What is the “right” age to get your child a smartphone? It’s a question that vexes many parents — torn between their pleading tweens and researchers who warn about the potential harms of constant connectivity. But new study findings strengthen the case for holding off.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, found that children who had a smartphone by age 12 were at higher risk of depression, obesity and insufficient sleep than those who did not yet have one. Researchers had analyzed data from more than 10,500 children who participated in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study — the largest long-term look at children’s brain development in the United States to date.
The younger that children under 12 were when they got their first smartphones, the study found, the greater their risk of obesity and poor sleep. The researchers also focused on a subset of children who hadn’t received a phone by age 12 and found that a year later, those who had acquired one had more harmful mental health symptoms and worse sleep than those who hadn’t.
“When you give your kid a phone, you need to think of it as something that is significant for the kid’s health — and behave accordingly,” said Dr. Ran Barzilay, lead author of the study and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
A Better Understanding of the Risks
The new study shows only an association between getting a smartphone earlier in adolescence and poorer health outcomes, not cause and effect. But the researchers point to previous studies that suggest that young people who have smartphones may spend less time socializing in person, exercising and sleeping — all of which are essential for well-being. Adolescence is a sensitive time when even modest changes to sleep or mental health can have deep and lasting effects, they note.
The purpose of the study is not to shame parents who have already given their children devices, Dr. Barzilay said. And he is realistic about how ingrained smartphones have become in American adolescence.
The takeaway, he said, is that age matters.
“A kid at age 12 is very, very different than a kid at age 16,” he said. “It’s not like an adult at age 42 versus 46.”
The median age at which children in the study got their first smartphones was 11. And virtually all of American teens now say they have access to a smartphone, according to a recent Pew report.
Jacqueline Nesi, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, who writes the newsletter Techno Sapiens, about parenting in the digital age, cautioned that the new study could not prove that smartphones were directly causing harm.
“It’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get that kind of causal evidence on this topic,” she said, though the findings may “nudge” parents toward delaying giving children a smartphone when possible.
Caregivers “do not need to wait for perfect evidence to make these kinds of decisions,” Dr. Nesi said. They should feel empowered to trust their gut, she added, and to hold off on giving their child a smartphone until everyone is ready — including parents, who have to do the very hard work of putting protections and limits in place.
“Giving a child a device with access to everything on the internet is going to be risky,” she said.
The Importance of Protecting Sleep
Though researchers may continue to quibble over the negative effects of smartphones on children, most tend to agree that the devices can keep kids from getting the sleep they need.
Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician with the University of California, San Francisco, pointed to a 2023 study he worked on, also using the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development sample, which found that 63 percent of 11 to 12 year olds reported having an electronic device in their bedroom. And nearly 17 percent said they had been awakened by phone notifications in the past week.
Getting phones out of the bedroom overnight is a simple step families can take to mitigate some of the negative health effects associated with smartphones — even if parents have already given their child a device, Dr. Nagata said.
But he and others acknowledged how difficult this can be for families to navigate.
Dr. Barzilay has three children, two of whom he gave smartphones before they were 12. But, he said, his 9-year-old isn’t getting one anytime soon.
He encouraged other parents to consider new data on the potential risks of early smartphone ownership as they decide when to get their child a device.
“It doesn’t mean that every kid with a smartphone has a problem for life,” he said. “All it means is that us as parents — and, I hope, also policymakers and society — are going to do something about it together.”
Catherine Pearson is a Times reporter who writes about families and relationships.
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