My 10-year-old asked for an iPhone for his 11th birthday. Many of his friends have them. He will be starting middle school in the fall and will no longer have just one teacher responsible for handling dismissal changes. He has various activities with various calls on his time (and our transport). There were practical reasons to get him a phone. But since he is the eldest of our four children, my husband and I knew that whatever we decided for him would become our official family “phone policy.”
Which implied that we needed a family phone policy.
Being the diligent parents we are, we decided to hash this out while also evaluating our wider approach to screen time. We have accumulated a surprising number of electronic devices: two TVs, three laptops and three iPhones for the parents’ work (and, okay, some Instagram perusal), one home computer, four Kindles for children’s games and videos (in various states of repair based on who last dropped it or spilled orange juice while watching Pokémon). My husband decided to email friends and family with older children. I poked around online for advice.
I soon discovered that children and phones, and indeed screen time in general, is one of the most fraught topics of modern parenting. The Internet—ironically—is full of angsty, virtue-signaling essays from parents promising they will keep their children offline and off devices as long as possible. The essays follow a basic arc: The writer sees a toddler glued to an iPad, is tormented by this image, and waxes nostalgic about a lost era of childhood, which seems to have occurred on some day in August 1956. He or she declares that the children will henceforth spend all their free time climbing trees.
What I can’t find is the follow-up essay, written from the ER after one of the kids has broken a leg falling out of a tree. I’d like to know if that parent is still unwilling to hand over the phone to help pass the long hours of waiting. I rather doubt it.
Screen time turns out to be like a lot of things in parenting. If you’re the kind of parent who’s concerned about it, you shouldn’t worry. Your kids are going to be fine. Indeed, your kids, by virtue of having conscientious parents whose worries tend more toward iPhone use than to getting evicted, are among the luckiest people on the planet.
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What you decide about screens doesn’t really matter. This might sound like heresy. Everybody has their stories. Haven’t I seen a fragged preschooler after a YouTube binge? Or there’s that time that youngster did something terrible after seeing something terrible on some terrible app I’ve never even heard of. The irony of this is that in our connected world, such tales spread so fast that they feel like data.
Amidst the barrage of anecdotes, it’s no surprise that people worry about what media exposure “does” to kids. As with any broad topic, one can find certain studies pointing certain directions. There is some evidence that exposure to media violence leads to increased aggression. There is also some evidence that children who have devices in their rooms sleep a bit less than children who do not.
The problem with any broader inquiry or conclusion, though—and with attempts by official bodies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics to issue guidelines—is that the world and children and screens are all complicated. Smartphones and tablets haven’t been around long enough for researchers to know much about their long-term implications and whether anything is materially different from the television era. Not all screen time is equal; chatting with Grandma via FaceTime is likely different from watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood or playing Grand Theft Auto. And someone with a familial predisposition to eating disorders discovering how-to forums on crash dieting is something else again.
Also, it’s hard to control for all the variables in how children “turn out”—whatever that parental obsession means. (Is the best measurable endpoint graduating from an Ivy League university or avoiding jail time?) No one is randomly assigning some children to have zero tech exposure and others to watch DanTDM narrate video games for 18 hours straight. The few studies that have aimed to get parents to reduce screen time have achieved very little real reduction; harried parents trying to get through the day are unlikely to change their lives to satisfy researchers’ curiosity. “Research shows parents with more confidence and more resources are more likely to limit screen time,” says Anya Kamenetz, author of The Art of Screen Time, NPR’s lead education blogger, and a mother of two. “So any benefit we see from limited screen time is confounded by the other advantages those kids enjoy.”
Indeed, despite widespread worries since the dawn of the Internet era that children from less privileged backgrounds might miss out on the wonders of technology, the opposite turns out to be true.
To know what playing video games or spending hours on Instagram does to kids, we have to know what they might have done instead. If the other option is reading Proust, screen time is going to be less intellectually engaging. If the other option is that your child would wander around a dangerous, gang-plagued neighborhood while you work an extra shift to keep the family from falling behind on rent, letting the kids play Fortnite is probably the wise choice. And so that is the choice parents in more strained circumstances make.
There is much to be written about (and lamented about) inherited inequality. But in the world we live in, the broad demographic truth is that the children of educated professional-class people, the sort who fret about screen time (or gluten or organic farming practices), almost always “turn out” to be educated professionals themselves. Children from tougher backgrounds have a tougher time of it.
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It’s just not about the screens. As for the various crises ascribed to modern childhood and adolescence, some of which are pinned on smart phones and Internet access, these are likewise a mixed bag.
Teenagers have always been stupid, but it is true that modern technology enables young people to engage in idiocy that would have been tough to pull off in prior generations. Before iPhones and Snapchat, sharing naked photos of yourself or others with total strangers would have involved such a mind-boggling number of steps that anyone pondering it would have sobered up long before completing the process. Another issue: The Internet is forever. Future employers will have access to the I-hate-the-world screed a teen posts in a moment of romantic disappointment.
