LBC's Tom Swarbrick gets candid about online safety: 'It has to be a collective movement'

I have a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old, so we are on the cusp with my ten-year-old of this decision about phones. Some of his mates have got phones already. I have told him that it's not happening until he is at least 14. He has not taken kindly to that.

We've got iPads and a PlayStation, and as much as we limit their time and what they can do on those, the phone is a whole new world of pain.

It feels like you have to hold back the tide single-handedly as a parent against the absolute nonsense that can be sweeping into them, and it's almost impossible.

You just want to hold on to every bit of innocence they've got left and try and contain their childhood for as long as possible because it can vanish pretty quickly.

We've heard horror stories throughout the first Online Safety Day about various kids, but even amongst my friends who are parents, there have been some absolute shockers.

The question is, what do you do about it? It's important, and I don't think it can just be individual parents anymore; it has to be a collective movement, doesn't it?

I think it's got to be galvanizing that collective spirit, and shaping it into something that people believe will actually work.

Obviously, the online safety bill is quite an important step forward, and let's see what the effects of that might be.

Personally, I would rather it was clearer, and said, 'Below this age, I'm afraid you cannot own this bit of equipment'.  There are plenty of legal limits placed on the kinds of things you can buy anyway.

I think it's going to be a hardware issue. What they're doing in Australia looks very interesting. They're looking at banning it for under-16s, banning full internet enabled social media.

I want my son to be able to have Google Maps so he can look at where he goes. I want him to be able to message me and his mum and everybody else. I want that freedom for him. But we can't be doing it on our own.

What constitutes social media is a bit tricky because my kids do really like watching YouTube, so, if that's considered social media, that's also a problem.

As adults, we are conducting a bit of an experiment on children with the access that they have to this, and the great worry is that in 20 years' time we'll have woken up to just how bad it was. That's the middle of the night worry. We've now conditioned children.

My teacher friends tell me that the attention span of children in class has plummeted, partly, they say, because social media holds your attention for 12 seconds. We are chemically inducing an inability for a generation to concentrate. Why are we doing this?

I hope LBC's online safety day gets people genuinely involved. There's a lot to be learnt from listening to experts about what this does to the young brain, who need to be heard loud and clear - and now.

I actually feel it is changing quite a lot.

Circumstances differ for each kid, but it's less about the mobile phone device itself and more about what its power is, what its range is.

Why would we allow our children to talk to each other on Snapchat? Why wouldn't we allow them to talk to each other on the phone or actually through playing computer games?

There are all these avenues of communicating with your mates outside of school.

Why would you funnel them into doing it on Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok? The cool kid will have Snapchat, so everyone will follow the cool kid.

Other than the education around it, by making it very clear and obvious early on that there is no upside. There's no neuroscientific upside to having this dopamine addiction in your pocket.

There might be some upside, because it's community creating and fun, but this has got to be limited and treated carefully because it is essentially a drug, an addictive property.

I think educating without scaring children is pretty critical. I don't want to scare my kids – I want to empower them by making sure that they know what they're getting into.

Why would you let a child get hold of a fully enabled, ready to go bells and whistles, everything's available phone? Why wouldn't you have graduated steps into the adulthood of using this thing? You can vote at 16, but you can't buy alcohol until you're 18.

I like the terror of it, particularly on LBC. You literally don't know what's coming next, and it is possibly the most high-wire act to perform in this industry, because someone's going to pick you up, someone's going to have an argument with you, but I like that.

I like debates. I like the cut and thrust of it. This Morning's been great, a really lovely team, very nice people.

Well, they can recite the [LBC] phone number, which is probably indicative of how often I say it, so maybe I should stop repeating it so often.

To be honest with you, they don't find it that strange, which I find strange.

We'll be listening in the car and the trailer for the show will pop up and I'll go, 'Oh, it's me.' They're like, 'Yeah, so what?' They're not bothered. You think, dad worked bloody hard to get here! They're like,' Nah, not interested, shut up.'

Twenty-five per cent of it was like being in a film - you're walking alongside graded generals to a Cobra meeting where you were flying all around the world meeting presidents and prime ministers.

You think, my God, this is every high drama political film I've ever watched. That's very exciting. The rest of it is an utterly soul-crushing, dispiriting, stressful nightmare.

I think you could spend 30 years as a political correspondent and not have the insight into how it works that you get from a couple of years inside the centre of the machine. Part of what I like about being on LBC is sharing some of that insight with people who are naturally quite interested in politics.

No. The PTSD is coming flooding back.

I harbour a slight ambition to maybe be in a film.

I didn't train as an actor. I did lots of acting at school and I did a bit of stand-up at university. When you leave the cloistered environment of your student existence, it turns out it's really bloody hard and you have to be really good. I was up for neither of those things, so I ditched it.

'Nearly' is pushing it. I did audition for The Inbetweeners. I don't know how near I really got. It doesn't matter because I don't think life would be any different… having two massive Hollywood blockbusters and huge numbers of critically acclaimed series, I think my life would probably be the same.

Some sort of desperate, slightly clingy radio presenter who's hanging on by his fingernails. Maybe that's a world to try and push into at some stage, but as I say, the landmines that are placed in front of you on LBC every day are quite enough drama.

I have a tattoo, which came as a shock to members of my family. It's the final paragraph of a poem called Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis, which is about a dad watching their child go off to their first day at school.

As much as I like being a cynical hack, it is schmaltzy sentimentality, I'm afraid.