IT is one of the toughest decisions faced by parents – when to give in to their younger children’s constant demands for a smartphone.
Startling recent figures from communications regulator Ofcom show that 20 per cent of kids have a smartphone by the age of three, and that rises to 55 per cent between the ages of eight to 11. But the residents of one seaside town in Ireland have decided they do not want their little ones to spend their most formative years peering into a tiny LCD screen. The entire parent population of Greystones in County Wicklow got together to agree not to buy smartphones for their kidsuntil they were in secondary school. All eight primary schools in the town, 15 miles south of Dublin, had already stopped pupils from bringing the electronic devices into the learning environment. But the school parent associations then went further by initiating a voluntary ban among themselves.
It is a revolutionary approach which would likely be welcomed by parents in Britain as well.
