[THEME MUSIC] It's just a lot of pressure on us. Everyone has to look a certain way. One small thing. It affects you so much. Like, someone will just be like, why does your hair look like that? Or why are you dressed like-- --posting grim stuff. I've seen videos of people like getting shot. Yeah, getting their heads cut off from-- --inapproprite pictures of male genitals. Since year 8, I think. When I was a kid, I would have been a lot more affected, but now I'm more normalised to it because I see it a lot. But obviously, that's not a great thing to have in your life to see. SUSIE DAVIES: The dangers of smartphones in young adolescents is that really, it gives the internet unlimited access to your child. Children can search up almost anything online. They can access online gaming with access to strangers. You also have to think about social media apps, which are now really being shown to impact the being and mental health of young children, as well as being really, really addictive. I've had a smartphone since I was nine. I had Snapchat straight away. I started using it just to talk to friends, keep up with friends. SUSIE DAVIES: With all these things comes cyberbullying and inappropriate content that can have a profoundly negative impact on young people's mental health. Snapchat for me, is the single worst challenge that we have to deal with at school. Children have reported to me that on a weekday, it's hundreds of snaps, but at weekends it can be thousands of emoji responses that keep their phone clicking, vibrating. Some children feel that they should be checking all of this. They don't want to miss out. And we all know that these apps are designed to be addictive and that is exactly what they are. You can see something that might scare you or might not be appropriate for your age group. Huxley: Yeah. And it could scar you for the rest of your life. My son's friends have been duped into giving explicit photos, and those explicit photos have been given to the whole school or the whole year. SUSIE DAVIES: Young people are being bombarded by often some really horrible messages day and night, and it's affecting their being. According to one study, 24% people are bullied online will self-harm as a result. The children's understanding of what they've said, they just don't have that comprehension that you've said it on WhatsApp or you've said something on Snapchat. And that's it. It's there. Someone screenshot it, someone shared it on-- it's there forever. I constantly say to children who have to spend time with me discussing their behaviour on social media, how would you feel if the person who you've made those comments about were sat in their bedroom receiving them and then decided, frankly, to take their life? And it happens. So you cannot underestimate the impact that your words have. SUSIE DAVIES: They are spending hours a day comparing themselves to other people's perfect curated images. And these pictures and images are not real. There isn't really much room to be yourself. You have to fall under this category-- like you either dress like this, you look like this, or you're really not included and you're not relevant and no one will talk to you and stuff like that. There are lots of discussions around what is the right age to give children access. And most of the apps, the legal age is 13. My view is 16 because between the ages of 11 and 16, most children obviously are going through adolescence at their own rate, whether it's periods, whether it's voices dropping. And we all know there is, of course, a level of anxiety around that. What you don't need at that stage is social media telling you that this is how it should feel, this is what you should look like. And by the age of 16, most children are through that process. Their normal levels of anxiety are through. And hopefully, you've got reasonably self-confident humans who can then manage the challenges of social media. Traditionally, as a teenager, there would always be someone who was prettier or sportier or more academic than you, but you knew their backstory. But it's really different with social media. Young people don't know what's going on in people's lives. All they are seeing are these perfect, curated, beautiful highlight reels, and it's making young people feel less good about themselves. They're not feeling as confident in their own bodies. They're looking to receive the same amount of online rewards and validation as influencers, and it's completely unrealistic. It's a very difficult time because these children are the guinea pigs of this generation. It's completely unregulated, and it's been let loose on them and no one knows the outcome of it. We're seeing that there are actually changes in the neuronal pathways in the brain for the way adolescents brains develops because of the dopamine reward pathways, which are really, really addictive. Now, what tech companies have done is they've created likes, push notifications, followers, and all sorts of rewards on social media. Now, dopamine is released when we don't know what reward we're going to get. So if you imagine when you go to pick up your phone, you don't know if you're going to have likes or new followers on social media, that creates a spike of dopamine. Now, the more you check social media, you create a really powerful feedback pathway. Our children's brains are these tiny things being impacted daily and it doesn't end. They have those phones with them all the time at the weekends. It's constant. We know the damage it can do. We should be stepping up and saying, we need to make a change. Ultimately, I think the only way we can protect children is by saying no social media. We don't allow them to smoke cigarettes. We don't allow them to drink alcohol. If we have a rule that stops them, we're OK. When I was a kid, I played a lot outside all evening, every evening, until it got dark, and I would love to see my kids doing the same. We know that things are good for young people are being outside in the fresh air, playing sport, and being with their friends, and these have been shown to have a really good impact on self-esteem and being. But obviously, the opposite is true of time online, with time on social media having a negative impact on self-esteem and negative impact on their mood and increasing anxiety. If I didn't have social media, I probably play sports way more, basically every day. I would go out a lot more. One of the things which raised a concern was when I became aware that children, sometimes in year 3-- that's 7, 8 years old-- had access to smartphones. If I were to say to parents, you give your child this device like a window to the world walking around in their pocket. Anybody, anything, can work their way to your child. Your child can hear things, experience things, that in a million years, you would not want them to hear. I've seen people post videos of people getting shot. Things like that. People getting their heads cut off and things like-- When I saw it, I was in year 8 and I felt weird and I couldn't sleep. We're giving them access to something that's wholly inappropriate at the entirely wrong age. Like when you see something and it's fishy or something that you see and you don't want to tell your parents, you get these shivers in your gums and stuff, which makes you feel like if you want to go to bed or something, you can't sleep because you keep thinking about that. Internet pornography is one click away for all young people with access to the internet, and it is having a profound impact on their body image and also their view of healthy sexual relationships. Boys all have unrealistic bodily expectations, like we're supposed to look a certain way and have our body a certain way, or always supposed to be a certain size, and it's like it's unrealistic. Not all women look the same. We don't all have the same bodies. And I think that it's quite dangerous, especially because we are so young. It's intensely graphic, it is very misogynistic, and it is often violent. We know that most young people access pornography by the age of 12. We're seeing a huge increase in sexual violence against women with choking and slapping, and they're watching this and then they're acting it out in later relationships. I remember speaking to a boy, and he just sent me a picture of what someone was put on his story, and he was like, recreate. And I said, no. And he was like, why not? It's fun. We can do it. And I was like, no. And I told him, I'm not comfortable with it. And there was that constant pressure of him trying to convince me. Most boys think that that's normal because it's been normalised in our generation. If this is how my generation is going to keep going, I don't think I'm going to find someone to be with in the future because of how toxic the behaviours is. I don't want to be around that. I would really like the government to take a more proactive approach. In medicine, we call it a precautionary approach. You don't always need to wait till all the evidence is there, but when something is becoming really obvious that it's having a harm on well being and health, that's the moment we need to act. I do wish that social media didn't exist because I think it would make our lives easier. If you're on a screen, time flies by, I wouldn't really know that. I've been like spending hours and hours on it. While you're on it, you don't feel like you're addicted. But then, I don't think I could go without it, now that I'm thinking about it. My school has just decided to be a smartphone-free school from September. And I honestly couldn't be happier. We've joined smartphone-free childhood and completely agree and align ourselves with their principles. There's a lovely quote from C.S Lewis that says you can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and you can change the ending. [THEME MUSIC]