The Internet likewise hosts plenty of horrible things that adolescents might have trouble handling. It’s not just the obvious stuff (pornography); the recent van attack in Toronto by a man claiming membership in the “incel” (involuntarily celibate) community brought to light angles of misogyny I hadn’t even thought to worry my boys might learn about.
There is also evidence that mental-health issues are more widespread than in the past. A study published in Pediatrics in 2016 found that the percentage of adolescents reporting a major depressive episode in the previous 12 months rose from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014. “Modern kids don’t have as much ability to manage their behavior, thoughts, and emotions as in previous generations,” says Katherine Reynolds Lewis, a parenting educator and author of The Good News About Bad Behavior. This decline in self-regulation skills has risen at the exact same time that kids have spent more time interacting through texts and social media, rather than in person. “It would be naïve to think there wasn’t a relationship,” she says.
But while any rise in depression or self-harm rates (including suicide) is worrying, even at these slightly higher rates, the vast majority of kids are doing all right. Indeed, plenty of indicators point in a positive direction since the smartphone era began. Teen pregnancy rates have plummeted 51 percent since 2007. The proportion of juveniles (ages 10-17) arrested annually has likewise dropped by more than 50 percent since 2007. With fewer young people experiencing these life-derailing events, the U.S. high school-graduation rate recently hit an all-time high.
There are many factors at work here, but it would be equally naïve to think there isn’t a screen-time relationship, too: When teens spend more time interacting online, rather than in person, they may not learn all the subtleties of interpersonal interaction, and they may be able to access some wretched content, but they aren’t doing problematic things with each other’s physical bodies either.
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Very little in life is all good or all bad. Screens also enable some really cool things—aside from your reading this essay because a friend posted a link on her Facebook page. “If we are so ready to ascribe negative effects to smartphones, we should be willing to consider the positive benefits of young people having a place to explore and connect that is physically safe and to access resources,” says Kamenetz. Teens with disabilities, or any sorts of differences, can connect with more kids who are like them than they could find in smaller communities. Young people can showcase their creative and entrepreneurial activities in a way that was difficult before.
Even some of the things people most lament about screens—like video games—aren’t all bad or even a waste of time. My little boys sometimes set up their own playdates with friends, agreeing to be online at a certain time to play games together. This sense of agency is one of the things people claim screens diminish. The idea that “you can’t make a living playing video games” is also emphatically untrue in the era of YouTube. For my kids, all this has provided a great opportunity to talk about the concept of income streams. Mommy makes her living by advancing her personal brand across multiple channels. Quite possibly my children will too.
None of this is either/or. All those essays lamenting the loss of childhood seem to gloss over the fact that many of us born before 1982 still spent quite a bit of time watching TV. Beating Super Mario Bros. was one of my proudest childhood accomplishments. I climbed some trees, too.
Any parent who wants to limit or restrict access to screens should feel free to do so. Your house, your rules—just as some families let people wear shoes indoors and others don’t. Just recognize that it’s mostly about preferences rather than right-or-wrong answers.
My husband and I settled on a screen-time policy of letting the older children get one hour a day, total, across their existing non-phone devices, Monday through Thursday, and just not worrying about it too much on the weekends. This will be self-policed, which might sound unworkable and maybe will be, but I also realized that structural factors preclude hours of zoning out. Among a certain demographic, there’s only so much time available for screens anyway, even if they are ubiquitous. Most of us do make our children do their homework. I try not to “overschedule” my children—another meaningless bit of modern angst, right up there with gluten—but with four children, even if each kid does two things, that’s eight activities for the family. That means the option doesn’t exist to start watching old episodes of Survivor at 7 a.m. on weekends and continue until 10 p.m. My kids may like killing time as much as anyone else, but if I forbid screens at meals and also make them go off an hour before an enforced bedtime, there isn’t that much time available for the killing.
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So I see no point in worrying about the precise amount within that window. There are also family benefits to allowing some slack. If letting my 3-year-old watch Thomas the Tank Engine on my iPhone means we can all eat dinner out some Saturday night without screaming, so be it.
As for the 11-year-old and the iPhone? I realized that my fears of giving him access to the Internet were unfounded, because he already has access to it on numerous screens at home. While monitoring a phone might be more difficult than monitoring the home computer, I could demand the same access. I already keep him off the Kindle long enough to do his homework; I could likewise keep him off a slightly smaller screen. Many parents that we respect replied to our informal survey that they’d gotten their kids smartphones in sixth grade or whenever middle school started in their communities.
So all the signs pointed to my son’s getting an iPhone on his birthday. My lingering trepidation is far more mundane than any existential angst about childhood and whether my child might become addicted to the Internet. This is a boy who managed to lose his winter coat twice in one weekend. The odds of the smartphone disappearing are high enough that I would not wish to write us an insurance policy. In the end, we bought an older, cheaper model. If I see no reason to worry much about screen time, I also see no reason to have money disappear faster than a photo on Snapchat.
