#100. Helping Kids (and Ourselves) Use Smartphones Safely
Enjoying the benefits while reducing the risks of the omnipresent phone
Dear friends,
In Letter #89, a few weeks ago, I described the characteristics of trustful, autonomy-supportive parenting (abbreviated TAS parenting), and I cited research showing that young people who experienced such parenting are, on average, psychologically healthier, socially more well-connected, and more self-motivated and self-regulated than otherwise comparable others. I described there eleven parenting practices that characterize this approach. For today’s discussion, the four most relevant of those practices are:
(1) striving to see from the child’s point of view;
(2) resisting fear-based and defensive modes of parenting;
(3) enabling free play and independent exploration; and especially
(4) teaching safety rules instead of banning activities, to the degree reasonably possible.
In much of my previous writing, including my book Free to Learn, I have described the advantages of being a TAS parent as applied to children’s activities in the 3-dimensional physical world, the world we think of as the real world. I have argued, with evidence, that for optimal development children need much more autonomy in the physical world than most are allowed. They need to play, explore, take risks, and get away from direct adult control for the sake of their immediate and future cognitive, emotional, and social well-being.
But today we and our children live not just in the 3-D physical word, but also in the digital world, manifested usually on 2-dimensional screens. Wellbeing today requires the ability to navigate and enjoy both worlds safely, and to be resilient to the inevitable slings and arrows of both. There is no going back. Luddites have never changed the course of history. To grow up healthy, children must explore the digital world as well as the physical one. Questions that arise, therefore, to appropriately cautious parents are these:
• How much freedom verses constraint should we allow our children in the digital world?
• At what ages should specific digital freedoms become available?
• How can we help children navigate the digital world safely?
Reasonable people today hold a wide range of opinions on these questions. I can’t answer them for individual parents, because every kid is different and every living situation is different. The most I can do is present some ideas to think about.
Conscientious parents have always recognized the value of teaching safety and reducing the hazards associated with children’s free-range activities. Parents in band hunter-gatherer cultures are, as a group, the most trustful, autonomy-supportive parents ever found by anthropologists (here), but they are not negligent. They allow children to roam and explore freely from about the age of four on, but they point out, for example, which mushrooms are poisonous and which snakes are dangerous, and they keep the poisoned darts high up in a tree out of reach of little kids. Parents in the U.S. in the 1950s, when I was a kid, were far more permissive of children’s outdoor freedoms than parents today. But they taught us to look both ways before crossing the street, not to chase the loose ball into the street without looking, not to get into the car of a stranger offering us candy or some such enticement, and how to swim before we could take the rowboat out ourselves. Can we, today, take a comparable approach to kids’ autonomy in the digital world?
A common argument we hear today is that children’s brains are insufficiently developed for them to follow rules, make reasonable judgments, and regulate their own behavior. If that were true, we would not have survived as a species, because throughout human history until very recently, children had great freedom to play, explore, and work away from adult monitoring and control, from as young even as age four or five (see Letter #75). The concept of the mentally incompetent child is largely an invention of modern times. (This is a topic for a future letter.) Children are inherently cautious, capable of remembering and following rules, and capable of reasoning. What they lack is knowledge. That’s why teaching safety rules, or demonstrating them in our own practices, which children observe and emulate, is essential preparation for the autonomy children need to grow up well.
The main questions of controversy today regarding kids’ digital access have to do with smartphone ownership and social media. The issues concerning smartphones and social media overlap but are to some degree different. One can have a smartphone without access to social media, and one can have access to social media (on a less portable device) without a smartphone. In what follows here, my focus is on the benefits and risks specifically of smartphone ownership. I plan to focus on social media access in another letter.
Benefits for Kids of Smartphone Ownership
The benefits of smartphone ownership are rather obvious. Here is a list of those that come most immediately to my mind, most of which were mentioned by readers in comments to Letter # 99:
1. Outdoor safety. The smartphone is an amazing safety device. In an emergency, you can call 911, or home. If you are lost, it can show you where you are and how to get home. If you are out after dark, it’s a flashlight. Kids playing and roaming freely outdoors are much safer with a smartphone than without.
