“Honey! The little one wants a smartphone…” “Ah-what!?” If you are a parent and you worry about what age your child is old enough to get their first smartphone, you are undoubtedly not alone. But you may be asking the wrong question. The specific age at which a child gets their first smartphone does not in itself have any measurable consequences for the child’s well-being. At least that is the conclusion of a study, made by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Stanford University, which has been printed in the scientific journal “Child Development”. Explained quite simply, the results mean that if Josef gets his first smartphone from school at the age of 9, while Alma gets it at the age of 12, the fact that he got it at the age of 9 has neither a positive nor a negative influence on Josef’s well-being . Just as it has no positive or negative influence on Alma’s well-being, that she got it three years later as a 12-year-old. Neither debut age nor status as a mobile phone owner has a visible effect on well-being. The researchers followed 263 children from low-income Latino families over 5 years – both before and after they got a mobile phone. New data was collected annually on the children’s well-being, including grades at school, sleep and symptoms of depression. “We did not find statistically significant correlations linking mobile phone ownership or the age of acquisition of a mobile phone with the levels of the children’s well-being,” says Xiaoran Sun, who has helped to lead the research work. She is an assistant professor at the department of social science family research at the University of Minnesota, but was a postdoc at Stanford University when the study started. In the trial, the families themselves decided when their children should have their first mobile phone. The average age at which the children received their first telephone was 11.6 years. Anxious parents Xiaoran Sun says that many parents are very anxious about precisely the question of when to allow their child their first mobile phone. Therefore, the study can hopefully have a calming effect: “Perhaps it can help relieve parents of some of the anxiety,” says Sun. Although the study cannot be used to give parents unequivocal advice on the best smartphone debut age, it can still be indicative in the sense that it can give parents a reinforced belief that they can trust their common sense and assess for themselves what where is best for their own child, explains Xiaoran Sun. “Our study builds on the amount of research that suggests that much of the anxiety that exists around children’s first smartphone is possibly exaggerated,” says Xiaoran Sun. So what is your best advice to parents who are confused? “That parents should not worry too much and trust their own judgement. When they feel that now is enough time for the child to have a smartphone, then it is probably a good time – and at least not a harmful time. What really matters is not the age, but how the parents regulate their children’s use of the mobile phone, when they have one,” she says. Although the study is unbelievably thorough in parts of its data collection, the researchers themselves write in the report’s discussion section that it should be borne in mind that the sample size of 263 children may have “limited statistical power”. However, Sun maintains that the sample size is large enough to be able to demonstrate that there are either “no or very few associations” between the age of debut for smartphone ownership and well-being. “Of course, we must be careful in generalizing the results of this study to the general population, as our sample is predominantly American Latino children living in northern California,” she emphasizes. The end of screen time According to Xiaoran Sun, the important question to a lesser extent is when the children will get a smartphone. It is far more interesting what they actually do when they use it: “Our study did not look at whether parents have rules regarding children’s use of smartphones, and how parents guide children in their use, which we still believe is very important, ” she emphasizes. So if you are a parent and experience that your children sit for two hours a day completely hypnotized by e.g. The TikTok algorithm, so something to be aware of? “This is not something that we tested. But children can use smartphones in many different ways, and for children who are really addicted to particular social media, it may well be harmful for them. Although it can be mentioned that Oxford psychologist Amy Orban has also tested the effect of social media on young people’s well-being and found no visible effect. Our results are in line with the part of the research literature, which indicates that a large part of the fear surrounding young people’s use of smartphones and social media is probably too violent,” says Xiaoran Sun. If you want to help the children, it is not so important if you, as parents, pay attention to the children’s screen time, i.e. how long the children spend looking into the screen, says Sun: “I would argue that screen time in itself is a poor measure of smartphone use – because children can in principle sit and read books on their smartphones for two hours, but they can also sit for two hours and watch TikTok or communicate with strangers online. And the effects of these things will be completely different. We should move away from talking about screen time, to instead talk about what children are actually doing on the devices,” says Sun. There is a lack of in-depth research According to Xiaoran Sun, one of the major problems when it comes to assessing social media and the smartphone’s effect on well-being is that there is not enough thorough research in the area. Studies with obscured conclusions about technology often go viral, even if they are methodologically weak, because they are mainly based on children’s own self-reporting, Sun believes. But Xiaoran Sun is helping to change that. She is currently working with researchers from The Human Screenome Project to investigate whether children’s use of smartphones in the evening has an effect on sleep. The investigation is ongoing and the conclusions have not yet been published. But from a purely methodological point of view, the use of self-reporting, i.e. what the children themselves say about how they use the technology, is not excluded. Screenshot data from the children’s phones is also used here (a screenshot is taken every five seconds over six months and stored in a database). Such methods can increase the credibility of this type of research going forward, says Sun: “Quite anecdotally, I can say that we have experienced a child telling us that he goes to bed at 22 and get up at 7. But we can then see from our screenshot data that the child was in fact on TikTok from 8pm to 6am. So okay… how can it be possible?” Sun asks. She is also part of a project, which digs into whether services such as Instagram affect especially young girls’ relationship with their bodies in a negative way. Which there has been a lot of talk about in the media, especially after the Washington Post leaked Facebook’s own internal documents, where i.a. showed that every third teenage girl feels worse about her body because of Instagram. “In our study, we use screenshot data to test how social media use is associated with girls’ weight concerns and body image. But we do this by looking at which media the young people specifically use. When that study comes out, we can say more about whether there is a problem here, and if so, which platforms to worry about. Is it Instagram? TikTok? Facebook? Discord?” The debate about the effects of smartphones and social media will undoubtedly not end for the time being – at least not as long as there are researchers who, on the one hand, believe that they have destroyed a generation, while others argue that things are not so bad at all. . Therefore, as a reader, you should be critical of the research methods, the next time you come across a new, startling research result, which has gone viral on the world’s media.
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Researcher: “Much of the anxiety that exists around children’s first smartphone is possibly exaggerated”
