Kate Emery: Forget about Apple, put your money in dumbphones

West Australian

19-05-2025

Mark Zuckerberg does it.
Zoe Foster-Blake does it.
A Melbourne private school wants its parents to do it.
And, if you have young kids, you probably want to do it too.
The wisdom of withholding smartphones from kids is a conversation that started when Apple's Steve Jobs and his black turtleneck stood onstage and claimed to have reinvented the phone. (Silicon Valley has more hot air than Marble Bar but Jobs was right.)
In 2007 — a simpler time when Microsoft had just released Windows Vista, Serbia's Marija Serifovic had just won Eurovision and Donald Trump's worst crime was assumed to be his cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — the effect of smartphones on young brains was not known.
Nearly 20 years later, smartphones and kids is a subject so fraught with judgment, fear and guilt that bringing it up with other parents is akin to trying to discuss peace in the Middle East with your supermarket checkout operator. At a certain point, you have to mutter some version of 'it's all very complicated isn't it?' and move onto something less controversial, like footy teams or religion.
If you bought a lot of Apple shares in 2007 you're not reading this: The West Australian doesn't deliver to your private island.
But if journalism was a career that delivered riches, in 2025 I'd be investing mine in dumbphone technology.
Maybe this is why I'm no longer this paper's stockmarket reporter.
But maybe it's also because the trend of withholding smartphones from children is going mainstream, particularly as generation Z — our first digital natives — become parents themselves. (My sincere apologies if that last sentence caused you to spontaneously age like that nazi at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)
There's a reason tech titans like Zuckerburg, Bill Gates and Jobs — graduates of the same Do As I Say Not As I Do school that is a proud alma mater to so many of Australia's political class — restricted their kids' access to smartphones.
They were the first to figure out a crackpipe might be the safer option.
The rest of us are just catching up.
Last week a Melbourne private school rolled out a new program to convince parents to withhold smartphones until at least Year 7.
More countries are banning smartphones during school hours, as Australian public schools largely already do.
The market for dumbphones — phones without internet access — is tipped by Statista to be worth $16 billion this year.
School bans are helpful but no panacea.
In news to disappoint every mum or dad hoping to outsource their parenting, research suggests school phone bans alone do not correlate with better student mental health or grades. The study's authors suggested kids attending schools with bans may simply make up for lost time.
In other words — and academics are advised to look away as I attempt to condense a 15-page study into one sentence — banning smartphones from schools does bugger all if students are greeted at the school gates by the loving embrace of their iPhone.
That's where parents come in and people like Foster-Blake, arguably best-known to women for her beauty empire and to men for her equally famous husband, Hamish Blake, are being increasingly public about their decision not to give their kids smartphones.
The struggle is real, as I was reminded in a very minor way at a recent birthday party.
Having played party games for hours, my eight-year-old and her friends were flopped in the grass listening to music (courtesy of some parents' phones). When my daughter asked to borrow mine, I was conflicted: the optics bugged me but it seemed harmless.
Then she sealed her fate by adding: 'Everyone else has one!'
With those four words, my personal Rubicon appeared and I saw a glimpse of her tween and teen years: hand over the phone now and she'd surely be on Only Fans by age 14.
'Not today,' I said.
Later, as I mentally awarded myself the 2025 Tough Love Mother of The Year Trophy, I looked across the park at my daughter. Happily ensconced with her mates she had her father's smartphone in one hand and was having, it must be said, a blast.