Children & Mobile Phones

There are currently around 70 million mobile phones being used by children all over the world and they continue to increase in popularity, as new features become available. Just as you struggle to remember life before TV, it would be unimaginable not to have mobile phones our children have never known a world without them. But, is it okay for children to use mobile phones or not? I myself disagree with that.

How Mobile Phones Work

Mobile phones are designed to transmit radio waves in all directions because base stations could be in any direction with respect to phone users. This means that a proportion of the radio waves they produce is directed towards the user's body the childs head, in short.

Effect of Radio Waves

The radio waves that are directed towards the head of the phone user penetrate into the body tissues for a few centimeters and tend to be absorbed. If you use the phone for a long time (six minutes is considered a long mobile phone call) then your head may feel warm where you held the phone to it. When you think how much smaller a child's head is with thinner skin (and with the very young, softer bone), giving them the same mobile an adult would use will potentially cause more damage.

Electromagnetic Fields
Exposure to all the electro magnetic fields around all of this mobile technology causes medical issues. Brain tumors are the number one leading cause of solid tumor cancer deaths in children under the age of 10. Besides cancer, research shows leukemia, depression, dementia and DNA damage related to this electromagnetic field exposure.

AgeAge-Sensitive Content
As growing numbers of mobile operators offer their customers access to a rich and compelling range of content services, they are faced with the challenge of how to manage content which would have been subject to age-restrictions if accessed through different channels. It is difficult to control what children will watch or transfer via bluetooth and other tools.

Unjustified Need
For Children under 12 years old, there is no real need for using mobile phones. The child at this age is unable to protect himself, not to mention a mobile phone. If parents are not connected to their children emotionally at this small age, then mobile phones will be useless.

Conclusion
While questions are frequently raised about the impacts of children and mobile phones, the trend towards increasing usage looks set to continue. This presentation has shown few reasons why children, specifically under 12 years old, should not use mobile phones. In this environment, parents need to adopt a consistently responsible approach in order to protect their children.

References


http://www.gsmworld.com/our-work/publichttp://www.gsmworld.com/our-work/publicpolicy/protecting-consumers/children-and-mobilepolicy/protecting-consumers/children-and-mobilephones/index.htm

http://www.who.int/pehhttp://www.who.int/pehemf/meetings/ottawa_june05/en/index4 emf/meetings/ottawa_june05/en/index4.html