People who are not yet ready to have full agency of their own lives is more or less the definition of children.

Does she also expect children to have full time jobs, pay taxes, pay all their own bills and rent, etc etc?

Smartphones are fomes peccati.

Edit: now fixed, thanks mods

Like all risks it doesn’t affect all kids equally either.

Some are less vulnerable for various cognitive reasons just like some are less prone to chemical addiction.

Kids with wealthier and/or more engaged parents or parents with more free time are also less vulnerable. Wealthier kids have more activities available and can often afford to have one parent stay home.

Lastly kids in healthier communities or suburbs or safe urban settings where they can roam free are less vulnerable.

They children of the poor, those with ADD or ASD conditions, and those with less third spaces or other activities are most vulnerable to becoming addicted to endless stupefying doom scrolling and addictive games that pre-train them for future gambling addiction.

It’s not just kids either. The elderly and the isolated become addicted to this stuff.

Addiction engineering is the problem, whether it’s via a phone, a web site, or a chemical.

IMO if you intentionally and knowingly engineer something for addiction you are committing a form of assault.

The article mentions 15-16 years of age.

The best practice is to keep kids off smartphones with full internet, full social media, touchscreen and scrolling at least until 13.

It doesn't mean they can't have other kinds of devices.

This is a wide open market category.

I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.

The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.

If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.

If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).

We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.