Parents banned phones. Their teens somehow survived.
Are teens better off with or without phones?Carol Yepes/Getty ImagesSome parents are resisting giving their kids phones, even in high school.Those teens say they were excluded socially, but ended up just fine.So what, exactly, is a parent of a 12-year-old supposed to do?The war over teens and phones is being fought on several fronts: in schools, where teachers are at their wits' end over kids looking at phones during class, in Congress where tech CEOs have been grilled over their policies about kids and teens, and in courts, where state attorneys are filing lawsuits against social platforms.But the most gruesome front lines of these battles have to be in the households where parents and eighth graders are squaring off against each other.It seems many parents are more skeptical than at any time in the last decade about allowing their young teens to have a smartphone, in part because of a viral article by Jonatha Haidt calling for the end of "phone-based childhood" and his recently released book, "The Anxious Generation." Haidt describes exactly what parents fear: that social media and phone use are contributing to the malaise of young adults. The idea that phones are bad for younger teens has hit a crescendo — and parents are taking action.For a story titled "The last teen in ninth grade to get an iPhone," The Cut spoke to several younger teens whose parents wouldn't allow them to have a phone until long after the rest of their friends had phones (as late as — gasp — 10th grade).What's interesting is that all of the teens spoke of being socially isolated. They were excluded from text chains, missed out on group video gaming before school, and were clueless about after-school meetups. To my horror, one ninth grader said friends told her that boys wanted to ask her out, but didn't because they couldn't approach her over text or Snapchat. (I, personally, would have died if I learned that my ninth-grade crush wanted to ask me out but couldn't).And yet, for the most part, all the teens admitted that their parents were right: Sure, it was hard, but growing up without a phone indeed built character. And once these teens finally got phones, they said they developed healthier relationships with the devices than their peers and were less prone to addictive habits.The bottom line: the teens survived and they don't hold it against their parents. This is good fuel for parents who are gearing up to hold their ground against their tweens.But I do wonder if these conclusions are also symptoms of sour grapes. The teens have been told that phones are bad for teens, so they've convinced themselves that their friends who had phones earlier are now addicted and worse off.There is also some new evidence that goes against the "phones are bad for teens" narrative. A recent study showed that using phones triggers a mood boost for teens — specifically while they're using them. The researchers texted teens a mood survey, and if they happened to be on their phone and answered immediately, their answers indicated a better mood than if they answered later. (This doesn't exactly fight the addiction metaphor — people are certainly happier in the middle of doing something addictive than they are a few hours later.)But there's also pushback on the overall idea that scientific evidence points to social media and phones being bad for teens' mental health. In the Atlantic, the same place Haidt published his viral article, Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist, argued that there's more nuance to the factors that affect teen mental health and that many scientific studies about social media use don't show the full picture. And yet, even if academic studies are lacking, it is really hard to ignore common sense about teens and phones.There does seem to be an opening for a really enterprising eighth grader to dig into the data and convince their parents that the studies linking mental health and social media involved only older teen subjects, and that external factors may matter more.For the parents of tweens and middle schoolers who are in the trenches right now debating when to give their kids a phone, I salute you.Read the original article on Business Insider
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