If you’re a parent, you’ve probably grappled with the question of when your kid should get a smartphone. There’s a nationwide movement, Wait Until 8th, that argues that devices should be kept out of kids’ hands until they’re deep into middle school. Some families manage to hold out even longer. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of technology and human behavior at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute and father of two, has a different idea.
“The kids have always had phones — since they were 3,” he told me a few months ago. I almost fell off my chair.
Before you come for us with pitchforks, it’s not as extreme as it sounds. Przybylski didn’t take an iPhone out of the box, connect it to the internet, and let his children start downloading apps. Introducing the device into his children’s lives was an incredibly intentional process, akin to putting a series of training wheels on a bike. At first, the only app on the toddler phone was a photo album filled with family pictures. Then, when they got a little older, the kids got access to the phone’s camera, then audiobooks and music handpicked by the parents, and eventually, they could call and text their family.
“It’s designed so that everything about technology is a conversation,” he said. “And it’s a conversation that we and the kids have now with the idea that the kids will have this conversation with themselves in the future.”
Przybylski didn’t take an iPhone out of the box, connect it to the internet, and let his children start downloading apps.
Giving phones to toddlers is a counterintuitive idea, and that’s putting it lightly. If you’ve read any of the reporting on the mental health crisis that struck young people around the time they gained access to social media, parents are rightfully scared to give their children phones. However, once you come to terms with the fact that these devices are also a vital tool in an increasingly tech-dependent world, the concept of teaching kids how to live with a phone from an early age — with guardrails, of course — makes perfect sense.
In the past two years, the debate over kids and smartphones has been heating up. Thirty-five states have laws or rules restricting or outright banning phones in schools to address a converging set of problems, including cyberbullying, classroom distraction, and the youth mental health crisis. Social media use, specifically, has been linked to depression and anxiety in kids. Parents and teens actually agree that social media in particular is a threat to mental health. It’s one thing to try to put controls around kids’ social media use but many parents are trying to prevent their children from having smartphones for as long as possible, if at all. It’s even driving parents to sign pledges that they’ll hold out and not buy their kid a phone until eighth grade.
This is a bad idea, in my opinion. Critics like Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, have a point that kids and parents are completely outgunned by tech giants pushing addictive products onto kids. They’re also correct that many solutions to keep kids safe, like better age verification, create new problems. But trying to keep kids away from smartphones, one of the most ubiquitous devices in the world today, is a fool’s errand. Many parents — even those that signed pledges — have tried and failed.
More than anything, teaching kids how to safely use technology is a good idea. Phones are a fact of life in the 21st century, and even if you try to keep them away from your kids, their friends will get devices, possibly without any safeguards, before you know it. Meanwhile, there’s also growing evidence that screen time can be a good thing, especially when parents are directly involved. It’s never too soon to teach digital literacy, if only so that children can spot scams and misinformation online, whenever they get access. By turning tech use into a conversation, parents also invite their children to come to them when things online inevitably go sideways.
I will confess, I have not yet decided when I’ll give my daughter her own phone. I have spent the past few weeks asking experts about the idea of giving kids phones when they’re 3. And based on everything I’ve learned, I don’t think I’ll be signing any pledges any time soon.
Screen time can be good, actually
Smartphones aren’t just popular — they’re unavoidable. Nine out of 10 Americans have a smartphone. The number of children with devices is growing, too. Common Sense Media reported earlier this year that 40 percent of 2-year-olds have their own tablet, and the percentage grows to 58 percent for 4-year-olds. The percentage of kids with their own smartphones are much lower: 4 percent for 2-year-olds and 8 percent for 4-year-olds. But if you’re looking at how many kids have access to a smartphone at home, the number jumps to 96 percent.
If you’re wary of the idea of iPad kids, these numbers might alarm you. But if parents are involved in what the kids are watching, which apps are available, and how long kids can use phones, screen time doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
“The research suggests that that can be effective in encouraging children’s digital literacy, encouraging children’s agency and exploration, and learning and avoiding the problems of saying, ‘I can use my phone, but you can’t have one,’” Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who has been studying kids and tech for decades, told me. “You know, it becomes a forbidden fruit.”
The idea of starting a toddler out with a photo album makes great sense. My daughter primarily wants to see family photos on my phone, which I inevitably have to take away from her.
A 2013 study found that 2-year-olds learned new verbs by talking to people either in person or on a video call but not by passively watching videos.
