ENDEAVOR
“Parents in Europe reject smartphones for kids.” This was the headline of an Associated Press dispatch from Barcelona, Spain that was featured in Manila Bulletin’s World News page last weekend. Concerned about my own seven-year-old grandson’s penchant for using smartphones and digital gadgets, I searched for internet links and found a comprehensive writeup from the El Pais website.
The El Pais post is based on a November 2023 story written by Jordi Perez Colomé who interviewed Elisabet Garcia Permanyer, a mother of three children aged seven, nine and 10. Ms. Permanyer initiated a WhatsApp chat group that adopted a slogan: “Poblenou – phone-free adolescence.” El Poblenou is a neighborhood in Barcelona’s Sant Marti district that borders the Mediterranean Sea in the south.
Since then, this chat group has attracted support from parents across Spain. Specifically, the parents are concerned about smartphone addiction among children, barely 12 years old, who are just entering secondary education. According to the story: There are two overlapping objectives behind this movement: to remove cell phones from the neighborhood schools and to ensure that more families do not automatically buy a cell phone with internet on it for their children as soon as they turn 12 and start high school.”
In their emerging consensus, the organizers informed El País their support for the European Union recommendation that teenagers should not have smartphones until they are 16 years which, they claim is supported by over 70 percent of parents, with only 10 percent opting for an earlier age of permission.
More advanced chat groups from other parts of Spain have reported the results of their efforts during the past two years: “We haven’t quantified the results, but we do see that before, no one in the first year of (high school) reached Christmas without a cell phone, and now they finish the first year and there are still children without a cell phone. It’s no longer (unusual).”
Advocates note that even if smartphones are not used in schools, applications are still used to commit cyberbullying from homes. Their concerns include addiction problems, mental health, anorexia, and suicide.
A cursory online search led this author to a study conducted between 2017 and 2019 by De La Salle University’s Social Development Research Center in partnership with UNICEF Philippines and supported by the Australian government. It was participated in by 1,873 children-respondents from 17 regions, 25 provinces, 147 municipalities, and 225 barangays in the country.
The study was entitled, Philippines Kids Online (PKO): The Online Experiences of Children in the Philippines: Opportunities, Risks and Barriers. An important caveat prefaced the report. As it was conducted in the pre-Covid period, “it is to be expected that the length of time that children spend online during the pandemic has increased significantly, as children are forced to turn online for most of their entertainment, connections, and for e-learning.”
For brevity, we cite here only the first three key findings.
First, “The age at which children in the Philippines first go online is, on average, 10 years old, and they spend on average just under two hours (116 minutes) a day online. Children most commonly access the internet on their smartphone, while at home, but many also frequent both libraries, and Pisonet cafés to go online, which together account for the second and third most common place of access.”
Second: “Social media dominates children’s internet use. Facebook is the most popular platform, followed by YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Interestingly, children “tend to equate the internet with social media,” underlining the pervasive influence of social media on children.
Third: “Children use the internet for connecting with others, and for schoolwork and education, more than for any other purposes. Entertainment, specifically watching their favorite TV shows, or music videos, followed by online gaming, is the third most common use of the internet for children in the Philippines.”
The study’s recommendations focus on actions that may be taken by schools, government regulators, communities and parents.
Attention to interface with peers and classmates is imperative, as they “offer an important entry point, and asset, to influence peer online behavior” when children encounter negative online content or experiences.
The basic curriculum must be revised to incorporate digital skills and digital citizenship for children. Technology is a double-edged sword with vast potential for good as well as evil, if its use is not regulated. Hence it is proposed that digital citizenship, including online safety, must be included in the curriculum for teacher training, college education and parent support programs. Essential elements that need to be affirmed in the digital sphere include freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and access to information.
Capacity building must enable educators at all levels “to identify the signs of online abuse and exploitation, cyber-bullying and other forms of negative online experiences that may impact adversely on children.”
Beyond the home and the school, there are three other noteworthy recommendations: “Establish an E-learning Outreach Program in select barangays; enforce the regulation and accountability of (internet) cafés to ensure they are ‘child-friendly’ establishments; and Identify high-risk communities and populations for targeted caregivers and parent’s digital literacy training.”