If you’ve got children, you need to watch Swiped – and see how sick their phones are making them | Simon Jenkins

The terrible toll that smartphones are taking on young people is now undeniable. We need to start talking about a ban

Every parent of a school-age child should watch Swiped, the Channel 4 documentary on smartphones shown last week. It was devastating. It told of an Essex secondary school’s experiment in response to what it saw as a rise in anxiety and stress among its 11-year-olds. A group of them agreed to surrender their phones for three weeks.

The parents’ stories were familiar – of children un...