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Cellphones can be bad for children, report says

A young girl uses her mobile phone to talk to her parents yesterday. A recently released report warned that inappropriate use of mobile phones could create tension between parents and children and disrupt family relationships. PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES

Taiwan's Child Welfare League Foundation yesterday released its first report on mobile-phone use by children, which has pinpointed a number of negative impacts.

The report shows that cellphone addiction has become a common problem, with some children running up bills in excess of NT$3,000 a month. It indicates that children also received messages with adult content and that phones were furthermore used to play video games.

Speaking about the report, Wang Yu-ming (王育敏), the executive director of the foundation, said that parents can no longer afford to ignore the potential negative impact of mobile-phone use on their children.

The report targeted students from senior primary school classes to those in their first year of secondary school in the cities of Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung. Of the 1,177 respondents, 51.1 percent were male and 48.9 percent female.

"In the same way that water can both support the weight of a boat and sink it, mobile telephones have their benefits, but can also have a negative psychological impact on children when not used in the right way" Wang said.

The report showed that the proportion of children using mobile phones in Taiwan is higher than that in the US and Japan (53 percent of junior-high students and 37 percent of primary school students). The proportion of girls with phones was higher than that of boys (56 percent to 44 percent). As to how the phone was acquired, 68 percent replied that the phone had been provided by and on the initiative of their parents.

The uses to which the phones were put were predominantly to facilitate appointments with friends and family (76.8 percent), reporting home (55.5 percent) and for sending SMS messages (44.5 percent).

While 60.3 percent of children with phones used them for under 10 minutes a day, in a small number of cases there were signs of addiction. A total of 9.2 percent of respondents said that they "needed" to speak on the phone for over an hour a day, while three respondents said they used the phone for three hours a day, and one child reportedly spoke on the phone for seven hours a day.

While 32 percent of children spent NT$100 to NT$300 a month on talk time, in some instances monthly charges reached NT$3,000. Over 16 percent of the children had no idea how much their telephone charges were, saying that bills where "paid by mum and dad."

"Parent should teach children to understand the financial costs of using a mobile phone, otherwise children will use the phone without restraint," Wang said.

The report came to the conclusion that parents should not necessarily provide children with a mobile phone for their personal use and should look into other methods of communication. It said that as the effects of mobile phones on our physical health has not been conclusively established, usage of mobile phones by children should be kept to a minimum.

The report indicated that the relationship between parents and children can be affected by mobile phones, with 58 percent of respondents saying they had been scolded by their parents for reasons connected to mobile-phone use, including for talking too long on the phone, not answering the phone or losing a phone.

Wang said that while a mobile phone could offer considerable convenience for communication between parents and children, inappropriate use could create tension between parents and children and disrupt family relationships.
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