Dr. Mary Aiken:

The problem does not really lie with parents or even the statutory authorities or the Government but with the behavioural sciences which have been blindsided by the rapid evolution of technology.

I first studied psychology before the Internet and computers. Everything changed and I had to go back to requalify for an MSc in cyberpsychology and a PhD in forensic cyberpsychology. I had to do so because the world had changed suddenly.

If one thinks about classical child development, we have Piaget's stages of cognitive development. Parents are told that, by the age of one year, their child should be standing up, by four, saying a sentence and so on. We do not have the equivalent for stages of cybercognitive development. For argument's sake, what is the best age to give a child a smartphone? There are no protocols or recommendations at a statutory level or from the Department of Education and Skills which state that expert consensus agrees on what age a child should interact with technology. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that one should not give a device or any screen time to a child under the age of 18 months, yet nobody knows that. One positive outcome would be to bring an expert group together to go through all the information and data we have to date to see if we could formulate stages of cybercognitive development that could inform and advise teachers and parents.

I know there are many lobbies, people talking about banning smartphones and much drama in the media about this. A ban is something else. As scientists, we would be much more in favour of protocols. If, for example, the recommendation is that a child under the age of 14, which is a protective band, is not mature enough to deal with what he or she is exposed to on a smartphone, then, effectively when little Johnny is given a smartphone at seven for his First Communion present, other parents can say that is not fair because it is creating peer pressure. It is actually not working to best practice in terms of the protocols.