Sophie Winkleman: ‘The Royal family are very sweet. I love them all'
Sophie Windsor had never been the type to post much on the class WhatsApp group.
The actress, best known for her role as Big Suze in Peep Show, preferred to keep a low profile.
'I just didn't go anywhere near them,' admits the 44-year-old, who has two daughters, Maud, aged 11, and Isabella, aged 9 with her husband Lord Frederick Windsor, the son of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
'But then I had to become that maniac mother who got everyone together before Year 7 and said, 'Can we maybe not do this?'.'
What Windsor – or Winkleman, as she is known professionally – wanted was to persuade fellow parents not to automatically give their offspring a smartphone on arrival at secondary school.
According to Ofcom, the online safety regulator, nine in 10 children own a mobile phone by the time they leave primary school.
But having become increasingly alarmed by research revealing how harmful they are to children's health and education, Winkleman attempted to lead a parents' revolt.
'It was so anti my nature to do that. [To be] the sort of noisy, irritating goose at the school gate,' she admits. 'The screen thing I was quite fanatical about because it was so obvious during lockdown that it was such a terrible way to learn. They are completely un-put-down-able – all these devices.'
It started out well, but then slowly 'everyone sort of started folding', she explains. 'Year 7's so hard and so stressful. [Maud] was already self-conscious about me being a mum who was against phones – there's nothing less cool, I mean, what a loser. So my daughter's got one now.'
She clarifies that the old iPhone allows her to send 'sweet little texts' but doesn't have any apps enabled.
Like any parent of Generation Z and Alpha children, Winkleman had tried to resist the lure of screens from an early age. 'I'm incredibly lazy in every other way, apart from screen use. I'm not a hands on mum; they don't do cello and they don't do Chinese, they can just do what they like.'
But everything changed when ' their schools gave them iPads without telling me.' She despairs: 'So they're on screen for a lot of the day. They come home, they open up the damn thing again, and they're on screen for two hours doing homework. And it's such a physically unhealthy way to learn. It's so bad for their eyesight, it's bad for their posture, it's bad for their sleep rhythms. It's even bad for hormones and it's terrible cognitively.'
Knowing what she does now, having read extensively on the subject, she admits: 'I wasn't robust enough to immediately take them off them. I regret that. I could have just said, 'No, you're not having them' and had a week of hell. I was a bit pathetic.'
But now the mother of two has become a leading voice campaigning for phone-free schools – and the removal of most of the educational technology ('EdTech') from classrooms. Earlier this year, she warned of the 'digital destruction of childhood' during a hard-hitting speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London.
She recently joined forces with Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist and author of the 2024 book The Anxious Generation – to raise awareness alongside fellow actor and father of five, Hugh Grant.
Haidt, who believes smartphones should be banned for under-14s, and under-16s should be prohibited from using social media, argues screens have not just caused an 'epidemic of mental illness' in children, but 'rewired' their brains, resulting in 'attention fragmentation'.
The Government has rejected calls for a law banning phones in classrooms, and Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has dismissed the demands as a 'headline-grabbing gimmick'.
At a recent event organised by the campaign group Close Screens, Open Minds at Knightsbridge School in London, Grant, 64, urged parents to take on the Government: 'I don't think politicians ever do anything because it's the right thing to do, even if it's the right thing to do to protect children. They'll only do what gets them votes. They only care about their career.'
Winkleman agrees. 'I'm beginning to worry that this country just doesn't care about children. I've been banging on about screen damage to children for about three years now – and now there's a spate of very intelligent articles about how screens are ruining adults' cognitive health and suddenly everyone's very interested.'
Like Haidt, who argues modern parents have underprotected their children online and overprotected them in the 'real world', Winkleman is also dismayed by the lack of traditional forms of play.
'It's so healthy for a child to get really bored and start making his or her own fun. That doesn't need to involve any money. I mean, it can involve a piece of paper and a pen or, you know, if you're a baby, a wooden spoon. You don't need these jazz hands tools to be entertained.'
She also advocates a return to pen and paper and for children to be encouraged to handwrite rather than type, insisting it 'implants information so much more profoundly and long-lastingly into the brain than typing does'.
She adds: 'I think children's brains are completely atrophying because they're just passive vessels for all sorts of content. They're not developing their imagination anymore because they've got these machines, they can be constantly entertained and it's such a mistake. Apparently, if kids keep going on the way they are, spending seven hours a day on screens, it will amount to 22 years of their lives. That's more than a quarter of a person's life.'
