Richard Hogan: How do we protect our children while also allowing them to enjoy technology?

Richard Hogan: "Since the pandemic, when we told children to stay home from school and use technology to communicate, I have seen a significant rise in the level of issues with technology and the family"

Technology is here to stay. Smartphones and all the social media platforms that come with them are also here to stay. So, what I’m about to say is in no way driven by a desire to get rid of technology from our children’s lives. I know that is never going to happen.

I work with teenagers every day, I even live with one. I know phones are such a significant part of how teenagers communicate with each other. The adult world always seems to view the teenage world with suspicion. 

They arrive at the conclusion that the coming generation has lost something really important that their own generation had. 

Parents of children in the 1960s couldn’t relate to their flower-clad hippie kids asking for peace; in the 1970s parents were terrified of their punk kids with mohawk hair.

Parents thought the stone-washed jean kids breakdancing on a little piece of cardboard in the 1980s, and the grunge kids of the 1990s, had all lost something their parents valued when they were their age. 

So, it is a very common experience to view the current generation through this lens of suspicion and loss. 

We see our teenagers, head down, scrolling, and we say ‘They are losing out on childhood. They don’t play anymore, their innocence and childhood is been taken right in front of our eyes’. Could we be right?

I have been writing about and working with this phenomenon since it started. I have noticed a massive increase in families reporting issues with technology since 2015. It is what prompted me to write Parenting the Screenager. 

I wrote a practical guide to help parents with the issues I was seeing in my clinic. The first chapter was on boundaries. 

I felt parents needed new skills and understanding about technology to be able to parent it more effectively.

In my experience, parents often had issues with technology themselves, and were using it to help them parent their children. Nothing stills childish play more than putting a device in front of them. 

I told parents in that book: “You can’t outsource your parenting to the devices.” I felt it was an important message for parents to hear.

But since the pandemic, when we told children to stay home from school and use technology to communicate, I have seen a significant rise in the level of issues with technology and the family. 

Lockdowns supercharged issues that were already causing families serious problems. Parents reported that they were watching the destruction of their child’s social world, while also reporting a significant decrease in their relationship with their teenage son or daughter.

In my clinic I heard that these devices were impacting on healthy, normal, everyday relationships in the teenage world. 

I spoke in schools, interviewed thousands of students to get an understanding of what was happening. 

I heard first-hand from teenagers about the impact technology was having on their lives. I worked with An Garda Siochána and heard case after case of harrowing stories about children being exploited online.

Children get exploited in the real world too, but these devices afforded predators direct access to our children. I worked with principals in schools and listened as they described incident after incident, where children had been very seriously injured online.

Many schools told me of an increase in children consuming hardcore material, because of how easily accessible it is with smartphones. 

Once you have a phone, you have everything the internet has to offer... good, bad and extremely ugly. So, what I do and say is motivated by all of these experiences. Not some puritanical desire for a simpler time.

I believe there is a solution to this great problem of our generation. But it is multifaceted. We need a 5-pillar approach to ensure our children are having a healthy childhood while also being active on their devices.

• We need better programmes in schools to promote digital literacy so our children understand these devices and how to use them in a healthy way.
• We need progressive programmes for parents to upskill them as a matter of urgency. Parents need to be empowered so they have their parental agency back. This is vital.
• We must delay smartphones from going into our children’s hands for as long as possible. Primary school must be a place of play, learning and adventure, not head down scrolling endlessly.4
• We need robust legislation to ensure these big tech companies are held accountable for the material they allow be sent to our children. We must stop our children from consuming hardcore extreme material, as it has such a deleterious impact on their development. We need strong legislation that says to these companies: ‘You don’t get to send our children damaging material. You must take it down, and must prove good practices or we shut you down.’ If a restaurant was feeding the public poison, we would shut it down. Same goes for tech.
• The final piece in this puzzle is that we bring about a systemic change in how big tech views children. They are not current revenue, but future revenue. If they are caught mining data on our children or with underage users on their platform, they must experience the full powers of the law. Fining them needs to hurt. It should be a percentage of their global earnings and not some small figure they have set aside to use when they get caught.

What I have outlined there is the starting point for getting our hands around this gigantic issue. We need our politicians more than ever.

Parents must not close their eyes and hope it all goes okay. Currently we are witnessing the biggest experiment on childhood, playing out in front of our eyes. 

When we look back, what will we want to say — ‘My god, why were we so passive?’ Or ‘we did everything we could to protect our children while also allowing them to enjoy technology’?

Next week I will tell you about my meeting with Coimisiún na Meán. They are responsible for bringing in online legislation.