Predators know that children have smartphones

I still find it hard to believe that children as young as four or five have mobile phones. Maybe parents with children around that age might be able to shed light on why, according to a survey, a third of children under six have been given one.

Surely children have not changed since I was their age. I like to believe that children under sixteen today are the same as when you and I were that age. Surely when they are at school the need for mobile phones should not exist.

Children are there to learn under the guidance of adults who have access to communication devices, should the need arise. They are there to learn to read, write, do maths, and other subjects.

Plus they are there to learn to socialise with actual human beings. They attend classes every day, all day, they go to assemblies and spend time playing sports, both supervised and unsupervised. Where then do mobile phones come into the equation? They don’t and, more to the point, they shouldn’t.

In fact, any phone usage during school hours, and that includes breaks, should be prohibited, or at the very least, there should be no Wi-Fi available to them. There are a number of legitimate reasons for this.

By their very nature, many children are bullies and like to target those who, they perceive, are weaker than themselves. In the old days when smartphones did not exist, the only method they used was to hit, kick and punch their target.

They’d do it in the playground, the school corridor, on the way home and even in the classroom when their teacher wasn’t paying attention. My question is this. Children still do all of this so why on earth would any school authority and parent add multiple other modes of bullying to the list.

Yes, children have been known to post dodgy pictures of the classmate they don’t like. They send vicious emails to them, spread vicious rumours about them on social media and send terrible videos of their classmates so that they go viral.

And this is all during school time. How? Because they have smartphones with access to either Wi-Fi or their own data which was purchased for them by their parents. Yes they may be doing all these things after school and at weekends too but surely they have longer access to Wi-Fi at school given the amount of time they spend there in the week.

Children ask for all sorts of things. It doesn’t mean that parents should give in. Many do not but there are some who can’t say no, until an outsider sees the parent-child interaction and points it out to them. I’ve been watching a Korean show called, ‘The Return of Superman’.

It chronicles the upbringing of a child with the father while the mother is working or out of town. The fathers are Korean celebrities. One child I’m particularly flabbergasted at is a single mother (the only female parent on the show).

Her baby is 2 years old but looks around 4. Anyone trying to carry the child is unable to for long periods because he is too heavy for his age. Over the 2 years I’ve watched him, I’ve noticed that the mother does not stop over-feeding him. If it’s not his regular meals, it is snacks.

She simply can’t say no and as a result, I am convinced that the child may grow up to be obese. Do you know another thing she can’t say no to? A smartphone. This child refuses to eat anything unless he’s watching something on his smartphone.

At the request of the mother, a councillor visited and watched the mother-child interaction and immediately told her to stop using the phone as a way to get him to eat. If he doesn’t eat when the phone isn’t playing then he doesn’t eat and that is okay. And this child is only 2 years old.

A lot of advocates against phone usage say they are campaigning to teach parents about the risks of handing over a smartphone to anyone under six. They say that they are trying to save children from BigTech.

It’s true that BigTech (that includes smartphone makers and social media companies) has admitted that it has designed the phone and social media platforms to be addictive to the user. That is the only way they can make money. But I should point out that such platforms are unfairly taking all the heat.

It’s like blaming a carmaker for someone driving while intoxicated and hitting a tree. Is the carmaker to blame or the driver who got in after drinking? The same surely goes for the smartphone. I am referring to sick predators out there who target children via the same platforms and emails.

Surely something of this gravity should stop parents handing over smartphones to children, especially those as young as six.  Predators prowl the net because they know children have access to it.