Parents understand the risks associated with excessive mobile phone use and can take steps to limit usage and block offensive apps.  For those who drag their feet, their children will fall further behind as they suffer from increased risks of anxiety, poor sleep and an unhealthy connection with the real world.

But isn’t that a question for parents to address themselves, and importantly is the role of the parent not to bring up their child up in a manner which means they are ready to enter the world of adulthood by the age of 18?  While strict guidelines are important, I always assume children will find a means of circumventing them.  There are numerous ways of installing VPNs, handing in fake or burner phones, or indeed bypassing parental security features altogether.  The only real solution is to educate your child about the inherent risks and hope they heed the warnings.

Indeed, risk and parenting are two topics I feel strongly about.  With all the knowledge we have, parents still try too hard to insulate their child from the rigors of the real world. Roads are dangerous but that doesn’t mean we should avoid children walking to the park on their own.  Phones are dangerous, but they will have one eventually and if you try and prise it out of the hand of a determined 15 year old you are setting yourself up for a fail.

Risk management is something we seem to have become very poor at over the last 20 years.  As a consequence, children today are not exposed to sufficient risk early enough in their lives.  This means they do not have the emotional tools to cope with the high-pressure world they are about to enter.  As we have seen since at least 2007, this has coincided with increasing mental health problems, higher rates of depression and ultimately very high levels of antidepressant usage in the wider population. 

A book I refer to regularly sums up these problems wonderfully.  Martin Seligman’s insightful and widely referenced, ‘Learned Optimism’, deals head on with what he characterises as a drought of experiential learning early in a child’s life.  Building a robust and resilient character does not rely on avoiding risks and failure, instead the most successful adults are those who push through problems and succeed despite the challenges of youth.  Mobile phones are just the latest in a series of risks which need to be navigated with careful thought, discussion and ultimately education.

David Paton is Head of Radnor House Sevenoaks.