2. Navigation. The outdoor world is far more navigable with a smartphone than without, because the phone’s GPS can provide maps and directions to any destination.
3. Documentation. The smartphone’s ready camera and easy note-taking capacities allows you to document your interesting experiences, to recall later and share with friends and family.
4. Education. The smartphone is, without question, the most powerful educational tool ever invented. With its internet connection, you have immediate access to all the world’s knowledge. True, you have the same access on a larger home computer, but the smartphone is always with you, so you can answer questions and explore ideas quickly, no matter where you are. What is the name of that beautiful flowering plant? Snap a picture and your plant identifier tells you the name and much more. What is the meaning of the word on that sign? How do I pay for a ride on the city bus for which I am waiting? Click, click and you know. If you ask a question of someone who speaks a language you don’t understand, your phone can translate for you directly from their speech. For an essay on how some kids use their smartphone as part of their self-education, see Letter #55.
5. Creative self-expression. The smartphone is a tool not just for building yourself, but also for expressing yourself. You can snap pictures or create films not just for documentation but also for aesthetics and humor. When novel lines of poetry or song lyrics enter your head as you walk on wooded trails or city sidewalks, you can recite them into your phone before they are lost. If you wish to share your creations with friends or family, or even with a larger audience, you can do so whenever you wish. It is human nature to want to share our creative thoughts and endeavors with others, and the smartphone is a powerful tool for doing that.
6. Amusement. Kids used to carry transistor radios to listen to whatever music was on the air. Now, with the smartphone, they (and we) can listen to whatever music, or stories, or podcasts, or anything else we choose no matter where we are.
7. Connecting with peers. In surveys, kid consistently report that the primary value of a smartphone is to keep in touch with friends. Almost nothing is more important to children’s social and psychological development than friendships and participation in what sociologists call “the culture of childhood” (see Letter #68). Today, adult fears and misbeliefs have largely destroyed the culture of childhood in the physical world, so children have wisely recreated it in the digital world. Hunter-gatherer children, and American children in decades past, spent many hours every day playing and exploring with other children away from adults. It is a biological need. Now children do that online, and the smartphone is the most convenient vehicle for it.
8. Developing digital skills. Children throughout the world and throughout human history have always been drawn to the most prominent tools of their culture. As the philosopher Karl Groos pointed more than a century ago in his book The Play of Man, children come into the world biologically predisposed to attend to and play with the tools and skills most important in the world in which they are growing (see Letter #4). They play with those tools not just to use them for immediate instrumental purposes but also to become skilled at using them. Thus, children in hunter-gatherer cultures play with bows and arrows and digging sticks and fire, children in farming culture play with farming equipment, and children in the mechanical age played with mechanical devices. In our culture today the digital computer is obviously the most prominent tool of our time, so no wonder children are drawn to it.
9. Being trusted. Growing up with a sense of being trusted is a big part of the advantage of having a TAS parent. Trust implies trustworthiness and that can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The TAS parent who gives a child a smartphone is not negligent but is deliberately helping the child acquire skills essential to our time. The gift comes, or should come, with respectful discussion about the potential dangers of this tool and how to mitigate them.
Potential Harms from Smartphones and How to Mitigate Them
The potential harms are probably well known to you because they are announced regularly in popular articles and books about the dangers for kids of smartphones or online activity generally. The dangers specific to smartphones, contrasted to larger computers, derive from what is also the main advantage of smartphones. For better and worse, the smartphone is always with you, always available. It is an extension of yourself in a way that is not true for a computer on your desk. To keep it from controlling your life, you must learn to control it. Here are some of the dangers:
1. Sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation appears to be the most consistently documented negative effect of smartphone ownership for children. I have found two recently published research studies assessing behaviors and moods of children below 13 years of age who own a smartphone compared to those who don’t. The studies showed mixed, positive and negative findings regarding other indices of wellbeing, but both showed negative correlations between smartphone ownership and sleep. One study revealed that kids who slept with their phones next to them slept on average 8.6 hours per night, contrasted with 8.9 hours for those who kept their phone out of reach in the bedroom and 9.3 hours for those who kept it in another room. The other study didn’t ask where the kids kept their phones at night, but found that those who owned a smartphone slept on average 9.0 hours per night compared to 9.4 hours for those who didn’t own one. Taking the two studies together, it appears that sleep deprivation does not derive from smartphone ownership per se but from where you park the phone at night. The sleep deprivation problem seems to be an easy one to solve!
