Smartphones should be banned for children under 14

Banning smartphones is fighting the last war. The actual harm — algorithmic feeds optimised for engagement, parasocial relationships replacing in-person ones, attention fragmentation — applies just as much to a tablet, a school laptop, a smart TV, or a friend's phone passed around the lunch table. The hardware isn't the problem; the design is.

A blanket ban also costs children real things adults take for granted: independent navigation, emergency contact, access to learning resources, and a way to coordinate social lives that no longer happen on landlines. Kids without phones in 2026 are reliant on adults in a way that previous generations of kids weren't.

The productive version of this policy is per-app and per-feature regulation — banning recommendation algorithms for under-16s, mandating non-extracting versions of social apps, requiring age verification at the OS level. That's harder, less satisfying, and the only intervention that actually addresses the harm.