an epic fall from power at the next general election, there appears to be a scramble to produce a quick ‘solution’ to appease the parent vote.

But, a word of caution to ministers working to pull the rabbit out of the hat; a blanket social media ban combined with even more pressure on parents to manage screen time and phone habits, does not a solution make. Parents do need more help, but they don’t need more homework. No parent wants their children to be harmed by online tools and content.

No parent wants their kids to waste their childhood, lose sleep, squander school and opportunities or be harmed by strangers or friends due to technology. That’s why many parents are already looking to mobile phone or internet providers and online safety and children’s charities for solutions.

To be honest, sometimes the issue we face is that there is too much information available, too much to navigate and that keeping on top of the pace of change is really difficult and overwhelming.

OPINION

And there is the tech demand in life too – we are all intrinsically attached to online devices. It feels like there is no escape from screens; my kids use tech for homework, music practice, relaxing and socialising. We have rules, we try to talk about online use and we have limits on some types of screen time. But none of this is easy – we work full time, our kids have busy lives and we are often running to stand still.

I know my kids sometimes sneak an extra hour here and there or circumnavigate the boundaries we have put in place. And I also know that some weeks I say no and other weeks I turn a blind eye as I’m spinning so many plates that I pick my battles and choose to let them have the extra time online.

As a family, we are not perfect and we are also not alone; The pressures on parents are overwhelming.

Life has never been more expensive, bills are going up alongside worries about employment; many families have to make difficult choices about how they spend not only money, but time and attention. The last thing most parents need is some government issued guidance to add pressure to the juggle of getting through the week in one piece.

And, the elephant in the room remains: the platforms and big tech.

I have spent some of the last week looking at the kinds of online harm that have been reported to me as the Online Safety Editor for Reach over the last four years. Upon reading through some of the events, I can say with full confidence that online harm is not only a young person’s issue.

And I can also say with certainty that so much more could be done by the platforms currently being used to abuse. Rather than putting so much on parents and banning children from some spaces, wouldn’t we be better investing in digital literacy for all children and young people alongside putting pressure on platforms, online service providers and technology manufacturers to put safety at the heart of design for everyone?

We know they can do it if they have to.

For example, earlier this year the UK threatened to ban X after it found that Grok, the platform’s generative AI tool, had been used thousands of times to undress real images of women and children.

Within days of the threat being made, the platform revised Grok’s design to prevent it being used to undress images in the UK. It just makes no sense that with all their capabilities, big tech and platforms are given a free ticket to design and distribute potentially dangerous products and it falls to consumers to invest time and money into using them safely.

We cannot escape technology.

As a society, we are living in a digital world, we have to future proof it for all generations and ultimately create better digital citizens through education, guard rails and by putting people before profit. Part of this has to be through holding big tech to account at the point of design and distribution to make online life safer for everyone.