Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Steve Hilton wants to get smartphones out of kids’ hands.
And come November, if voters elect him to be California’s next governor, he said he would do that in a unique way: inverting the social pressure so many parents succumb to when they get their kid a phone.
Hilton told a crowd of supporters in Irvine on Monday, Aug. 31, that he would require schools to ask parents to sign a “Wait Until 8th” contract. Wait Until 8th is a national campaign aimed at getting parents to promise they won’t give their child a smartphone until they enter high school. And if parents need a way to stay in touch with their kid, the campaign encourages them to get their kids a basic cell phone.
Hilton said he intends to require schools, early childcare providers and state-funded organizations that work with kids — like youth groups, sports programs and after-school clubs — to promote the campaign and ask parents and their kids to join. The ultimate goal, he said, is to create a new social norm for kids and teens across California: that children should not be given smartphones until they reach high school.
The national campaign has gotten more than 155,000 parents to sign on across the country.
“We are not against technology; we’re the tech capital of the world. But when it’s kids we’re talking about, we need to protect childhood, unplug the children (and) free our kids from the feed,” Hilton said to a group of about two dozen supporters outside a Verizon storefront in The Market Place shopping center, many who held signs that read “unplug the children” and “free our kids from the feed.”
“I don’t want to ban anything. I don’t want to tell parents what to do. I want to help parents do what they want to do anyway,” said Hilton, who prides himself on never owning a smartphone.
Parents often succumb to social pressure and get their kids a smartphone because they don’t want them to be the only one among their peers without one, Hilton said. But if enough parents refrain from getting their kids smartphones until they’re entering high school, then the kids who do have a smartphone will be the odd one out, he said.
“Therefore, the kids can’t say, ‘Oh, my friends all got one,’ because they would do it together,” Hilton said in an interview after the event. “It’s a kind of social contract. … I think parents want to be in the driver’s seat.
“The parents can still say no. It’s a free country. But that social pressure will be much greater. So you’re putting it in parents’ minds from the jump.”
Phones in classrooms and the overall use of technology by children and teenagers have become a priority for lawmakers in recent years.
In July, the Phone-Free Schools Act went into effect, requiring every California school district, charter school and county office of education to have a policy limiting smartphone use to begin this school year. And state legislators also pushed this year for a “bell-to-bell” cell phone policy for K-8 students, which, if enacted, would prohibit those students from using cell phones for the entire school day.
Democratic candidate Xavier Becerra‘s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his views on smartphones in schools or for younger children.
Hilton, meanwhile, wants to see that bell-to-bell phone ban in place and strictly enforced, but he envisions a ban that goes beyond classroom phone use.
“In many ways, you could look at the school bans and say it makes life worse for parents, because all of the smartphone use is now on their plate, because kids don’t have it in school so it’s only outside school. I could say that’s worse for parents, so what we need to do is eliminate smartphones from childhood,” he said.
Hilton’s event on Monday comes off the heels of Meta settling a lawsuit brought by 29 states over teen social media addiction. The tech giant agreed to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of the deal. If approved by the court, California will get at least $1.5 billion, the largest sum of any state, over the next decade.
However, this suit brought by states — and the settlement itself — is “a complete waste of time and money,” Hilton’s campaign said.
“Everyone knows that it will make no real dent in Big Tech addiction and the destruction of childhood caused by the scourge of smartphones. Social media bans, lawsuits, guidelines, exhortations, parental controls will do nothing unless they address the real problem: not the apps but the screens. Specifically, smartphones. Everyone knows that children will find ways to evade measures that aim to manage social media use,” the campaign said in its policy plan.
Hilton, a Republican and former Fox News host, said this is why a shift in the societal norm is necessary. From a policy perspective, Hilton said if elected, he would try to sit down with phone carriers, manufacturers and retailers to push these old-school cell phones to children and teens.
“I really believe in that kind of way of working and using the power of the office to convene those kinds of conversations,” he said. “I don’t want to tell (phone manufacturers) what to do and what their business is, but if we’re moving to a world where kids don’t have smartphones, there’s a market for Apple to design really cool, basic phones. And that’s the kind of conversation I’d like to get to.”
Hilton’s campaign also released new outlines of his aim to “get big tech out of the classroom” on Monday, though it was not the focus of his event in Irvine.
Notably, Hilton said that as governor he would try to the adoption of artificial intelligence in California schools until a “full independent review” is completed and clear guidelines on the use of AI in schools can be made, while also requiring “independent evidence and testing” before new tech is introduced in classrooms.
Part of these new priorities is a plan to prohibit tech companies “from setting academic standards, writing curricula, designing teacher training or shaping state education policy,” requiring organizations that advise California education officials to disclose their corporate funding from big tech and stopping companies from using branded courses and teacher training as marketing, but neither Hilton nor his campaign went into specifics about this plan Monday.