Are Mobile Phones Transitional Objects?

As the Government consultation comes to its conclusion on children’s online safety, some terrifying statistics have come to light.

▶ One in five people being prosecuted for terrorist offences is under the age of 18

(Source: UK Home Office)

▶ 13 is the average age at which a child in the UK first sees pornography

(Ofcom)

▶ 60% of children see pornography by accident

(Source: Ofcom)

▶ 54% of 13-15-year-olds have watched a beheading video online

(Source: Academy of Medical Royal Colleges)

▶ 29% of all child suicides in the past seven years have mentioned child screen time.

(Source: The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health).

▶ One in five children under the age of five own a smart phone.

(Source: Big Brother Watch)

Doctors are now warning that social media addiction has become a public health emergency. Evidence submitted to the consultation suggests that many GPs are regularly treating young people for screen-related problems. Children are also being exposed to extreme content at alarming rates, including pornography, violent videos and suicide-related material.

The debate rages on about what to do with banning mobile phone use for the under 16’s a contentious option. While advocates like Baroness Beeban Kidron (5Rights Foundation) think it is a necessary first step before more targeted legislation, opponents, such as Silkie Carlo (Big Brother Watch), are concerned that age verification will force every mobile phone user to input their age, handing yet more information to the tech companies. 

But let’s take a step back from this frothy debate and, for a second, look at the psychology behind mobile phone use. At what a mobile phone represents to each one of us. And I mean the phone, NOT the social media it connects to.

Donald Winnicott, the paediatrician, coined the phrase ‘transitional object’. It was, e.g. the teddy that a child held onto whenever they went. Winnicott said that the purpose of the ‘transitional object’ was to mitigate the subjective reality of the child’s world against their experience of it. The core idea is that the object is ‘not me’ and ‘me’ at the same time. The object itself becomes invested with safety, continuity, fantasy and identity.

Although most people have probably never heard of the phrase ‘transitional object’, almost everyone has a lived experience of it during their own childhood. The theme certainly recurs as a powerful theme in modern entertainment, from cartoons such as Calvin and Hobbes to franchises such as Toy Story and motion pictures such as ET.

Much of the heated debate around mobile phone use rests on the mobile phone’s underlying symbolic power as a bridge between a person’s life in the here and now and the life ‘out there’ on social media.

Furthermore, the experience of using a mobile phone to access social media consolidates the feeling that the phone is essentially physically a part of the person. And as Esther Perel has pointed out, this extends psychologically in terms of ‘artificial intimacy’, the phone as a pacifier – hence them being provided to the under-fives by their parents.

So both physically and psychologically, the phone becomes an essential part of a person’s life. It’s not ‘just a phone’; it’s not a tool like a fork or a car; it feels more like a limb.  To discuss mobile phones as a ‘tool’ is to misrepresent them and risks underestimating the pull they have on users. Any forthcoming legislation needs to seriously evaluate mobile phone use in this psychological light; the trillion-dollar Tech Bros almost certainly understand this relationship better than we do.