You may know that until 2021 I was a full-time high school teacher in St. Catharines. I began my career in February 1993 just short of 12 years from having graduated from Grade 13 myself.
Through the years I would find myself at gatherings with old friends and new ones, most of them not working in education. Often they would express the sentiment that I must find it difficult working with “today’s teenagers.”
Invariably I would ensure them that the kids I was teaching were just like us at that age. They were going through the same growing pains, fighting the same hormone surges, striving like we did to find our place in the world, albeit wearing different clothes and sporting different (better?) hairstyles.
But that all started to change around 2012.
Five years earlier Apple had introduced its first iPhone. The following year saw the introduction of T-Mobile’s first Android cellphone.
Slowly, these new convenient touch-screen devices blew the Blackberry, the Palm Pilot and the flip phone away. It took a few years, but I started to see the effects these devices were having on my students.
I realized in 2012 that the teenagers I was teaching were no longer fighting the same struggles I had fought at that age. And their mental health had taken a sharp decline.
Kids today don’t have any experience of a world where smartphones didn’t exist. They are constantly connected and attached to their screens from a very young age and it’s causing unprecedented anxiety.
The folks behind BC-based Unplugged Canada want to change that. Taking a cue from the US-based Wait Until 8th, their mission is to educate parents about the risks of early smartphone use and to inspire a collective commitment to restoring childhood through advocacy, resources, and an online pledge to wait until 14.
Josette Calleja, a parent coach, executive, and wellness specialist, is an ambassador for the fledgling organization.
“We just started Unplugged Canada in September 2024,” Calleja tells me. “We have chapters now in Nova Scotia and Alberta, we’re getting one in PEI and another in Quebec and we’re looking at getting one going in Ontario.”
Calleja has a nine-year-old son in Grade 4. She’s seen the prevalence of smartphones in his school, where some classes will have as many as half of the students who have their own such devices.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education banned cellphones in the classroom starting this current school year. That was a step in the right direction. But what happens outside of school, when kids begin to be influenced by Instagram and other apps at such a young age?
“By 2012 social media started exploding,” explains Calleja. She references Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation in which the social psychologist and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business pinpoints the advent of the rear-facing camera as the start of the anxiety problem.
“People started taking selfies,” Calleja says. “That’s when comparative culture and the need to have ‘likes’ on the phone started swallowing so many kids. It is causing all kinds of mental health issues. The addiction piece is front and centre.”
Calleja’s son does not have access to a cell phone and is not allowed to play video games yet.
“I don’t want him to get that easy dopamine fix from a video game,” she says. “I want him to get his dopamine fix out in the real world, from exercise, being outdoors, being in a forest or near water. You can’t compete with what a phone provides to a child.”
Kids in the outdoors - do you remember that? Interestingly, when the buses were cancelled and schools were closed last week, The Local’s Joy Sanguedolce hightailed it to Fort George to catch some kids sledding on the hill. There was one father with his two boys there. That’s it.
Where were the rest? At home playing video games or on their phones?
I’m one of those people who will admit I watched an excessive amount of television when I was a kid. But television is different than a smartphone.
“The algorithms of social media feed exactly into what you want,” Calleja insists. “In some ways it’s so innocent, but in others it can take you down a scary rabbit hole. It also doesn’t give you a balanced view. You get fed one perspective.”
And science has shown that social media is actually rewiring children’s brains.
Unplugged Canada is urging parents of young children to sign their pledge that they will not give a smartphone to them until they are 14 years old.
Why 14? Calleja says it’s what she and Unplugged Canada founder Jenny Perez felt they could “get away with.”
“If we can at least wait until 14 we’re getting kids through that critical age of nine to 13,” Calleja postulates. “We want to get them through most of puberty, and we also advocate for no social media until they are 16. Australia has just passed a law on that (in November 2024).”
Calleja admits it’s not an easy thing for parents to do. Kids are subjected to peer pressure, and parents can only fully control what happens in their own homes. To that end those who sign the Unplugged Canada pledge (waiting until 14) can opt to include their email information so when five other families also pledge from the same grade and in the same school, their contact information can be shared so they can connect and create community.
“There’s strength in numbers,” says Calleja. “Our goal from the start has been to raise awareness. I don’t think enough parents know the dangers, and for others, it’s easier to just close their eyes. But once their eyes are open they will feel compelled to take action. For every pledge we get it’s easier for the next parent to sign it.”
To date, over 1,600 parents, representing children from 376 schools across the country, have vowed to wait until 14. Unplugged Canada hopes to see that number reach a reasonable 10,000 by the end of 2025. I think that number is way too conservative.
It’s too late for my wife and me - our kids are 24 and 21, but I think we did a good job of helping them wait until an appropriate age.
But if you have a child under 14 years of age, visit the Unplugged Canada website. Learn more about the dangers of early smartphone use.
Sign the pledge, help break the trend and save your children from developing crippling anxiety.
