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It’s hard to avoid giving your child a smartphone in this new digital age, but some parents around the world are looking to buck the trend and seek out guidance on how to protect their kids from the harms of smartphone use.
Smartphone Free Childhood, a recently founded U.K. organization, is aimed at uniting parents who are not giving their kids smartphones. It has since expanded internationally as research around the topic grows.
Young people who acquired a phone before the age of 10 reported worse mental health outcomes than those who acquired a phone over the age of 15, a Sapien Labs study of 27,969 18–24-year-olds from 41 countries last year found.
Meanwhile, at least 42% of children in the U.S. had a smartphone by the age of 10, according to a Common Sense report in 2021.
Some parents give their children smartphones for safety reasons, including being able to contact them and track their location when they’re outside the home, but this may lead to mental health harms.
“The analogy that I often have in mind with the cell phone and technologies today is the automobile and when the automobile was first invented people were thrown from their cars and the number of fatalities was dramatic,” Kathleen Pike, CEO of One Mind at Work and psychology professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told CNBC Make It in an interview.
“There were no seatbelts, there were no airbags. The construction of the chassis made people vulnerable and in recognizing the vulnerabilities that came along with this tremendous technological innovation, we instituted regulations and better design and policies that protected the health and wellbeing of drivers and passengers. We’re in the earliest days with cell phones and technology broadly where we need to do the same,” she said.
Columbia’s Pike and Zach Rausch, a research scientist at New York University Stern School of Business and lead researcher for Jonathon Haidt’s number one New York Times bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” shared five tips on how to avoid giving your kids a smartphone.
Organize with other parents
Being the only parent refusing to give your child a smartphone can be isolating for both you and your kid, Rausch said.
“Before you act on your own, find a couple of your kid’s friends, three to five of them. Talk with their parents, and if you all together decide to delay smartphones till high school, then it’s going to be much easier because then you can say ’Well, Johnny is also not getting his smartphone till 14,” he said, adding that this will make the conversation “much more digestible” for the child.
Pike also advised working with other parents. She shared an anecdote about a parent whose child’s fifth grade class formed a parent-teacher association.
“The class parents, as a collective, agreed that they would postpone giving their kids cell phones until they entered middle school. So when nobody else in the classroom has a cell phone, it makes it a whole lot easier for your child not to have a cellphone,” Pike said.
“If your child is the only one without a smartphone, that may present a whole additional set of stressors for your child,” she added.
Phone-based childhood versus play-based childhood
Children who don’t have a smartphone will need to replace that behavior with other forms of entertainment, the experts said.
“As this new phone-based childhood has come in, we’ve taken away what we call the play-based childhood, where kids used to have much more time being independent outdoors, playing, taking risks, and that is really crucial for human development,” Rausch explained.
He said it’s not enough to just remove the technology, parents have to give your child a new outlet for creativity.
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