10 Tips To Keep Smartphones From Making Your Kids Miserable

A study released this week shows the real damage smartphones can cause to the developing brain of a preteen. It serves as a sobering warning to many phone-addicted adults to both lay off the electronics themselves and delay giving smartphones to kids.

The study was led by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University in New York. Researchers looked at data collected from the National Institutes of Health from more than 10,500 youths between 2018 and 2020. The research was published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

First, it found that most kids have smartphones. More than 95 percent of teens aged 13-17 have a smartphone; more than half (57 percent) of tweens aged 11-12 had a smartphone; and 29 percent of kids aged 8-10 had one.

Any adult who has doomscrolled at 3 a.m. knows how addictive smartphones can be. What happens to a child’s health when hours of screentime are added to his life?

Researchers looked at 12-year-olds, comparing those with phones to those without a phone, and found that “smartphone ownership … was associated with higher risk for depression … obesity … and insufficient sleep.”  The younger the age of smartphone acquisition, the more risk of these outcomes. But teens are also at risk.

Those who first acquired a phone at 13 still showed “greater odds of reporting clinical-level psychopathology … and insufficient sleep … compared with those who had not [yet acquired a phone].”

The researchers concluded that the findings should “inform caregivers regarding adolescent smartphone use and, ideally, the development of public policy that protects youth.”

Keeping phones out of the hands of youngsters until parents are confronted with a reason for the child to have a phone seems like common sense.

Children with divorced parents may get a phone from the noncustodial parent so that parent can connect directly with the child without the other parent gatekeeping access. Parents may want to communicate with a child waiting for a ride after activities, or to keep tabs on them in a number of other ways. There is also peer pressure. When every kid in sixth grade has a phone, your child may feel socially cut off — which wouldn’t be the worst thing, even if it may feel that way to the kid.

Unless stern boundaries are defined when the phone first lands in kids’ hands, parents are losing control over major portions of their children’s lives. An unrestricted smartphone puts a lot of local dramas in their hands: peer-led group chats from their own school, with maybe a kid or two from a neighboring school district.

It also gives them access to porn, child predators, gambling, shopping, and music and videos that undermine the cultural values you wish to instill — all while stealing time that could be spent on worthwhile pursuits you can encourage while their minds are still malleable to parental suggestion.

While oversight can go a long way, parents don’t get all the information they need by following their kid’s Instagram account. They know you are watching. You may never learn who they are talking to at 2 a.m. Once you give a child a phone with no restrictions, it is hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Here are some common-sense restrictions I would recommend as a grandmother who navigated the emergence of flip phones, then smartphones, with the first generation of kids raised with these powerful tools in their pockets. We didn’t do it perfectly, but this is what I would do today:

1. Don’t give your kids a phone until absolutely necessary.
2. Give your children a phone with no internet connection. Your reason for giving them a phone is probably related to texting and talking. That is all the capability they need.
3. Charge the phone overnight in the living room or kitchen, not their bedroom. Don’t let them have the phone in their room overnight.
4. Have a set time for phone use. Perhaps the phone is not in use at meals or between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.
5. Role-model healthy phone use. If a parent is too engrossed in his or her phone to engage, a child learns it is normal to make the phone the priority.
6. A parent must approve any app downloads and have all passwords.
7. Tell kids to expect spot checks. That is, the parent can ask for the phone at any time, and the child must hand it over and discuss what he or she is doing on your phone.
8. Teach your very young child phone etiquette and how to be comfortable speaking on the phone. Texting has taken over calling socially, but speaking is still necessary in business. Try calling your child without giving advance notice via text.  
9. As a teen approaches adulthood and has proven himself responsible, the conversation must change to boundaries and trust. The rules above are for very young or new phone users, but a parent teaching a child appropriate phone use is different from a controlling boyfriend demanding access to his girlfriend’s phone.
10. Likewise, if you keep that college student or young adult on the family plan, don’t comb through the phone bill looking for how many times she has called that same number from a different state. You will wonder if your child is job hunting or has a new love interest. That is a boundary better navigated with trust now that you’ve raised a smart young person.  

The remedy to phone-induced depression, obesity, and poor sleep at any age is as simple and as challenging as teaching — and practicing — self-control.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.