How young is too young to have a smartphone? 5 of the biggest parenting questions about smartphones, answered.
Smartphones are an everyday part of our culture, but research on the effects of screen time might give parents pause when it comes to giving their children one of their own. Even so, smartphones allow parents to reach their children in an emergency, students to access educational materials at the stroke of a finger, and kids to find community, especially when peers of certain identity groups may be hard to find locally.
Of course, with each benefit comes a new digital risk. Parents must manage to keep their children safe while they're online. Monitoring their child's content consumption is also important to ensure their phones don't interrupt their sleep, which can induce added stress, or impact their socialization—not to mention potential impacts on their childhood and imagination.
Spokeo reviewed academic research from Stanford University and other institutions and survey data to help answer some of the most pressing questions facing parents considering when to give their children a smartphone.
For Dr. Ryan Sultan, an adult and child psychiatrist and the medical director of Integrative Psych in Manhattan, the most important thing parents can do is show children what a healthy relationship with digital devices looks like.
"Model behavior that you want them to be doing," Sultan told Stacker. "So use your phone at the times that you think it is appropriate—use it for the appropriate things. If you want them to be doing things other than using their phone, then you have to get that going with them. You have to be doing those things with them."
Teaching healthy behaviors, however, can take time.
"For younger children, it's best to delay personal phone ownership until they demonstrate readiness for boundaries that prioritize their sleep and health," said Dr. Lizzie Benge, a sleep medicine physician and faculty member at Harvard Medical School's Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, in an email to Stacker.
A Stanford Medicine study found that when children reach 10 years old, the number of their peers who acquire their first phone increases rapidly until about age 12.5. The average age at which a child receives their first phone is 11.6. By the time American children become teens, nearly all (95%) have access to a phone, according to the Pew Research Center.
There isn't a clear answer to when a child should get a phone, according to Sultan, but the age continues to rise.
"Thirteen is when I would consider giving my kid a phone, for parents who are worried about locating their child all the time," Sultan said.
From a sleep perspective, Benge said children younger than 12 haven't learned how to regulate their phone use responsibly.
"Introducing phones too early, particularly before middle school, can disrupt sleep cycles due to blue light exposure, which suppresses melatonin production and delays sleep onset."
Sultan suggests allowing supervised screen time until a parent officially gives their child a phone or using smartwatches that allow texting and phone calls but not social media.
Even though smart devices can help families communicate and locate each other, Sultan does not recommend giving children access to social media.
"The concern we have with social media is that it was designed to pull you in and keep you in it," he said. "And it's still designed that way, giving you essentially a dopamine hit, which is similar to addiction. We also know that kids' brains are more prone to the circuit of addiction because they're not as developed."
Experts suggest setting clear boundaries based on family values before handing children their first phones. Additionally, it is recommended to set parental controls on the device and make sure children know they must ask permission to download new apps. It can also be helpful to set guidelines for all family members, such as no screens during dinner or turning off notifications while doing homework.
Benge also suggested implementing a no-phone policy one to two hours before bed, a centralized charging station in a common area to keep phones outside of bedrooms at night, and daily screen time limits.
Protecting a child's privacy can start before they're even given a phone. Sheryl Ziegler, a licensed clinical child psychologist, suggests parents adjust the device's privacy and security settings beforehand.
Benge also recommends parents talk to their children about the risks of sharing personal information online, using parental controls to help avoid inappropriate apps or content, and "maintaining open communication about online behavior to foster trust and reduce the mental burden of secrecy or fear."
Although Sultan recommends keeping children off social media for as long as possible, if a parent feels their child is ready, he suggests starting their account with limited functionality intended for younger individuals. Additionally, Instagram, for example, now has teen accounts for people aged 13 to 17 that automatically set their account to private and don't allow private messages from people they're not connected to.
While children don't have any legal rights to privacy online from their parents, there still is a line to toe. Each family can determine the extent of parental monitoring based on each child's needs.
"If you think your child might be the victim of a predator, is having suicidal thoughts, or has a drug addiction, then monitoring the child's communication and devices seems like an obvious step towards protecting them," Elizabeth Burke, a child advocate attorney, said in a 2020 interview with the nonprofit childhood independence organization Let Grow. "The trickier area is things like is your child being bullied or bullying other kids on social media?"
Additionally, if you're giving your child an iPhone, when you set up the phone, you can use features like Screen Time to limit and monitor how much time they spend using the device. You can also set content restrictions by age and prevent app store and in-app purchases.
For Android phones, parents can set up a Google account for their child with Family Link, which allows them to set screen limits. Apps like Qustodio also allow parents to monitor how their child uses their phone, as well as control screen limits. As an extra layer of parental monitoring, Sultan suggests having children under 16 share their passwords with their parents.
Story editing by Shanna Kelly. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Lacy Kerrick.
This story originally appeared on Spokeo and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
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