A few years ago, I saw an infant — maybe two or even younger — in his buggy at the bus stop with a smartphone in his fat little hands.
I stared at him as he stared at the phone. He lost interest at one point and wailed.
His young mother looked up briefly from her own phone, stuffed a packet of crisps into his hands, adjusted his screen, and returned to staring at her own screen. After a bit, conscious that he would not get her attention, he did the same. It's one of the most haunting things I've ever seen.
Tanya Gold is haunted by the image of a boy in his buggy clutching a smartphone while his mother stared at her own screen
No one can be parented by technology. Lord knows what will happen to that child.
My son is nearly 11 and about to start senior school. He gets screentime once a week, but only if he does his chores, and I've noticed he is most likely to be grumpy after it. So, no, despite considerable pressure to do so, I will not be buying him a smartphone when he starts big school.
I am not the only one concerned. Last month 20 head teachers in St Albans, Hertfordshire, asked parents not to buy their children a smartphone until they're 14. I'm going further; my son can't have one until he's 18, and he must buy it himself.
I consider myself a permissive mother, but for once I agree with Katharine Birbalsingh, 'Britain's strictest head teacher', who says that giving a child a smartphone 'is the most dangerous thing you can do... every paedophile out there, every gang member out there knows where your child lives'. And that is not my only objection.
My son and I browse old-fashioned Nokia handsets because he will need a telephone and, he pouts, because he will be in a minority. Many parents manage to hold out during primary school, but 90 per cent of children will start senior school with a smartphone.
I made my decision when I saw the infant at the bus stop, and I've seen nothing since to change my mind.
Katharine Birbalsingh, dubbed 'Britain's strictest head teacher', thinks that giving a smartphone to a child is 'the most dangerous thing you can do'
New technology, as far as I'm concerned, is a danger for all children, whose brains are not yet fully developed. Cases of childhood anxiety, alongside many other conditions, are going through the roof.
First, as Birbalsingh points out, there are the material dangers. Unless you are hyper-vigilant, you are unlikely to know what your child is looking at or who they are talking to.
Three in five children report they have been contacted by people who have made them uncomfortable online.
My great fear is p*rnography. (If I had a daughter, it would be online predators). The idea that the first thing my son will see of adult physical love is an abusive film on a smartphone is so horrifying, that when I think about it, I sweat.
I don't even want to think about what exposure to it does to young children's sense of self and capacity to love.
Then there's social media. Three quarters of children aged ten to 12 have an account on one of the big sites.
There are so many horror stories about vulnerable children destroyed by this evil. Bullied girls who end their lives after encounters on WhatsApp; children who think they are ugly because they believe the Instagram filters; youngsters (especially boys) radicalised by TikTok; the nightmare of sexting, when intimate photographs of girls are passed around the class.
This all takes place in an online world where normal processes for resolving conflict just don't exist.
I made the decision partly from my own experience with addiction — to alcohol. I know as well as anyone that the bigger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one — and online is, at least partially, a fantasy life.
It's not only about what your child is doing if they are always online. It's about what they aren't doing: tree-climbing, rock-pooling, cooking, playing board games, reading.
We've worked to give our child a full life offline, and it's rewarding. I am sure that my son is even-tempered, emotionally available and physically active due to his very limited screentime. I love his comparative innocence; it's a truism that the children who are not allowed to be children never grow up.
Three quarters of children aged ten to 12 have a social media account on one of the big sites
I'm not saying that smartphones make all children ill — that would be ridiculous. But I do believe that those with an underlying predisposition are at greater risk of getting ill if they have one.
Of course, some of the anti-phone chatter has a tint of moral panic — that this is the only thing wrong with our children, and if we fix this, we fix them. That's nonsense; children face challenges in every generation. But until we've learnt to navigate the new technology, and until the tech firms clean up their acts (the Online Safety Bill is a start), it feels safer to keep my son away from it. I'd sooner drop an adder into his hands.
I also fear that families who spend their lives on phones don't really know each other.
One Mother's Day I saw a family of four in a restaurant. Every one of them was on a phone. In that awful modern tableau, there seemed little space for intimacy, or love.
I thought again of the child in the buggy at the bus stop, looking for a mother online.