Sophie is the daughter of Barry Winkleman, publisher of The Times Atlas of World History, and the children's author Cindy Black. The television presenter Claudia Winkleman is her half-sister from her father's first marriage to the journalist Eve Pollard.
Educated at the City of London School for Girls and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she studied English literature, she developed a passion for acting after joining the Cambridge Footlights.
Considering herself 'lucky' to be brought up in leafy north London, she says: 'I was very irritatingly lucky. I have two very wonderful parents who I'm far too close to. It's actually awful how close I am to them. I wish I liked them less. I grew up in Primrose Hill before it had a Space NK, when it was still quite shabby and full of lentil shops.'
She met Freddie, who is 54th in line to the throne, after sharing a taxi from a party in Soho on New Year's Eve in 2006, when he recognised her from Peep Show. He works as an executive director at JP Morgan and the couple live in south London.
Their 2009 wedding at Hampton Court Palace was attended by around 400 guests, including Princess Eugenie, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, actress Jane Asher, Lady Helen Taylor and the singer Bryan Adams.
'It was such a blur because we had to move to Los Angeles the day after and I had to start a brand new job the day after that. So we got married on Saturday and moved everything, our whole lives out to America the day after. And I'd been so concentrating on the work that I hadn't thought about the wedding.
'Which meant that my hair was so disgusting and Freddy still gets upset about it. It was just disgusting. And my mother-in-law chose my dress, which was very sweet and puffy, but I looked barking.'
Princess Pushy, as she was cruelly named by the tabloids, chose her dress? 'She sort of took it all over and I actually didn't mind at all. I thought, 'Great, do everything.' I was concentrating on this acting job and saying goodbye to my darling granny who wasn't very well and just doing other stuff. But now I look back on it and think I should have worn a simpler dress and I should have got my hair blow dried by someone who'd done it before.'
The Royal family, she insists, were always welcoming. 'Family isn't always brilliant but this lot are very sweet. I love all of them.'
Despite finding having the children 'astoundingly knackering', Winkleman has balanced an acting career with a huge amount of charity work and is patron of a number of organisations including the Children's Surgery Foundation and School-Home Support, which, she says, 'keeps children from very tough homes in school and learning.'
One of the reasons she campaigns on screens is because of the adverse impact on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. 'The reason we need government intervention is that I think it's predominantly a middle class thing at the moment. It's middle class parents having the confidence to rally people around and say, 'Let's not do this.' And poorer kids are being destroyed by these things. It's not a patronising thing to say. It's true. They're on them all night long. They're going to school wrecked, not focusing, eating rubbish, being angry. I know this because of the education charity and so many teachers I've spoken to. That's why it needs to be a big, old governmental piece of legislation.'
Although she says 'I don't think kids should have internet-enabled devices till they finish their GCSEs,' she realises 'it won't happen'.
Instead she wants the UK to follow Sweden's lead and remove most of the EdTech from schools, except in the lessons where it's essential, such as computer science. 'They've been very brave and admitted they made a big mistake – that EdTech is a failed experiment. They got computers out of the classroom and reinvested in books, paper and pen. And the children are doing brilliantly. Surprise. Surprise.'
The Safer Phones Bill and Online Safety Bill are currently going through Parliament, but Winkleman believes neither go far enough.
'Parents all over the country can get a better grasp on this. I think we have to go towards the doctors and there's a brilliant group called Health Professionals for Safer Screens and they are paediatricians, psychiatrists, optometrists, speech and language therapists. They're all at the coalface seeing what damage screen use in and out of school is doing to children. I think it needs to be a public health warning. They're saying that even 11 to 17-year-olds shouldn't have more than one to two hours of screen time per day.'
Parents can mount a revolution, she argues, but ultimately 'it has to come from all the young people'. She adds: 'There was a recent report which interviewed teenagers and asked them, 'If social media and smartphones were banned for all of you, would you be OK with that?' They all said, 'Yes, please,'.'
And with that, Winkleman is off to her next acting job: to record a radio play in which she's portraying a mole. She has just finished filming a BBC One drama called Wild Cherry, 'about a group of horrible, competitive, wealthy mothers and their very screwed up teenage daughters.' She laughs: 'I'm playing a complete maniac, which is really fun.'
It will certainly be a departure from her clear-eyed and cool-headed quest to lead the mother of all campaigns to end the digital destruction of childhood.
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