Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

One often hears of the amount of peer pressure being put on parents as a consequence of their children's classmates having phones. It is a serious issue. If one has a child who does not have access to a smartphone, he or she can be excluded from his or her community and bullied as a consequence. This is why we, as a society, need to sit back and figure out what we want our schools to be doing and how we want parents to behave with each other. If there is a cohort of parents who give smartphones to their kids at certain ages, we should be frowning upon that because it is putting pressure on other families to buy these devices and start putting their kids online. We need to each to a level of maturity to deal with this cultural issue. As Dr. Aiken said, the world has changed enormously. Eleven years ago, when the first iPhone came on the market, we had no idea that we would end up here.