Teenage doomscrollers need to have their phones taken away

The Liberal Democrats’ proposal for cigarette-style health warnings on social media for under-18s is an important moment for young minds, says Emily Bryce-Perkins. In 2025, desperate measures are often the only sane response to desperate times

The Lib Dems’ plan to slap cigarette-style health warnings on social media for under-18s and even introducing a doomscrolling time limit sounds extreme, but in 2025, extreme is often the only sane response when it comes to our online lives. We’ve spent far too long letting Silicon Valley sell us bottomless feeds without asking what they might be doing to us, and now it’s time to call time out.

My five-year-old son’s school is loudly phone-free. He’d barely been there a day before we were asked to sign a group pledge promising “not to buy our children smartphones until they were in their late thirties”. Or something like that. The parental panic in the WhatsApp group was palpable: if phones made it into the playground, all hell would break loose. I signed, and tried not to picture a dystopian future where AI controls everything and mobile phones are the least of our problems.

When our firstborn was first born, my husband and I made a vow that we would never use our phones in front of him. Ha ha ha. These days I find myself saying, “Mummy only has to have her phone because of boring work!” Innocent on the surface, but really, just one of those parenting manoeuvres where you pretend you’re setting a moral example to excuse your own bad habits.

On holiday, my husband and I take a dumbphone for emergencies and leave everything else in the hotel safe (Alamy/PA)

And yet I know how fantastic life feels without social media. On holiday, my husband and I take a dumbphone for emergencies and leave everything else in the hotel safe. It’s bliss. A new level of peace unlocked, if you ignore the fact that we’re on holiday with our children. Back home, though, Instagram is my shop window, and I couldn’t do my job as a communications consultant as well without it. A millennial who joined Facebook the second it landed in the UK, I remember life before social media, and how its arrival made everything easier: the invitations, the connections, the validation.

But the difference between today’s teenage doomscrollers and me was that my brain was fully formed when social media entered the chat. They’re using these platforms before they have the neural tool kit to protect themselves. And while I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the books or watch the documentaries about what these apps do to developing minds, I read the news, and I read the crib notes in the 329 WhatsApp groups I seem to have joined. The consensus is always the same: children shouldn’t be on social media, being fed algorithms designed to addict them, let alone risk stumbling across whatever horrors lurk on there in terms of content.

So yes, I’m with the Lib Dems on this one. Health warnings and a doomscrolling cap won’t solve everything, but they’re a start. They make the problem impossible to shrug off, which is exactly what’s needed when the status quo is just hoping the tech companies will grow a conscience. How many more times do we need to hear a boss at a tech company say their child is not allowed a phone? In our hearts we know what is right. We know how good it feels to be free of our phones; on holiday, the cinema, in that rare hour you’ve left it in another room and forgotten where.

Smartphones are not harmless fun. Maybe if we admit that out loud, we can start clawing back a little autonomy from the algorithm and we can give our children the chance to grow up with at least one part of their lives that doesn’t come with push notifications.