Member's statement: Smartphones: Impact on Children
Member's statement by Ms Sinéad McLaughlin on .
- MLA
- Ms Sinéad McLaughlin
- Party at the time
- Social Democratic and Labour Party
- Date
- 15 September 2026
- Type
- Member's statement
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Smartphones: Impact on Children
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5705483
Read the official Assembly record
Text
A few weeks ago, during the féile, I sat in a room in Creggan with the brilliant Sure Start team and listened to Dr Claire Sinton talk about smartphones and what they are doing to our children. I will be honest: it really shook me. Dr Sinton is not a campaigner looking for headlines; she is a talented and wonderful paediatrician at the Royal. She is seeing a generation of children whose brains are developing differently, not because of anything they have done but because of what we have handed them. Here is what the evidence now tells us. A major longitudinal survey published by eBioMedicine in December 2025 followed children for over a decade. It found that high screen exposure before the age of two was linked to brain networks maturing far too fast and before they had built the flexibility that children need for reasoning, adaptability and coping. The consequences showed years later as slower decision-making, high levels of anxiety and a brain that specialised too early and paid for it.
It is not a small number of children. The 2025 'Common Sense Media Census’ found that children aged five to eight now average three and a half hours of screen time a day. Parents think that nine hours a week is healthy: children are living through more than double that. Attention spans are shrinking, sleep is disrupted, blue light delays melatonin production, young brains stay wired long past bedtime and sleep-deprived children start showing symptoms that look exactly like ADHD. It is not only what screens do to developing brains; it is what those brains are being exposed to. Children as young as eight are encountering pornography online, often without looking for it, and often through the same apps they use to talk to their friends or watch videos. Predatory adults are contacting children directly through the same platforms. That is not a fringe risk; it is built into how those apps work, and it happens at a scale that most parents cannot fully grasp. We would never accept that exposure in the classroom, a playground or a youth club. We police those areas and spaces carefully because children are in them, yet we have allowed every child with a smartphone to carry an unregulated, unsupervised space in their pocket all day, every day. It is not a story about bad parents, and it is not a story about lazy children; it is a story about technology that has arrived faster than our understanding of it. It is a technology built to capture attention, deployed on brains that are still being built themselves.
436 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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