Over Mother’s Day dinner on Sunday, my college-aged niece ribbed my mother for consistently misplacing her iPhone.
My mom, who’s in her seventh decade, cracked, “Unlike you, I used to be not born with a cellphone in my hand, so it’s not an appendage for me.”
It was good-natured family banter.
But sitting between a Boomer and a Zoomer, I, a young Gen Xer, could see the total spectrum and development of our smartphone habits.
Generally speaking, Millennials and younger Generation Xers are those now raising kids. We’re sufficiently old to recollect the virtues of our device-free childhoods — and to understand how technology has made our lives each higher and worse as adults.
And having seen either side, I can’t help but feel we’d like a more conservative approach to the lingering debate over when kids needs to be allowed smartphones.
Then this morning, more evidence for this arrived in my inbox.
A recent study from nonprofit research organization Sapien Labs reports that the younger kids are after they’re first given smartphones or tablets, the more serious their mental health as adults. To no surprise, this connection is more intense in females.
Sapien Labs runs an ongoing survey into mental global health. For its most up-to-date report, it asked nearly 29,000 adults ages 18 to 24 at what age they received their first smartphone or portable device with web access.
Then they cross-referenced those responses against answers to comprehensive questions on respondents’ current mental health.
The later someone received a tool, the higher their current mental health.
Girls who received one under the age of 10 were particularly negatively impacted in a while in life — with mental health scores indicating they’re currently “coping with, or in danger for, a serious mental health condition.”
It’s a reasonably compelling endorsement for fogeys who’ve held out on giving their young offspring a handheld window to the world.
In response to Common Sense Media, a majority of youngsters have a phone by 11, and in 2021, about one in five kids between the ages of 8 and 12 were on social media. By age 14, smartphone ownership hit 91%.
Even at my “I watched the OJ verdict in highschool” age, I’ve seen how the smartphone has chipped away at my very own attention span, exasperated my insomnia and given me irrational FOMO.
How is a toddler with no fully developed prefrontal cortex presupposed to manage all the online stimuli?
Especially impressionable girls, for whom the smartphone is actually a portal to a hellscape of unrealistic beauty standards, facial filters, photoshopped bodies and bizarre gender ideology, to call a couple of landmines.
Raising children in today’s world is a treadmill set to full speed where most certainly each parents are working full time. Youth sports and other extracurriculars have put so many demands on adults’ time, wallets and patience, that within the pursuit of sanity, something gives.
Normally it’s those well-intentioned rules — like that promise not to present your kid a smartphone before they turn 14. It’s easy to cave when kids are complaining that they’re the lone phone-free one of their peer group. Also, parents need to have the ability to achieve their children in case of an emergency.
I don’t have any children of my very own. But I’m a really energetic within the lives of my friends’ kids. I’m involved and present at games, in the house and on vacations. I ask a whole lot of questions of each my pals and their kids, and I see trends emerging with behavior and parenting styles.
Greater than anything, I see the effectiveness of guardrails reminiscent of parental controls limiting what and when kids can watch. And I see the ability of claiming “no.”
Setting a later threshold and sticking to it not only helps kids to take care of disappointment and rejection, but additionally helps acquaint them with the concept of delayed gratification— just about nonexistent in our on-demand society where every creature comfort is offered through an app in your phone.
Moreover, children are unable to understand the responsibility that comes with unfettered access to smartphones.
And as parents, teachers and authority figures, we’d be abdicating our own responsibilities if we freely hand unprepared kids this loaded weapon.
