New research links a heightened risk of mood problems, weight gain and sleep loss to the age at which kids first get smartphones. But that’s no reason to ditch your phone, experts say. There are ways to use it that should help protect your well-being.
“You need to keep track of how you use it and how it may relate to your health,” says study leader Ran Barzilay. A child development psychologist, he works at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
For the new study, Barzilay’s team dug into data from the ABCD study. Those letters stand for Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development. This project has followed more than 10,000 kids from ages 9 or 10 into young adulthood. Researchers collect data about them at 21 places across the United States.
Within the sample used by Barzilay’s group, nearly two-thirds of the 10,588 kids already owned smartphones at age 12. Among them, 5.7 percent had been diagnosed with depression. That was true for only 4.5 percent of kids without phones. People with depression often feel apathetic, sad or hopeless. Without treatment, this condition can sometimes turn life-threatening.
BMI, short for body mass index, is one gauge of how healthy someone’s weight is. And the BMI of 12-year-olds with smartphones was, on average, higher than that of kids without phones at that age. Nearly 16 percent fell into the range for obesity. That’s compared with fewer than 12 percent their age without smartphones. Excess weight ups the risk of diabetes, heart disease, joint problems and other health issues.
Kids with a smartphone by age 12 also were likelier to get less sleep — an average of nearly 17 fewer minutes per night. That may not sound like a lot. But many teens already don’t get enough shut-eye. Sleep is vital for good physical and mental health. And for each year before age 12 that someone got a smartphone, a kid was even more likely to be overweight and sleep too little, the ABCD data showed.
Yet another part of the study looked at kids who didn’t have phones at age 12 but got them by age 13. Compared to those who still didn’t have a smartphone, those new owners ran 50 percent higher odds for too few Zzzz’s. These recent smartphone owners also were more likely to report having a mental-health problem.
Barzilay’s group shared its findings in the January Pediatrics.
Xiaoran Sun is a psychologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. One of her group’s studies collected data about health and smartphone ownership for 263 Latinx children in low-income families.
Her team followed the kids over a five-year period. And they didn’t see significant links between when kids got smartphones and their grades, sleep or depression symptoms. Her team shared its work three years ago in Child Development.
What should we make of the different findings?
Sun’s and Barzilay’s teams approached the issue in different ways. That included not just the size of the samples, but also where and how those data were collected, Sun notes. In any case, both her group’s study and the new research looked at correlations. So even where Barzilay’s group found links, “we can’t say smartphones actually cause these things.”
How old kids are when they get smartphones may not be as important as how they use them, the findings by Sun’s group suggest. In fact, exploring that is now the focus of some of her ongoing work.
What can you do?
At some point, almost every U.S. kid gets a smartphone. So say data from the Pew Research Center.
“Try and make this a very mindful move,” Sun says. Talk about it with parents, she suggests. Plan how you’re going to manage the phone’s use. Think about things like screen-time limits and where and when you’ll put the phone away, she adds.
When you do get a phone, keep it out of the bedroom at night, Barzilay suggests. That will limit the chance it will tempt you to stay up later than you should — or that it will prevent you from getting back to sleep if you wake up at night.
More broadly, try to focus on your overall health, Barzilay urges. For instance, make it a priority to get a good night’s rest. Likewise, the new study shows smartphones are linked to more risks for being overweight. So build more exercise into your life, he suggests.
Similarly, try to stay aware of your mental well-being. Look for healthy ways to boost your mood. Smartphones connect you with people. But also focus on your connections with friends and families in real life, Barzilay says.
“Think of learning how to live with a smartphone as a process,” Barzilay says. And “think how it affects you,” he adds. “You need to know what’s good for you — and bad.”
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