Ryan Bridge: Should we just ban the kids cell phones altogether?

Author: Ryan Bridge ,
Publish Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2026, 6:10am

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Is banning smart phones for kids a dumb idea?

That would leave them with dumb phones - sans apps and the internet - just txts and phone calls.

Remember the old Nokia? Or Alcatels? They came in that weird light orangy/peachy colour and a purpley blue.

David Seymour's talking about this after a blog post suggesting it'd be easier, and less restrictive for everyone else, if we banned the hardware not the software.

Make smartphones like cigarettes or beer - if you saw a 12-year-old with one, you'd judge the parents, wouldn't you?

At present, parents hand them out like candy, caving by osmosis to the their kid's peer pressure to own one.

The social media bans don't seem to work very well - as we've spoken about before - half the Aussie kids get around theirs.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Banning the actual device itself does, on the face of it, make more sense.

You can still communicate, but not with the entire world. And not with the entire sum of human knowledge- good and bad - at your unsupervised fingertips.

This way , adults can keep using social media and not have to use some ID or date of birth test to log in.

Which all sounds great. Except the real problem here is parents themselves.

They're often the ones on their phones and ignoring their kids in the first place.

If you were a child, wouldn't you want to be doing whatever your parents are doing too?

It doesn't really matter what the law says, and changing it won't change everything, it's ultimately up to adults raising those kids to teach them right from wrong, good from bad and whether 8 hours a day doom scrolling is a behaviour that's acceptable- for them or their kids.