2. Disruption or prevention of physical world communication. Although research to date does not support the contention that kids with smartphones engage in less face-to-face, physical world conversation, on average, than do those without smartphones, smartphones clearly can have that effect for some children as well as some adults. It’s not hard to think of ways to mitigate this problem. For starters, we need to develop, teach, and model some rules of smartphone etiquette: It’s rude to respond to a ding on your phone when you are engaged with someone in real-world conversation. It’s rude to bring your phone to the dinner table, where the family is gathered not just for food but to enjoy one another’s company. It’s rude to respond to your phone, or even have it turned on, in any meeting where those involved are physically present. At school recesses, summer outdoor camps, and any other settings designed for real-world play or communication, it seems appropriate to ban smartphones, as they interfere with the intended purpose of the setting.
3. Loss of practice with real-world communication. For some, digital communication can be a crutch that reduces their chance of acquiring confidence and skills at communication in the physical world. People who describe themselves as introverted, or shy, or socially inhibited, often report in surveys that they find online communication easier than real-world communication. The upside is that the smartphone, ever present, enables them to communicate and maintain friendships despite their inhibitions; but the downside is that it may prevent them from overcoming their inhibitions about real-world interactions. This is another reason why there should be times and places where smartphones are banned and people must communicate without them.
4. Distraction from appreciation of the physical environment. If your eyes are fixed on your phone, you are not seeing the trees, or birds, or people, or architecture of the three-dimensional world. You are missing a lot of real-world beauty. This is one of several good reasons for keeping the phone in your pocket rather than in front of your eyes as you move around in physical space.
5. A time sink. This is especially a problem with social media, so I may discuss it more in my letter on that. Clearly, the algorithms social media use to keep people engaged are highly effective, for adults as well as children. There’s nothing mystical about the algorithms; they just keep feeding you stuff that you seem to like. Resisting is much like ending the cycle of eating “just one more” potato chip. If you can resist the next potato chip you can also resist the next bit of click-bait that pops onto your phone. It may take deliberate, conscious measures to resist. Self-imposed rules, such as, “Truly, I’m limiting myself to just 10 and then that’s it” can be effective and are good ways to practice self-discipline of all sorts. Learning to resist temptations that drag us away from what we know is good for us is a big part of growing up healthy. A good mantra for everyone is this: “I control my phone; it does not control me.”
6. A potential money sink. It’s one thing to play video games; it’s another to throw away money when the game starts enticing you to purchase something to help you raise your rank. Kids, like adults, may also be subjects of online scams. I personally would give a kid a smartphone (after much discussion) but not access to my credit card. If they want to spend money through their phone it has to be their own money, which they earned themselves. Losing their own hard-earned money is a life lesson for them; losing my money is not.
7. Online bullying. “Bullying” is a term used to mean lots of different things these days. Much of what gets called bullying is normal kid behavior. Kids tease one another; they sometimes display what they call “drama;” and they sometimes truly get mad at one another. That’s normal kid behavior and learning to deal with it, whether online or in the physical world, is part of growing up. Adults aren’t always nice to one another either. In surveys, kids generally point out that real-world bullying at school is much worse than online bullying, because they can, with a twitch of the thumb, turn off the latter but not the former. But there is a kind of ganging up bullying, many tearing down one, which can be extremely hurtful, online or off. Perhaps the most important lesson for your kid to learn regarding such bullying is how to avoid being one of the bullies, online or off. Statistically, when bullying is many against one, your kid is much more likely to be one of the bullies than the one who is bulled. How the victim can deal with bullying is another problem, probably deserving more research on my part and another letter down the road. I would appreciate any comments on this problem.
