Following the furor over TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp allowing her teenage son to take an Interrail trip, safeguarding experts and child psychologists have said the risks to teenagers travelling online at home are “far greater” than when travelling alone.
The debate over safeguarding teenagers began when Mr Allsopp revealed that his son, then aged 15, had been questioned by social services after posting online about a train trip around Europe after his GCSE exams.
Child protection consultant Simon Bailey told the Guardian: “The risks to children accessing smart devices in their bedrooms are far greater than those to travelling to Berlin or Munich and seeing the spectacular sights of Europe.”
Mr Bailey, a former police commissioner who was lead for child protection at the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) before becoming a consultant on the issue, said teenagers were at greater risk from using smartphones at home than many parents realised.
“The risks to children online have never been greater, and the online world that children inhabit poses greater risks than the real world they live in today.”
Bailey pointed to a recent ChildRight study that found that more than 300 million children worldwide face online sexual exploitation and abuse each year. He said the findings should send a “chilling shock down the spine of every parent” and that parents should place greater emphasis on managing these risks.
“In the real world, even a 15- or 16-year-old can tell if someone is threatening,” he said, but “online, they don't know who they're talking to or what their motives are.”
Ms Allsopp's son Oscar, now 16, took an Interrail holiday around Europe when he was just 15. After writing about it on X, Ms Allsopp was contacted by a social worker from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea asking what safety measures were in place for her son's trip.
Alan Wood, founding director of child welfare group What Works, said it was “not unreasonable” for social services to make initial contact, but added: “It is a bit questionable to assume that childhood ends at 18 and then apply rules, protocols and procedures designed for younger children to teenagers in their later teens.”
Wood, who has led many child welfare departments, said he feels technology is a bigger threat to teenagers. “I think a lot of the risk comes from something a little different than being a 15-year-old on tour. I think the social alienation of individual kids through being obsessed with social media and gaming and things like that can have quite an impact on their mental health and emotional wellbeing.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University who explored twin trends of declining freedom and unsupervised play among adolescents and increasing reliance on screens in his book “The Anxious Generation,” praised Allsopp's decision.
He posted on X over the weekend: “If we want to undo our mobile phone childhood we need to give our kids back a fun, exciting and sometimes dangerous real world childhood. Kirsty has given that gift to her 15-year-old son.”
Educational psychologist Dan O'Hare said children's reduced physical freedom and increased screen time were affecting their health.
He said parental concerns about safety can curtail young people's physical freedom, meaning “less physical activity, more time spent through screens rather than engaging with the world around them and exposed to content they would never have encountered if they were playing in the park”.
“I think all of these factors need to be taken into account. The risk doesn't come from the immediate world around us. The risk in 2024 could come at 3 a.m. from another time zone, thousands of miles away.”
O'Hare said independence needed to be “developed as a skill” from an early age, adding that assessing the risk of teenagers travelling unaccompanied would depend on how much support they received as children to develop that independence and whether they learned how to ask for help from others.
