Kids with smartphones are OK and may be beneficial

“Smartphone” is often a foul language. When someone says, “Everyone puts out their smartphones” or “before we all have our smartphones,” they usually criticize technology. And the following is generally not optimistic, especially when someone says, “Today’s kids have smartphones…”.

Based on our collective anxiety about smartphones, people and groups often recommend withholding tax from children. In the 2024 bestseller, The Anxiety Generation, NYU psychologist Jonathan Hyde recommended “I don’t have a smartphone before high school,” or until I’m around 15 years old. There is an entire organization dedicated to this idea. Waiting time for the eighth pledge encourages parents to “have their kids a little longer” by keeping their smartphones in hand until the end of the eighth grade, but childhood-like movements without a smartphone also reflect Haidt’s recommendations. They all claim that smartphones contribute to childhood cheating.

Participating in a statewide survey of 1,510 11-13 years of age in Florida, conducted in late 2024, we found that smartphone ownership was linked to anxiety and depression, and negatively related to self-esteem, including exercising and spending time with friends. We were hoping to lend support to recommendations like Haidt and Smartphone Free Childhood.

But that’s not what happened.

In almost every health and wellness measure we did in the field, children with their smartphones were significantly better or at least not worse than children without their smartphones.

Children with their own smartphones feel sick about themselves, cybers exist, anger, and lose their temper, saying that life is meaningless than children who don’t report symptoms of depression or anxiety. They meet in person with friends. They may exercise just like kids without smartphones. We asked the kids how old they were when they got their first smartphone, but there was no correlation between their smartphone and the number of years they had anxiety and depression.

Money is not the reason for these discoveries. Children in low-income homes were much more likely to have their own smartphones than children in wealthy families.

Living in this media research portends longitudinal research by University of South Florida researchers in journalism, public health, psychology and other fields, and is the first effort to investigate digital media use and health among children and track the same participants across life expectancy. It will be a national project. The current study in Florida informs long-term research.

So, what if having a smartphone doesn’t contribute to fraudulent behavior between the ages of 11 and 13?

Repeatedly with our data, we found that posting publicly on social media is associated with negative outcomes. Children who often posted publicly on social media were far more likely than children who never posted to report severe symptoms of depression or anxiety. Children who posted publicly were more likely to report poor quality of sleep than those who did not. Disparity in sleep quality and quantity, even small amounts, can have a significant impact on the developing brain.

But even discoveries about the use of social media have been mixed. For example, heavy social media users are more likely to say they exercise every day compared to lighter social media and non-user users, and daily social media users also reported that they would convene directly with friends than lighter users.

Some data caveats. First, our data is cross-sectional and not yet longitudinal, so we don’t know if smartphones contribute to the happiness of children, or if healthy, well-tuned children are more likely to have smartphones than children who have worsened for some reason. And our data is a snapshot. The 11-year-old in the sample, who had a smartphone since he was 8, may be doing well now, but this does not mean that such connectivity will not have a negative impact on them in the future.

Still, our data suggests that we lower the room temperature a little in our child and smartphone discussions, but we cannot do that first. In a solid rebuttal against the “uncertain generation,” University of California Irvine psychologist Candice Odgers wrote that last spring, the portrayal of digital technology in nature as the main perpetrator of poor childhood mental health is not supported by science. As much as we want to identify the point sources of what plagues young minds, according to Odgers, many meta-analyses show that the problem is more complicated. Financial difficulties, abuse, exposure to violence, and systematic discrimination are among the main contributors to childhood mental disorders cited by researchers, Odgers writes.

Meanwhile, researchers in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (the largest long-term study of its kind in the US) found no evidence of developmental changes associated with exposure to digital technology. Andrew Przybylski, a research co-author and professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford, also pushed back. In an interview with Tech News News Platformer, Przybylski said that Haidt has no evidence to support the effectiveness of the two solutions proposed in his book: before high school, there is no smartphone or social media.

There is no problem with limiting smartphone use among children. Our study shows that children sleeping on the phone in another room get a recommended 9 hours, a minimum of 9 hours, for age groups. When one child in each sleeps with a cell phone or sleeps in bed, brain development does not provide enough sleep. We also found that children whose parents limit their time on their smartphones and tablets are more likely to participate in extracurricular activities (of course, one way to limit the use of the device is to mandate certain extracurricular activities).

But you have given birth to a smartphone child of 8 or 9 years old, so don’t feel guilty. It’s probably okay, and perhaps even beneficial. And otherwise, it would require much more data to propose.

Dr. Justin D. Martin is the Eleanor Pointer Jamison Chair of Media Ethics and Press Policy, an associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Digital Communications at the University of South Florida, and a life researcher in media research. Logan T. Rance of MS is a graduate student in the same department. Please contact Martin at justindmartin@usf.edu or lifeinmediasurvey@gmail.com.

Research method

Harris’ polls collected data using an online survey of 1,510 11-13 years olds in Florida from November 12 to December 9th. The margin for sampling error is +2.9% points. The research team also includes researchers from the Poynter Institute.