Last week, in a landmark legal case, a jury in LA ruled that Meta and Google deliberately built their platforms to addict children. "Deliberately." Yikes.
Now there are two thousand more cases lining up behind that one.
Last week I also lost about an hour of my life watching a farmer clean the hoof of a horse.
One scroll led to another, and suddenly I'm deep into hoof-cleaning TikTok. I actually enjoyed it, but afterwards I was well gutted. What was I doing? What is this going to give me? I don't have a horse.
I'm a grown man and I still get sucked in. If I can't stop, what hope does a ten-year-old have?
When I was growing up, I was outside all the time. Not because my parents were running some genius strategy. It was just where I was. There was nothing else competing for my attention.
Mum would say dinner's at five and I was out the door, on a bike to the park. I even had a favourite tree. I'd come back at 17:15 covered in dirt and probably get a clip round the ear for being late.
Looking back, I reckon it was boredom getting me outside. Me and my mates would invent games, build dens, argue about rules, pretend to be Gary Lineker.
These days, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable giving Leila, my eight year old daughter, that same freedom. The world's changed. But I do know this. I wasn't up against an algorithm. No one was engineering an app to make sure I was never bored.
Since Leila rocked up, and I guess since I started Dubs, I've taken a huge interest in this. I have a degree in sports science, so I've always known the value of being active and what it does for kids physically and mentally. But the research coming out right now around social media, inactivity and children is so so alarming.
Kids are spending less time outside than prison inmates.
81% of young people globally are classed as physically inactive. Not just a bit lazy, officially inactive.
Nearly one in six children under eleven are struggling with their mental health.
The timing is hard to ignore. Since smartphones became part of daily life, anxiety and depression in children has rocketed. A study from Imperial College London, published in March, found that kids using social media for more than three hours a day were significantly more likely to develop depression and anxiety by their mid-teens.
In primary school, kids get the beginnings of their education: maths, history, science, a bit of PE. But out in the park, in the middle of make-believe or a physical game, that's where they learn how to reason, how to handle frustration, how to fail and go again. They fall out, make up, push their limits and build resilience.
But replace all of that with a algorithm, and you're handing a developing brain, still figuring out reward, impulse and self-worth, to a machine that, as the courts have just confirmed, is specifically designed to exploit those vulnerabilities in kids. No wonder these stats are so stark.
The young woman at the centre of the case in LA started using YouTube at six and Instagram at nine. She's twenty now.
Leila is eight. And the apps are getting more sophisticated every day.
During the case, the court saw internal documents comparing the platforms' effects on kids to pushing drugs. YouTube labelled "viewer addiction" a core KPI. An Instagram employee described the company as "basically pushers." This is actual evidence, put in front of a jury.
The press is calling this tech's Big Tobacco moment. So, thinking about it in that way, you wouldn't hand your eight year old a cigarette or a pint. But social media? We just don't think of it as the same kind of harmful.
What really makes me sad is kids watching other kids play on screens rather than doing it themselves. The platforms are doing exactly what they're built to do: keep kids inside, passive, scrolling, consuming. They never get the chance to feel bored enough to do something about it.
I think about this a lot as a dad. Leila loves her cartoons. Family film nights are one of my favourite things we do together. Educational apps are brilliant too, spelling, times tables, stuff that comes home from school. Technology is going to be a huge part of their future, so learning how to use it well really matters. I still remember the first BBC computer rocking up at school. It was like witchcraft.
But social media is a whole different beast. Unsupervised, unrestricted access for kids who aren't ready for it. The doom scrolling. A child in their bedroom at night, alone with an algorithm built to keep them scrolling for as long as possible. And it's very good at it.
It's not just the endless content either. It's the kid-to-kid stuff. The group chats, the DMs, the constant ping of notifications. It feels like this is where friendships live these days, where gossip spreads, where kids feel they have to be just to stay in the loop. And the algorithm knows it.
Leila is eight, so we're not there yet. But I can already see the day when Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever's next turns up in our lives. I'd like to think we'd say no. But I know how hard that will be. Leila will feel like she's been cut off from her friends. For a kid, FOMO is real. Missing out on chats, being out of the loop, it'll be really horrid for her. She'll feel like an outsider and probably resent us for it. That really does make me sad.
That's why Smartphone Free Childhood is so important. They're a movement of families standing together to delay smartphones and social media for children, not individual parents fighting a losing battle, but collectively, so the pressure is shared. So far 159,000 families have signed up to their Parent Pact, building local networks and fighting this together. It's really inspiring.
Leila is why I started Dubs. She's also why I write things like this.
When she's outside, just playing, I see the real Leila. Fearless, gloriously bonkers and completely lost in whatever her brain has invented in that moment. And then there's the version after too long indoors, glued to a screen while Dad gets some boring admin done. Flatter. Grumpier. A bit ratty.
We started Dubs to make shoes that don't slow kids down. Trainers that let kids be kids. But the shoes only matter if the childhood is actually happening.
Right now, for a lot of kids, it isn't. Sign the Parent Pact today at smartphonefreechildhood.org - the more parents that do, the louder our voice gets.
Stuart
Co-Founder & CEO
