The purpose of the study is not to shame parents who have already given their children devices, Barzilay said. And he is realistic about how ingrained smartphones have become in American adolescence.
The takeaway, he said, is that age matters.
“A kid at age 12 is very, very different than a kid at age 16,” he said. “It’s not like an adult at age 42 versus 46.”
The median age at which children in the study got their first smartphones was 11. And virtually all of American teens now say they have access to a smartphone, according to a recent Pew report.
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Jacqueline Nesi, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown University, who writes the newsletter Techno Sapiens about parenting in the digital age, cautioned that the new study could not prove that smartphones were directly causing harm.
“It’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get that kind of causal evidence on this topic,” she said, though the findings may “nudge” parents toward delaying giving children a smartphone when possible.
Caregivers “do not need to wait for perfect evidence to make these kinds of decisions,” Nesi said. They should feel empowered to trust their gut, she added, and to hold off on giving their child a smartphone until everyone is ready – including parents, who have to do the very hard work of putting protections and limits in place.
“Giving a child a device with access to everything on the internet is going to be risky,” she said.
The importance of protecting sleep
Although researchers may continue to quibble over the negative effects of smartphones on children, most tend to agree that the devices can keep kids from getting the sleep they need.
Dr Jason Nagata, a paediatrician with the University of California, San Francisco, pointed to a 2023 study he worked on, also using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development sample, which found that 63 per cent of 11- to 12-year-olds reported having an electronic device in their bedroom. And nearly 17 per cent said they had been woken by phone notifications in the past week.
Getting phones out of the bedroom overnight is a simple step that families can take to mitigate some of the negative health effects associated with smartphone, even if parents have already given their child a device, Nagata said.
But he and others acknowledged how difficult this can be for families to navigate.
Barzilay has three children, two of whom he gave smartphones before they were 12. But, he said, his nine-year-old isn’t getting one anytime soon.
He encouraged other parents to consider new data on the potential risks of early smartphone ownership as they decide when to get their child a device.
“It doesn’t mean that every kid with a smartphone has a problem for life,” he said. “All it means is that us as parents – and, I hope, also policymakers and society — are going to do something about it together.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
