Look in the mirror before you ban screen time for kids

Our political leaders have a consensus view on banning children from the internet.

"Parents want their kids off their phones and on the netball court. So do I," Mr Albanese says.

“It's inconceivable you would allow your 13-year-old to go down to a park and start mingling with any random person who comes by”, chimes in Mr Dutton, leaving his position on the netball court vague (although sending kids to jail at the same age is apparently perfectly fine).

I’m not sure these are particularly new problems.

Before 2007, when the iPhone changed everything, we had other arenas for airing sexism, racism and ableism, circulating toxic misinformation, and picking on the vulnerable. They were called ‘playgrounds’.

Unsupervised seven-year-olds are closer to Andrew Tate than they are to Bluey. Social media don’t force adult issues on kids as much as they let adults get away with the worst habits of pre-teens.

I’m not saying ‘I went through all that and it made me the person I am today’, mind. Those are bad ideas, and we ought to try and reduce their incidence as far as possible. But I’m questioning whether the task of doing that is technology-dependant or device-specific.

And I’m definitively sceptical about forbidding particular applications to young people when their parents are almost certainly going to have to call on their children’s expertise to install the apps that do this.

I’m not a great fan of moral panics, as a class. They generally turn out to be protests against modernity generally, calling for a return to some imagined golden age when the young folk were more biddable.

You don’t have to look back far to find the same intensity applied to attacks on television-watching, comic-reading, and having long hair. You’d think that an era where kids have moved away from all of these things would be a utopia, but apparently not.

All the angst has moved over to concern about children’s corruption by social media.

And, to be sure, there’s a lot about social media to dislike.

It’s run by greedy billionaires who pander to our worst instincts, it’s empowering racism, sexism and religious hatred, and it’s taking up all the attention we used to bestow on social interaction with actual people. These are unquestionably real problems.

Yes, giving young people access to pornography gives them unreal expectations of teenage romance and distorts their ideas about dominance, submission, consent and respect.

But then, if we were really concerned about a culture of bossiness, bullying, and body dysmorphism, we probably wouldn’t have got into a situation where most of our successful movies are about well-muscled superheroes punching each other. And if we don’t want to encourage toxic misinformation, we shouldn’t be giving Peter Dutton a real crack at government.

As with most social issues, the real question is the ratio of baby to bathwater.

Academic studies are ambiguous. The internet can enable creativity, allow genuine research, bring progressive movements together, or simply answer humanity’s eternal quest for something that passes the time without involving thought. We could build on that rather than leaping for the off switch.

You can’t beat something with nothing.

What are we recommending that our children do with their newly freed-up days? Not go to the park, evidently. Collect pressed flowers? Write essays on What I Did In My Holidays? Pen snail-mail thank-you letters to grandma for the Christmas socks? Read Dickens?

Okay, you first. Go on, set them a good example. Let’s face it, one of the charms of focusing on particular age groups is that it affects other people and doesn’t ask Australian voters to stop doing anything they themselves may have a yen for.

The trouble is that we have no common image of the good citizen that we can train our children to follow. We could shoot for a generation of well-informed, socially aware schoolkids who considered the interests of others, if it wasn’t for all the nasty things we said a little while ago about students striking against climate change.

Younger (though post-classroom) people voted heavily for the Voice, which their parents overwhelmingly spat on. Young people are irreligious, increasingly sober, and don’t join political parties.

When I think about it, in fact, I’m really hesitant about claiming moral superiority over the next generation. If anything, I’m inclined to set them no limits they haven’t agreed to themselves.

We could make a beginning by lowering the voting age to 16 and keeping 10-year-olds out of jail – shame on you, Northern Territory government.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.