Before taking away children's smartphones

Korea is moving to keep minors off social media and phones out of classrooms, but the adults writing those rules cannot look up from their own screens.

A few days ago, heading home from work, I was standing seven stories underground at Daegok Station on Subway Line 3. Six elevators connect to the transfer platform, and long lines backed up at each. I picked the shorter one and waited. The elevator stayed on the second floor.

Wrong line?

Then I looked at the call button. Dark. Nobody had pressed it. Nobody waiting seemed to have noticed, or cared. Every person in that line was looking down at a phone. I stepped forward and pressed it myself. When the doors finally opened, the commuters filed in with blank faces, eyes still down.

"Smombie" is a portmanteau of "smartphone" and "zombie," a term for people who walk without looking up. When the word arrived more than a decade ago, it was treated as a new phenomenon of the smartphone age, something to study. Now it is unremarkable. Anyone can be a smombie a dozen times before lunch, as those commuters were.

We have given up the idle minutes between tasks, and the quiet stretch before sleep, for short-form videos. Money, memory, health and even taste — the phone holds all of it. Public services and social systems are now built on the assumption that everyone carries one, which means life without a phone has become hard to manage.

Korea, to its credit, takes the damage seriously. Studies have linked excessive smartphone use in adolescence and heavy social media use to depression and weakening literacy. Some countries have moved to restrict minors' access to social media by law or to limit phone use on school grounds.

Korea is reviewing an amendment to the law governing information and communications networks that would ban social media accounts for children younger than 14 and restrict algorithm-selected content for older teenagers. Starting in September, a "smartphone-free schools" pilot program that bans phone use during breaks and lunch periods is due to run at 200 schools nationwide.

Here is the irony: The children we shield from smartphone dependence will grow up watching us. More than one in five people in Korea are classified as at risk of smartphone overdependence. We worry about our children's screens with our own screens in hand. What exactly do we think they are learning?

On Aug. 14, France's Constitutional Council struck down a law restricting social media use by minors under 15, ruling it violated freedom of expression and freedom of communication. The lesson is not that regulation is hopeless. It is that "no phones, you're too young" is insufficient on its own. Platforms must be required to block harmful content and build in real protections, and the systems around us have to stop penalizing people who are not holding a phone. Otherwise a ban is only a delay — taking phones away from children at 13 and handing them back at 19 into the same world, on the same terms. Before taking children's phones, can adults put down their own?

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.