Eventually deciding action needed to be taken, the parents opted to ‘reverse course’ and confiscate the device.
“That created a whole set of new problems,” Elachi says.
“Because by that stage she was almost addicted, I would say, to the phone.
“She’d spend so many nights crying herself to sleep about the fact that we had to take it back off her.
“So my wife and I were feeling kind of helpless at that [point], we knew we didn’t want to give her a phone but at the same time, we don’t want to see our children in that sort of distress.”
It’s an agonising dilemma that’s playing out in just about every home across the country, Elachi says, as parents weigh up the pros and considerable cons that come with handing children a personal smartphone before they’ve even hit the upper grades in primary school.
“As many parents do, we give in to our children’s pleading. Especially when they come home and they say, ‘everyone else in the class has got a phone. I’m going to miss out if you don’t give me an iPhone’,” Elachi says.
Spying a chance for collective change, the parents reached out to other families at their school, inviting them to join their no-smartphone stance.
Something of an alliance soon started to grow.
“That’s how the The Heads Up Alliance was born in our little school,” Elachi reflects
“And look, it’s slowly made things a little bit easier knowing that there were other families, and our daughter knew she wasn’t the only one in the whole school that didn’t have a phone.
Now the group’s advice is to ‘get in early’ with other parents.
“Do even better than what we did, don’t wait til your child is in Year 5 or 6.
“When the kids are in Year 1, Year 2, create an alliance of other families who also want to hold out giving their children social media – we say at least until the end of Year 8.
“Hopefully everyone can stick to it, especially if there’s a nice, decent-sized group that are moving forward together,” Elachi says.
It’s a win-win for all involved, he reports.
“It gives our kids a hope of not feeling too left out. And the parents also get to feel that they’re not the only mean parents in the school. So, it kind of helps everyone.”
This week parent groups have appeared before the Social Media and Australian Society inquiry, urging the Government to impose a ban on all children accessing social media.
Elachi was among the throng.
“The message to our politicians was, ‘parents are really finding it hard. We are kind of in an unfair fight, because all of the big tech companies are swimming in money and their mission (is) to make sure that our children are addicted to their platforms for many, many hours per day'.”
When all the hours frittered away on the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook are tallied up, Elachi says, it’s effectively a childhood that’s lost.
“[And] it’s creating a whole lot of consequences for our children that are bearing out in mental health statistics,” he adds.
“Some children on the very, very tragic end are ending their lives, and we’re not suggesting it’s only because of social media. Of course, these stories are very complex – there’s usually a cocktail of reasons why someone ends up in that level of despair, but social media is, without doubt, playing a significant role.
“And we’re asking for help.”
Elachi says parents in the The Heads Up Alliance were “absolutely shocked” by this stance of mental health organisations who spoke at the inquiry. PHOTO: The Heads Up Alliance
Representatives from six mental health organisations including ReachOut, Headspace and Beyond Blue rejected proposals to raise age limits for social networks at the inquiry, arguing the move would cut children off from accessing mental health supports and hand parents a ‘false sense of security’.
Instead, they called for more stringent Government regulation of major social media networks.
Elachi says the Alliance was “absolutely shocked” by this stance.
“I don’t give much weight to those arguments at all, and I’m happy to take each one of their arguments one by one and explain why we don’t agree….
“The point that I made in my submission was, ‘well, if they want to defend the status quo, which is [the age limit of 13], on what basis are they saying 13 is the correct age? Why not 10? Why not six? Because every argument that they’re using could be applied to an eight-year-old, for example.
“I mean, an eight-year-old might want to seek mental health help through the medium of social media. But does that mean that we should let eight-year-olds on TikTok?”
Elachi is appealing to policymakers to “consider the science here” and ban social media for children under 18. He says the platforms should be treated much like alcohol and tobacco.
“What do what do neuroscientists, what do child psychologists have to say about the appropriate age for social media use?
“We shouldn’t just take Big Tech’s word for it, because Big Tech has set that age limit of 13….”
Not helping the cause are various academics and cybersafety educators who Elachi says are downplaying the serious harms caused by social media.
“We get messages saying, ‘Oh, we’re not really sure if there are links between social media use and harm to children’.
“…as far as parents are concerned, those links are very clear, because those experiments are being conducted in every single home, and we can see in real time with our own eyes the damage: the lack of sleep, the taking our kids away from reading, from exercise, from playing, from doing all the good things they should be doing in childhood.
“It’s happening before our very eyes.
“So, we are imploring our lawmakers not to listen to those academics who [are] trying to blur those connections and to help us,” Elachi says.
As for his eldest daughter, now 15, Elachi says she’s doing “absolutely fine”. The same goes for her four younger siblings, none of whom have a smartphone.
“Some people would have you believe that if your child doesn’t have a smartphone, that’s the end of their social life. We’ve not found that at all.
“[All of our children have] absolutely managed to survive without a smartphone and social media.
“We, humanity, did manage it for millennia. We shouldn’t really be surprised that they’re doing OK.”
And while challenges do remain around access to other devices in the home, Elachi says his children can live far richer and healthier lives that those which unravel in the grips of tech addiction.
“Not being tied to social media for hours a day means that they have the chance to do other things, and they do want to connect with their friends, of course they do,” he shares.
“But instead of messaging or liking posts, they’re forced to pick up the phone or even FaceTime.
“We encourage them to get on FaceTime chats, two, three friends at a time. They can have a lovely chat, and at least they’re looking at each other’s faces and connecting in a way we think is better than just through a screen, mediated through social media platforms.”
Too many vocal critics in the social media ban debate believe if children don’t have a smartphone ‘that’s the end of their socialising’, Elachi laments.
“It's not – it's the beginning of a different way of socialising, and I think a better way.”
