
Whisper it, but there are tentative signs attitude to screens may be shifting. A raft of new organisations and campaigns are emerging – ironically using the internet – to urge all of us (though especially young people) to reduce our phone use.
I challenge you to find a parent who didn’t cheer last month upon hearing that 21 schools in the London borough of Southwark have sent a letter to thousands of families across the borough urging them to restrict their children’s screen time. And perhaps took note themselves – after all, us parents are as guilty of endless doomscrolling as our offspring.
The moves in Southwark are just one glimmer of hope that our attitudes to the use of phones are changing. There are others.
First up is Scroll Aware, a new social enterprise set up this June by the entrepreneur Jessica Butcher. It is made up of businesses and campaigners who have had enough of smartphones. It plans to launch a #LessScrollMoreSoul campaign later this year.
The Scroll Aware website encourages users to audit their online habits, revealing the time they spend scrolling, and to pledge to live more mindfully and be present with others. Its online store also offers the chance to buy your phone what looks like a mini sleeping bag – dubbed the ‘Smaart Pocket’ – as way to tuck the tech away.
One champion of Scroll Aware is Mumsnet. It too is on the case. In February this year it created its Rage Against the Screen campaign, designed to inform parents about the dangers of smartphones and social media.
Then there’s the head boy of the less-scroll movement: Smartphone Free Childhood, an organisation which has (again, ironically) more than 200,000 followers on Instagram, and campaigns against the ghastly norm of giving children smart devices when they go to secondary school.
There are other, positive stirrings that attitudes to using smartphones are changing. A 2023 Ofcom report, titled ‘Teens on screens’, found that 51% of young people feel they spend too much time online. Then there’s even more recent evidence from a Deloitte survey earlier this month that teenagers themselves wish to reduce their phone use. Digital fatigue appears to be growing.
At St Edward’s School in Oxford, there is now a landline phone in every boarding house.
Meanwhile, the same survey found that one in five consumers has deleted a social media app in the past 12 months, a figure that rises to one in three amongst Gen Z (born between 1995 and 2012).
As someone who holds wellbeing workshops in London schools for parents and teachers, I’ve noticed this trend towards a more analogue future myself. Take Trevor Roberts, a prep school in Belsize Park, North London. There are no screens in sight. Instead, they focus on what we might call slow learning: the use of books, pens and map reading. At St Edward’s School in Oxford, there is now a landline phone in every boarding house.
Parents are rightly worried about smartphone use and the rise in screen time. But they also tell me that their children are becoming more savvy about how social media makes them feel – and taking steps to cut down the time they spend on it.
Children are becoming more savvy about how social media makes them feel – and taking steps to cut down the time they spend on it.
So, we have a problem, but one of which people are increasingly aware. And part of the answer is reckoning with your own tech dependency. The psychiatrist Dr Jamie Arkell, of London’s Nightingale Hospital, tells me he now asks his patients to measure exactly how many hours a day they are online, how that makes them feel, and how they might reduce their screen time. ‘Disconnection prescriptions’ are becoming common.
How can we parents help? First, sign up to some of these admirable new campaigns. My own view on reducing phone use – and I’m writing as a mother who’s shepherded five children through adolescence and written a book on teenage mental health – is that we’re better off focusing on the ‘pull’ of more soul-time rather than the ‘push’ of less scroll time. What we focus on expands: we are what we pay our attention to, as our brain rewires itself and constantly creates new neural pathways.
So, we do well to focus on the good stuff. I'm thinking here of the timeless benefits of offline living and in-person activities – pottering in the garden, chewing the fat, sharing a cuppa, or really taking any excuse to spend time with each other. Book holidays in places with bad WiFi. Set up a family book club. I’ve found this is better than emphasising the downsides of smartphone use or advising teens to disconnect. Bossing them never works (and can be a reason for them to rebel). But championing the positives of living in a more analogue world does.
I’m not alone. Public spaces are being designed more thoughtfully to invite connection: benches facing each other, communal talk tables, free chess boards and community walls for public expression and local event promotion. There are already ‘Happy to chat benches’ which feature a sign saying ‘Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello’ popping up in Newcastle. Analogue is already cool again - vinyl, paper-planners, alarm clocks, disposable cameras and game nights. Vinted, the second-hand marketplace, says digital cameras were in the top five most searched keywords in its UK electronic category between January and May this year. Many bookshops now serve as digital detox zones, offering cafés, events and open-mic nights.
Call me optimistic, but I predict that these changes are just the beginning. One day phone cloakrooms may be common at social gatherings and ‘no-phone zone’ signs visible in public spaces. We will all have mini sleeping bags to silence our tech. It may even be frowned upon for phones to be out in social settings, just like smoking is no longer acceptable. And the doom-laden narrative around teenage wellbeing and screen addiction may become a thing of the past.
Rachel Kelly’s latest book The Gift of Teenagers: Connect More, Worry Less was published by Hachette in May