A Psychologist Advises Parents About Smartphones

 

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. 

Kids and Smartphones: Does the Good Outweigh the Bad?

If you have children, do you regulate their use of smartphones?  In particular, what do you do about smartphones when you sit down for a meal together?  These questions came to mind when my wife told me about a little episode she'd witnessed in a restaurant one evening last week. 

The mother and father sat on either side of the daughter, who was perhaps 11.  Shortly after they got there, all three got out their smartphones, and each person escaped into a different electronic world.  The parents actually put down their phones and started a conversation after a while over the girl's head, but she held onto her phone till the food came, and after she was finished eating she picked it up again. 

In the lobby of the restaurant we'd passed a lady who was singing pop tunes and accompanying herself on the accordion.  (This is Canyon Lake, Texas, you understand, not New York City.)  Later in the evening, the singer picked up a hand puppet and went around entertaining guests who had brought along their children.  According to my wife, the puppet struck out with the smartphone girl, who looked up uncomprehendingly and then went back to her phone.  Evidently, live entertainment can't compete with electronic media, at least in that particular girl's world. 

When a new technology gets adopted as widely and rapidly as smartphones have, there is always at least a theoretical concern that some long-term effect that hasn't shown up in pilot marketing tests will pop up later to surprise and harm us.  The worst case like this from history I can think of was the thalidomide crisis of the 1960s. 

Thalidomide was a drug introduced in West Germany in 1957 and marketed as, among other things, a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.  While it appeared to help, it took several years for doctors to figure out that if a woman took it early enough in her pregnancy, thalidomide caused severe birth defects:  deformed or missing arms and legs, facial defects, and other disabling problems.  Although thalidomide is still available and prescribed for certain conditions such as cancer, the medical community knows to avoid any possibility of its use by women who could be pregnant. 

If something as bad as the thalidomide episode was going to happen with kids using smartphones, I think we'd probably know by now.  Nearly two billion such devices are out there, and a survey in Britain showed that more than half of eleven-year-olds use their own smartphone.  But not every technological problem can be studied with surveys and statistics.

What my wife witnessed in that restaurant was the clash of tradition and something else—"modernity" isn't the right word, nor is "technology."  One way to put it was expressed by a friend of mine, Bruce Hunt, who is a historian of technology.  We talk a lot about "cyberspace" without always knowing quite what we mean by it.  His definition of cyberspace is this:  "Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone."  At the time, he meant a traditional POTS phone (Plain Old Telephone Service), but saying that all three members of the family were in cyberspace before the food arrived is a pretty accurate statement.  So it was a clash between traditional space and activities, and whatever each individual happened to be doing in cyberspace.

By traditional, I mean nothing more than activities that have gone on more or less the same for a long time.  There have been restaurants and inns and families eating in them as long as there have been civilizations, I suppose.  And the same goes for live entertainers, going all the way back to cave men who put on masks and danced around the campfire.  Just because a thing has been done a long time doesn't mean it's necessarily good—it's just durable. 

When it comes to a family eating meals together, though, you can find studies that correlate all sorts of good things with families who eat together at least five nights a week.  Their kids are less likely to get involved in drug and alcohol use, they make better grades, and they feel closer to their parents.  I don't know whether the studies were fine-grained enough to notice how often smartphones were brought to the table, but it doesn't take a Ph. D. to tell that a family meal without smartphones is going to allow more opportunities for interpersonal interaction than one with them. 

The age at which a child should gain access to a smartphone is a question each parent has to decide.  Not having children myself, I have never had to make that decision, but I hear that it's a hard one to make.  Like driving, watching R-rated movies, and drinking alcohol, using smartphones is something that adults are free to do, and it's a judgment call on the part of parents as to when a child is mature enough to use one responsibly. 

But the little drama in the restaurant made me think that the family that brings their smartphones to the dinner table is missing something valuable that has no corporate-sponsored PR in its favor, no guaranteed payoff, and no particular immediate harm that results when it goes missing.  It's the chance to be with other people, in the time-honored sense of devoting one's embodied attention to the experience of the real, actual bodily presence of other human beings.  The very name "media" means "that which goes between," and anything between us can separate us as well as bring us together. 

So I'm not going to issue any blanket condemnations of smartphones at the dinner table. 

But I would ask parents to consider first how you use your smartphone and what kind of example you are setting for your children to follow.  Do you let it interrupt quality time with your spouse or children?  Or do you put it away at specific regular times, and devote your full attention to other members of your family?  Children have a powerful built-in instinct that says, "Whatever mommy or daddy does is okay," and if you tell your son to put away his smartphone at the dinner table and then whip yours out when it goes off, you've just wasted your breath.  The kids won't always be young, and you won't always be around to talk with them.  Do it while you have the chance.

Sources:  I referred to an article on the website PsychCentral by Amy Williams entitled, "How Do Smartphones Affect Childhood Psychology?" at http://psychcentral.com/lib/how-do-smartphones-affect-childhood-psychology/, and a rather touching essay on the benefits of family meals by Cody C. Delistraty in The Atlantic online edition for July 18, 2014 at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-importance-of-eating-together/374256/, as well as the Wikipedia article on thalidomide.