Have spent the last half hour writing and deleting many replies to your post. In the end, I just gave up.
We'll drink a beer together at some point, then we can talk about it at length.
I'm not even going to try and go into the ifs and why of a ban being put in place, but I want to explain why I believe implementing a ban would be, in my opinion, impossible
I believe before parliment or anybody else spends endless hours discussing the IFs of banning kids from phones, they need to skip ahead and think about how they will actually implement the ban
To say though, I do think that social media is harmful to this age group, and clearly built to take advantage of parts of the brain they've studied to turn people into endless scrolling machines
1. What are you banning, phones, smartphones, tablets, tablets outside school times?
That's the first question I have, what are you actually going to restrict kids from using? Anything with a touchscreen or a keypad? Anything with internet access? Anything that connects to a cell tower? Like what's the ban?
A point i'd like to make is that, the recent news articles and "tens of thousands" of people coming together still make up a minimal amount of parents. Even though it's been advertised as "coming together for a phone free childhood" they probably make up 5-10% of kids in a Year 7 classroom, which is minimal enough that the problem of them being the odd one out will still be a big issue. And on top of that as soon as something like this is actually starting to be implemented, everyone else it inconviences will start to voice their opinion making much more noise than the "ban" crowd.
I heard somebody call into a TV Talk show recently where this was being spoken about, saying "why would the child have control over the parents? if the parents dont think a phone is appropiate then they don't get one", simply in blissfull ignorance not understanding the problem with their kid "being left out" and the issues they'd be in for when their kid reached that age
Let's say "smartphones" are banned, which is the only real possiblity I see on the "physical" side of banning things. Apart from the issue of defining what a smartphone is in the eyes of this law, I highly doubt it will be enforced. Whatsapp and pretty much every social media app has banned users under the age of 16 for a long time now, but they all still use it. So is the Police going to start taking the phones off of kids, or issuing fines to parents?
Are they going to ban a phone that connects to the internet? I heard this one proposed on a Talk Show aswell, but they didn't seem to understand that even all modern "dumb-phones" will access the internet to make calls over VoLTE, so where do you draw the line? O2's IMS server on the internet is okay, but some random foreign website that they'll never be able to block isn't?
When I have kids, I imagine as soon as they starting leaving the house on their own i'd want to give them one of those dumb phones, they're the price of what 2 pints with 12 Months service from Sky Mobile at the moment? The peace of mind is totally worth it, especially if theres some kind of GPS function (talking about 8-12years old here)
2. What's even harmful on the phone? Is it not an "everything-tech" problem?
I assume that we're usually talking about social media when we say phones are harmful to kids, I doubt a lot of harm would come from a dumb phone with a few contacts on it. But isn't a smartphone just an iPad with, in simple terms, the ability to "Get WiFi everywhere"? What's the difference between an iPad with celluar and a phone? Or even an iPad with a kid that knows how to login to the hundreds of public wifi hotspots?
So if you ban smartphones, but the kids still go to school everyday and spend atleast a few hours on screens either in the form of chromebooks or iPads - which granted will usually be much more locked down - and then they come home to spend time on an iPad, Xbox, Playstation or anything else that has just as much communication ability as a smartphone?
I'm pretty sure the harm being done to kids in terms to smartphones, would be at home endlessly scrolling, since kids spend most of their time between home and school. We ban the phone, but not the iPad, Laptop (which the school almost makes mandatory to use for homework) or the Xbox/Playstation which are arguably just as bad?
3. Enforcing a software ban is impossible from a government perspective
A parent generally would have much more control over a device than the government, the government simply cannot "ban" kids from social media sites because it just won't work.
How are you going to enforce a ban? If you make the social companies verify user age, the kids will find one that doesn't (very good alternatives are already open-sourced for anybody to spin up), and the actual "legal" users also turn to ones that don't. If not, these kids will just start using the normal call and SMS functionality built into their phones, RCS/iMessage has come on a lot
Can the government even get Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, Twitter/X, Snapchat, Discord, even Skype to enforce this? And what about Matrix, Signal, Session? All it takes is one kid in the school to find one app and tell everyone about it, and you've lost the whole point
People like to assume that if somehow there was a gateway block on Apple or Google's App Stores to verify users age that it would solve the problem, but I very much doubt that. A whole generation hacked android, even flip phones, to pirate music, games, apps. It would literally be more than trivial for a 10 year old to find a way to install apps outside of Google's play store even today, and that's before some company abroad decides to make a social media app designed to circumvent a law put in place and makes some super simple step-by-step guide or something.