Jacqueline Nesi is a professor of psychology at Brown University whose specialty is how technology use affects children, and how parents can deal with this issue. She has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers and writes a Substack blog on technology, and appears to be one of the best-qualified social scientists to advise a parent when children should be allowed to use smartphones. In this month's Scientific American, she had the opportunity to summarize the best of her findings in a page or so, and I'm here to tell you that according to her . . . it all depends.
As one would expect, her command of the literature is superb. She starts out by describing the present situation: at what ages do kids these days get smartphones? You might be surprised by the results of one study she quotes from an outfit called Common Sense Media. Over four out of ten ten-year-olds have their own smartphone. Or at least they say they do. (Nothing is said about how reliable a ten-year-old's survey response might be.) 71 percent of 12-year-olds have one, and by age 14, 91 percent do.
She then makes the entirely reasonable statement that while these stats show what parents are allowing their kids to do, it doesn't say anything about whether it's good or bad. Dr. Nesi's goal is to muster research responses to let parents make the right decision "for your child and to help you feel more confident in your decision-making."
There's lots more statistics about phones and teens, and she describes some of the flaws in realistic surveys, and then winds up saying a gradual approach might be the best: first a family-shared iPad, then a dumb flip phone, and then if the teen has proved to be responsible, maybe a smartphone at last.
Leaving aside the expense of this graduated approach, this might not be a bad idea, although I've never personally heard of anybody using it. But beyond all the statistics and data, there is an underlying philosophical flaw in Dr. Nesi's approach which she never addresses.
The word "best" implies a scale of values. If there is a best, there are good and bad solutions, and presumably even a worst one. But what Dr. Nesi leaves almost completely alone is the question that motivates this whole issue: Good and bad according to what scale of values? Producing 21-year-old fodder for the economic machine? Leading your teen to Christ? Or just keeping him or her out of jail until they're on their own?
The closest Dr. Nesi comes to addressing any issues of moral values is when she says ". . . smartphones offer an in-your-pocket portal to everything on the Internet—some of which we'd rather they not see."
Now in a one-page essay, it's unreasonable to expect a social scientist to delve into the depths of moral philosophy and come up with gems of wisdom, or indeed anything at all. The elephant in the room here is that "science" (which is to say, scientists speaking as scientists) cannot tell us what is right or wrong. That's not what science is for, at least not as presently practiced. The science of psychology tries to describe what goes on in peoples' minds, but strictly speaking, it has nothing to say about the morality of thoughts, words, or actions—including giving your ten-year-old a smartphone, which four out of ten parents apparently do.
To be fair, Dr. Nesi respected the boundaries of science in writing this mostly helpful and insightful piece. She refrains from laying down absolute prescriptions, and says that each case is different. A very mature and self-controlled ten-year-old (a thing I cannot recall having encountered) might be able to handle a fully-functional smartphone without anything bad happening, but it would be unusual. And there are fully-grown adults walking around with smartphones that I wish someone would take away from them.
But fundamentally, Dr. Nesi cannot go very far with the parents who are agonizing about what is right to do with regard to smartphones and children. She can only say, "Well, here's the data. Best of luck in figuring out what is right for your kids." And while she's wearing her scientist hat, that's all she has a right to do.
There's a reason that as of this writing, 13 states have laws or policies enacted that limit K-12 classroom or school cellphone use. While relatively few experts have called for a universal ban on underage cellphone use, as it would intrude into the privacy of the parent-child relationship, there are some who argue even in favor of that. Why do you suppose these movements are happening?
One can think of the problem as an iceberg with the tip showing and a whole lot more we don't know much about underneath. The tip of the iceberg are the cases of smartphone-enabled bullying that lead to suicides, and other smartphone-enabled deaths of teens and children. Just underneath those cases are the vastly greater number of depressed, anxious, and sleepless children and teenagers whose lives revolve around how they look to others on social media. And farther out of sight, but perhaps most important of all, lies the issue of how smartphone-mediated pornography, social media, and even news and educational material coming through smartphones molds the character and abilities of an entire generation. Science can maybe help us a little here, but we need a moral compass to navigate these iceberg-fraught waters, to overload a metaphor. And you can't find moral compasses in the social-science stockroom.
I will close with an anecdote, which has no scientific value as a single data point but spoke volumes to me about the state of smartphone-saturated society at the time. When we were test-driving what became our new car in 2020, my wife and I exchanged random conversation with the twenty-something salesman who was hoping we would buy the car. Somehow we got onto the topic of how life was when we were his age, and he spontaneously offered the following, which is the most accurately I can remember what he said from five years ago: "Sometimes I wish I'd been born back then, and you know why?" He pulled out his smartphone and said, "These weren't around."
Sources: Dr. Jacqueline Nesi's article "Kids and Smartphones" appeared on pp. 83-84 of the March 2025 Scientific American. The statistic about states with smartphone bans in schools is from https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools.
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