Your child’s phone isn’t just bad for their mental health – it’s destroying their body too

The rise of ‘tech neck’ is another reminder that allowing mobiles in schools will haunt and shame us for the rest of our lives

It was hard not to laugh at an LBC call-in about the benefits of phone bans in schools at the weekend. The delight of the teachers! The astonishment of the parents! Who could have guessed that the concentration levels would already be so improved? That the bullying would have decreased so noticeably? That children would, overall, be so much happier?
That we’ve been banging on about mental health for over a decade, but only now plucked up the courage to ban the blatant cause of ill health for so many children in schools. It is something that will haunt and shame us for the rest of our lives. I genuinely believe that. In terms of madness, it would be up there with patients having once been allowed to smoke in hospitals. 
Now that one of England’s largest school academy trusts is taking action by banning phones during the school day, the pressure for others to follow suit is on. I’d be willing to bet that within five years there won’t be a school in the country allowing phones during the day.
A lot of damage to younger generations has already been done, however – not all of it reversible. And, when I read the words of one of the country’s leading dermatologists about the rise of “tech neck” in children, it was a reminder that much of that damage will also be physical.
At the Royal Society of Medicine’s inaugural Aesthetics Congress earlier this month, Dr Rowland Payne and Zoe Barley, a medical student from King’s College London, presented new research showing that whereas in an upright position, the human head weighs 5kg, when held at 45 degrees – the angle most smartphone users position their heads at – it jumps to 22kg. That’s as heavy as what Americans call a “showpiece pumpkin”, by the way, so no wonder those teens you see on buses and tubes are so hunched over. And it gets worse.  
According to Payne, children are particularly susceptible to tension in the trapezius muscles “which can radiate into the muscles of the nape of the neck, then to the temples and on down into the jaw muscles”. That’s when the “migraines” start, the “joint damage” and the “attrition of the teeth with cracks and fillings, chips and crowns, root canal treatments, endodontistry and eventually implants”.
Add this to the “weak core muscles” and “poor trunk stability” teachers have reported seeing in kids as young as four – kids who have spent so many hours slumped over devices that they are unable to sit upright at a table in primary school – and that’s quite a wake-up call. The only question now is how we managed to stay asleep as long as we did?