It’s time to be honest with ourselves about our smartphone use and how it puts children at a disadvantage, says Al Kingsley MBE.
Most of us have probably seen the sad sight of a child trying to get their parent’s attention while the adult is scrolling on their phone – or being pushed along in the buggy in their own little world while their caregiver talks endlessly on the phone to someone else.
The reality is that smartphones, for all their benefits of convenience, are actively stealing our attention, eating our time and intruding on the relationships we have with our children.
As educators, we talk a lot about screen time and children, whether it’s the apps they use, the suitability of the YouTube cartoons they watch or using tablets at the dinner table or bed time. But the bigger story is actually us – the grown-ups – and the example we are setting to our children. That’s what should be concerning us, because it’s high time we were honest with ourselves about our own screen use.
We are – ping! – distracted
Years of child developmental studies have shown that the early years of a child’s life are when the roots of language learning are set down. They learn it from parents and carers by being talked to, responded to and drawn into back-and-forth exchanges, long before they can speak any words themselves. This ‘commentary and response’ where adults expand on what the child is meaning/saying is what researchers call ‘contingent talk’. And it all happens naturally when an adult is present in the moment with a child.
That moment is exactly what a smartphone so often interrupts.
Every time we glance down when they are mid-sentence, we are actively withdrawing the learning materials that a child’s brain uses to build vocabulary and understand how conversations work.
These are the foundations of communication and oracy, where, later on in schools, we nurture the ability to articulate ideas, hold conversations and use spoken language confidently and effectively.
I’m not saying this to blame anyone – least of all parents, who are constantly pulled in multiple directions – but rather because it’s a cultural reality, with practically everyone who has a smartphone being distracted, having their attention diverted and time consumed by the devices in their hands. Now, as primary schools are sounding an increasingly louder alarm on the decline in communication and language skills in Reception-age children, it’s time we were honest with ourselves about what effect our screen use is having on them.
The situation in the classroom
Over the past few years, it’s been well reported that children are arriving at school when they are not ‘school ready’. This means not only basics like dressing themselves and toilet training, but with language and communication, too. In January 2026, the Kindred Squared school readiness report found that:
- “82% of staff report [children have] difficulty listening or responding to instructions
- “70% say children struggle with basic language skills
- “68% say children are unable to communicate needs.”
Children are starting school with noticeably smaller spoken vocabularies than expected for their age, say teachers. Their sentences are short and they struggle to convey a simple sequence of events, which is a skill that normally develops through being narrated to, often in the form of story time. In short, their oracy is underdeveloped before they’ve even got to school.
Once again, there is no blame here; it’s simply a shift that is happening to all of us at once, and the decline in children’s early oracy (and the literacy it supports) is what is being affected.
Oracy supports literacy
Oracy foundations are laid down from thousands of hours of being spoken with – not just from hearing voices nearby. Long before a child decodes their first word on a page, oracy is what will give that word meaning, provides them with the vocabulary to recognise it, the sentence patterns to know where to use it, and the conversational skills to do so effectively.
However, a child who hasn’t had the benefit of those back-and-forth conversations at home arrives at school with a really limited vocabulary. Teachers can teach them the skill of decoding a word, but if they don’t understand what it means or how to use it, that quickly becomes a problem and puts them at a disadvantage.
This is why the advice to parents to limit children’s screen time only addresses half the problem. The more urgent priority is about our screen time, the smartphone habits we model and the detriment to oracy and vocabulary we’re unwittingly passing down by being distracted by (or addicted to?) the device with its pings, bright colours, moving pictures and sounds.
Setting boundaries – for ourselves
This isn’t about making people feel guilty about phone use – everyone is in the same boat. However, a few practical boundaries have the potential to make a real difference, and I share these in conversations whenever it feels appropriate.
- Phone-free time. Have 20 or 30 minutes a day (at the dinner table, on the walk to school, during bath time) where the phone is genuinely put away and out of reach.
- Narrate ordinary activities. Describing what you’re doing while making toast or folding washing is easy and feeds directly into vocabulary building.
- Notice and respond. When a child points at something like a ladybird, a dog or a cloud shaped like a fish, be the one to look up and talk to them about it.
- Model full sentences. If you can use full, expressive vocabulary in conversations with young children, it really helps with their learning.
Being honest
If we want to protect oracy and literacy in the next generation, as adults, we have to start by looking honestly at our smartphone use and understand how it links with the all-important early years of child development.
Think too, about what impact screen time has on our own lives. After all, do we really want to spend more than four years of our precious time alive scrolling aimlessly, as this recent Virgin Media O2 recent study revealed?
Dialling back our phone use could probably do us – and our children – a lot of good. The next step is actually finding ways to do it.
References
- Where language meets attention: How contingent interactions promote learning. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0273229721000162 (Accessed 25 June 2026)
- School Readiness Survey 2025. Available at: https://kindredsquared.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/School-Readiness-Survey-January-2026-Kindred-Squared.pdf (Accessed 25 June 2026)
- You’re probably on your phone right now – and there’s a good chance you don’t really know why. Available at: https://news.sky.com/story/how-much-time-do-you-spend-scrolling-it-might-be-more-than-you-think-13550297 (Accessed 25 June 2026)
