Parents in the Irish town of Greystones were tired of seeing their children staring at their smartphones. Parent associations at eight primary schools in County Wicklow (east of Ireland) adopted a ‘smartphone-free code’ last month to reduce anxiety and exposure to screens for young people, reports the Guardian .
Concretely, this pact consists in withdrawing the telephone of the children at the house and the school until their entry to the high school. “Childhoods are getting shorter and shorter,” Rachel Harper, the director of St Patrick’s School at the head of the initiative, told the English newspaper. From the age of nine they are already asking to have a smartphone. It starts younger and younger.” Implementing this city-wide policy “reduces the chances of a child having a playmate with a smartphone. Parents can present the code as a school rule,” she continued.
To obtain the signature of this pact, the schools circulated questionnaires to parents. This led to a meeting between all the community actors who then established the content of the pact. Its application is not compulsory, parents remain free to provide a telephone to their children. But Rachel Harper still noted a significant number of registrations and hopes that “this will become the norm in the future,” she told the Guardian.
Indeed, according to the report drawn up by the parents’ associations, the ban or restriction of smartphones only at school is not enough to stem the harmful effects caused by screens and social networks, particularly since the Covid. -19.
This local initiative caught the attention of the Irish Minister of Health, Stephen Donnelly. He now wants to turn it into a national policy. “Ireland can, and must, be a global leader in ensuring that children and young people are not targeted and harmed by their interactions with the digital world,” he said in a column published on 31 last May in The Irish Times.
“There are increasing reports of the harm to children and adolescents from certain types of phone use, such as social media and internet use, that damage their mental health,” he said. -he adds.
In France, a bill aimed at establishing a numerical majority was adopted at first reading on May 23 in the Senate, succeeding the National Assembly. Among other things, it aims to require platforms to set up a mandatory system of age verification or parental consent, in order to protect children from social networks and online hate.
