For my thirteenth birthday, which coincided roughly with my Bat Mitzvah (the Jewish ceremony for entering adulthood), I had begged for – and got – my own phone line. This was so that I could talk for hours on the phone to friends I had seen all day, or possibly all weekend if they were at a different school, without tying up the whole family’s phone system. Friends would call and whoever picked up would holler to me that ‘Lexie/Sarah/Jessica/Anna is on line two’ and put the friend through. There would be a click and off we went, at liberty to gab privately for hours. I don’t actually remember spending much time on homework.

Is there much difference between that central role of pointless communication – albeit conducted by voice – and the contemporary child’s endless back and forth over instant messaging? Whether there is or not is debatable, but either way the hysteria over Meta’s lowering of the age for WhatsApp from a bizarrely high 16 to 13 (still pretty high) is mystifying. Many teens have been bonking and drinking long before they’ve been allowed a WhatsApp account.

Teens in the modern era have always missed out on sleep for one reason or another

The fact is that to be a teenager, and especially a teenage girl, is to chat incessantly with friends. The conversation always revolves around boys, crushes, desires, revulsions, and most of all, gossip, much of it cruel or inane. There were – and are – hurt feelings, plans hatched, laughs and experimentation with words and ideas: in short, the development of a social and emotional self. It is an obsessional past-time, all that chat, full of performance and rumination. I remember that a lot of time was wasted.

Today, frenzied concern over smartphone use by children, especially at school, is understandable. Addiction to a nonstop stream of photos, video clips, alerts and likes, or their absence, is felt by everyone, and in school-aged children these distractions make it hard for kids to concentrate on learning (assuming they are being taught anything worth knowing). There are those tragic cases of bullying and shaming, especially of girls, by the sharing of compromising photos. That these can be beamed out to thousands of people, with scaled-up trauma to match, clearly makes them different to what the bullies of yore were able to pull off, however nasty and powerful they were (and they were plenty nasty: bullies ruined my life in 1992, when I was ten and had committed the heinous crime of cutting my curly hair short).

But the growing obsession with smartphones as the root of all evil – and the urge to ban them for under-16s full stop, as the government is proposing, because of the perils of social media – is peculiarly short-sighted. Banning smartphones in 2024 is like banning the air. At the very least, smartphones are walking computers: they allow people, including children, to do and learn a huge amount on the trot, from chess – which boomed among smartphone-wielding young people during lockdown – to the eating habits of ancient Romans. They can program, listen to podcasts, or watch YouTube videos that are informative or funny (not just crass or sewers of fake news).

Smartphones are how we all communicate now – and nobody communicates more feverishly than young people. There are fears that WhatsApp encourages children and teens to miss out on sleep because they stay up messaging each other – but so what? Teens in the modern era have always missed out on sleep for one reason or another. I remember feeling watchful, alone and fearful when the lights went out for years and years. To fend these feelings off and get to sleep eventually I’d have to listen to music, read for hours, keep a light on or, when younger, have a parent sit in the room while I tried to go to sleep. The chance to message under my sheets might have been a far jollier, less dispiriting way to pass the small hours and make my lifelong insomnia less of a burden to others. (I love a cheeky scroll or chat in bed these days; it’s soothing.)

In my book – and I write as a new parent – the worry with smartphones is far more to do with the insidious politicisation of an apparently neutral corporate platform. This has the effect of making the toxic political correctness of Silicon Valley programmers and executives appear as the nature of things. I remember being on Bumble, the dating app, when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement erupted, and was constantly badgered by messages about anti-racism and the app’s commitment to the BLM cause. I found it inappropriate and sinister.

The same, even more sinister thing happened last week with Apple, when an iPhone update suddenly programmed the Palestinian flag emoji to appear next to the word Jerusalem. It was the only city with a flag attached, and a hugely contentious and offensive gesture, especially as Israel battles for its survival against Palestinian, Lebanese and Yemeni terrorists, all funded by Iran. The tech giant claimed it was a ‘bug’.

The power of smartphones to politicise blank slates with rotten politics is far worse than the platform they provide teenagers to chat among themselves at all hours. Staying up late sharing memes and gifs and gossip and Tik Tok dance videos is far better than inheriting a world which presents dangerous falsehoods as plain truth.