Video calls have long been established as an early, educational screen time activity. A 2013 study found that 2-year-olds learned new verbs by talking to people either in person or on a video call but not by passively watching videos. A later study found that parent participation improved learning even more.
As kids get older, though, passively watching videos can be good, too. We know this because of decades of research into children watching TV. A seminal study on the effects of Sesame Street found that watching the show in early childhood led to improved school performance. Of course, Sesame Street is created by a nonprofit with the explicit mission to educate kids. The infinite feed of YouTube, with its sometimes uncanny kids’ content, is a different animal. The American Psychological Association said last year that features like endless scrolling and infinite feeds are “particularly risky” to young people, whose brains aren’t as easily able to stop scrolling or watching and may become more distractible as a result.
That’s why every expert I talked to emphasized an intentional approach to introducing tech to kids. Creating playlists of music or videos and selecting specific audiobooks or podcasts is akin to putting training wheels on that corner of the internet. The most important part of that process is talking to kids about what they’re watching or listening to, and eventually, discussing how platforms like YouTube and Spotify work. That includes explaining how dark patterns and algorithmic feeds can compel them to keep consuming content.
“With some new boundaries and communication and approaches to content, parents can shift things in the right direction,” said Jenny Radesky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School who coaches families on intentional approaches to tech use. “These tech companies don’t deserve to occupy so much of our family’s time and space.”
These tech companies are also acutely aware of the very public perception that their products harm kids. That’s why we’ve seen the introduction of things like YouTube Kids and Instagram Teen Accounts, which offer more parental controls but still profit from capturing the attention of children. The least parents could do is empower those kids with digital literacy skills so that they gain an understanding of how these powerful platforms work.
The more I think about it, giving them their own smartphone to start the process at an early age — and talk to them about it constantly — is a great first step.
The last thing parents want is for the full weight of the internet to slam into their child’s prefrontal cortex at the wrong time. You could argue that middle school, when many kids are deep in the throes of puberty, is the worst time for them to gain access to everything a smartphone can do. And even if there are parental controls in place, teens are famously good at figuring out ways to bypass them.
It’s hard to imagine keeping phones out of kids’ hands until an arbitrary age and then expecting them to develop a healthy relationship with the device overnight. At the same time, I get that giving a phone to a 3-year-old may strike many as way too young. In general, the concept of easing them into technology is a good one, and should remain the same regardless of the age the child gets their first tablet or phone or smartwatch. The process starts with a series of guardrails that gradually come off, and it requires time and attention from parents.
The last thing parents want is for the full weight of the internet to slam into their child’s prefrontal cortex at the wrong time.
“The goal is absolutely to think about how we can foster healthy, meaningful use of technology early on,” said Eisha Buch, who oversees the digital citizenship program at Common Sense. “Because those skills and the mindsets ideally are there to stay and stick with them for when they are 16 or 18 or whenever they’ve left the house and the parent isn’t there to guide them.”
Something that struck me when I started to imagine doing this for my own family is remembering the order in which I gained access to digital tools in the ’90s. My first real gadget was a digital camera — not dissimilar to the device Przybylski says it’s okay to give a 3-year-old. Then, I had an iPod, and eventually a flip phone. When I pick up my phone today, I still think of it primarily as a device that does helpful things like take pictures, play music, and connect me with family and friends. Admittedly, my phone has also turned into a way to waste time, thumbing through feeds or watching videos, and even my adult brain struggles to stop doing that.
David Bickham, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, suggested a framework that I found particularly useful: Parents should give their kid a device when it serves a need. They should engage with their kid about tech, release oversight sequentially, and give the kid tools to handle challenges or talk to a parent when they’re in trouble.
“The worst outcome is a child who needs help from an adult but can’t go to their parents because they don’t have the trust that their parent is going to do something that’s really going to help them,” Bickham said.
It’s possible that starting this process at a very young age is particularly good at addressing that challenge. A toddler, in the best of circumstances, goes to their parents for help with everything: peeling a banana, putting on shoes, seeing pictures on a phone. One of the first sentences many toddlers learn is, “I need help.” If a parent wants to be seen as helpful when it comes to technology, making themselves available early on seems smart.
Even in the near future, when we’ll be able to talk to AI agents in our glasses, smartphones will remain ubiquitous. This generation of parents, who mostly grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, have a unique opportunity to ease their kids into this tech-filled world and to help them develop a healthy relationship with that tech. Whether you start at age 3 or age 13, it’s a hard but incredibly important job. Personally, I’ll take the years-long head start that comes with starting sooner rather than later.
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