8. Making public what you don’t want to make public. When you think you are sharing a photo of yourself or making a wisecrack just to a friend, that photo or wisecrack may, through one channel or another, get out to the whole world in a manner that could bite you sometime down the road. Unless you know much more than I do about how to keep such online communications private, a good rule is never put anything into the internet that you wouldn’t want a future prospective employer to see. Think before you hit “send.”
9. Being tracked and continuously monitored by parents. Arguably the biggest problem of smartphones for kids is it’s an umbilical cord that never gets broken. The ultimate purpose of childhood is to become increasingly independent of parents, increasingly in charge of one’s own life. The smartphone can be a tool for independence, but it can also be a tool preventing independence. If parents insist that the tracking function be always on and that the child report regularly on whatever they are doing or always answer the parents’ calls or texts, then the phone is countering the biological imperative of breaking away. Interestingly, camp directors and school principals tell me that the main advocates for kids keeping their phones with them at camp or school are not kids but parents, who want to be in continuous contact with their kids. Those are not TAS parents.
Concluding Thoughts
What I have listed here are not the only benefits and potential harms of smartphones, for kids or for ourselves. You may well want to add more. My point is that all these should be topics of respectful back-and-forth discussion with your child before and at various times after giving them a smartphone or adding to its functions.
And now, what are your thoughts about all this? I’m interested in any additions to the list of potential benefits and harms. If you have had experience talking with your child about safe use of their smartphone, I and others would be interested in hearing about that. What seemed to work and what didn’t? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your stories, thoughts, and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the extent to which we agree or disagree. They add to the value of these letters for everyone.
If you enjoy these letters, please invite others to subscribe. If you are currently a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can afford the $50 or $100 per year. With a paid subscription, you will gain access to an audio version as well as the text version of this and future letters and will be invited to periodic online meetings with me and other paid subscribers to discuss topics of mutual interest. I use all profits from paid subscriptions to help support organizations dedicated to bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives. Paid subscriptions also encourage me to keep these letters flowing.
With respect and best wishes,
Peter
NOTE: An audio version of this letter is available to paid subscribers, HERE.
I would add to the list of negatives- smartphones decrease opportunities for boredom and for short “breaks” for your brain to pause and rest. Most people just pick up a phone when they’re bored. These things are also important to neurodevelopment and to brain health as we age.
I also think it is naive, frankly, to think that you can simply teach a child or teen brain (with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex) to simply resist and control one of the most *intentionally* addictive devices ever created. As someone who overcame addictive behaviors in my late 20s that I developed in my teens, I can tell you it would not have been possible for me to deal with them out of sheer willpower and education when I was younger, especially without a truly supportive social environment. The reality is that there will be screen-based addictive behaviors for many young people and it will impact their brain health. I think we would need quite an extensive social wellness shift to remedy that; it isn’t something most parents could deal with on their own.
Hi Peter,
I appreciate the nuance you delve into in this article. I especially like (and noticed) how you repeatedly point out that so many of the issues kids face surrounding smartphone use are also issues adults are facing.
Along those lines, I would ask, when you suggest smart phone bans in particular situations (camps, recess, etc.), would you advocate for the same in adult group situations as well? Who gets to decide which situations warrant a a ban and which don't? Just more food for thought.
I think the part that felt missing (it's implicit, but not made explicit, in your writing here), is that parental support and communication about these issues needs to be ongoing. And I don't mean "lecture your kid at every turn about their smartphone use." No. Absolutely not a solution, just more of a way to get them to distance themselves from you and your smartphone opinions. What I mean is that regular, genuine, relationship-based discussions between parents/adult mentors and young people is a key to supporting our young people in developing better habits with their phones over time, and navigating the issues with smartphone use in the world. It's also a key to keeping US parents and adults accountable as well. As you repeatedly mentioned, adults struggle with most of these factors as well. I think open communication and mutual support around smartphone use is so important in family and group dynamics... it's not something many of us are used to practicing, but if we are going to try to hold our kids accountable to certain expectations then they should be able to do the same with us. And I welcome it, because I need reminders and support about a lot of this as well.