Rachel Harper

Well look I've been listening in on the conversation there and some really good points have been made all around but I think ultimately we're just trying to protect children and young people and I suppose

Just within my own school and the Greystones area, when we set up It Takes a Village three years ago, it was because we could see an increase in anxiety levels in the children in our area.

And we simply came together as a group of schools and principals in a community to try and ask parents to hold off and to get a smartphone for their child in secondary school because what we were seeing, even at a primary level, was,

children as young as 9 and 10 three years ago were getting their hands on smartphones and getting onto platforms and it was also some of the stuff that we were seeing.

So I suppose what we saw then after... It's kind of a parental issue, isn't it?

Yeah, we did find, but what we did find was parents also needed that support.

They needed that collaboration because

You know, no parent wants their child to be left out or the odd one out in the class if they haven't got a device, you know, a smartphone.

So I think that's where that community working together and trying to create a new norm for the children, that really worked.

And Dr. Mags Green then did an evaluation of that year one.

And some of the things that came out of that was that, you know, change happens best when communities work together collaboratively.

but also the importance of the children's voice and the young person's voice.

So like today, you've had lots of young voices on, which I think it's really, really important to hear from the young people and to hear what it's like.

Because for you and I, we don't know what it was like being a teenager with social media.

So I think it is important to bring them on the journey with us.

And that's where we went with year two of It Takes a Village.

We've now been really heavily focusing on education.

and educating children and bringing them on the journey and explaining to them why we're asking them and their parents to wait till secondary school.

And that's been a game changer for us, the buy-in from the children, you know, but also the buy-in from the parents because we're all about delaying but preparing, you know, children for this online world because I think it's so important to create in children those these digital critical thinking, you know, that they need

the digital skills because this is the world they're growing up in.