Should you get your kid a phone for Christmas? I know that you want to make it a magical and memorable Christmas or Hanukkah. But please, do yourself and your child a favor: do not buy them a phone as a gift. (And please tell Santa to hold off as well.) Here’s 50 research-backed reasons to delay gifting a phone to your kids this holiday season.
Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling “The Anxious Generation” offers these four norms for all parents:
- No smartphones before high school.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
Reason #50 To Delay The Smart Phone
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, “Smart phones are experience blockers. Once they enter a child’s life, they push out or reduce all other forms of non-based experience.” If kids are on phones they’re not doing anything else, including making friends, playing with friends, reading, studying, exercising, or sleeping.
Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” is an incredible place to start if you’re trying to figure out this whole kids-and-phones thing. He explains how the play-based childhood of the past has been replaced with a screen-based childhood, and it’s causing major damage to our children. I have a review/summary here, and I also did a “Book Bite” summary if you’d rather listen than read. It’s a quick synopsis of the main points that you can quickly ingest while you’re on a walk, driving, or doing the laundry!
Reason #49 To Not Buy Your Child A Smart Phone For Christmas
Research including this 2022 study, links early smartphone use, before age 13, to higher rates of suicidal thoughts.
Licensed Professional Counselor Tessa Stuckey spoke to the Screen Less Play More Podcast about the rising trend of teen suicide. Tessa started recognizing a pattern about 6 years ago. “Kids would come to me with typical life stressors, mom got mad at them, they didn’t empty their dishwasher, or they made a C on a chemistry exam. Typical life stressors. But their go-to answer was always a dark, dark thought, whether that be self-harm or suicidal thinking.” Tessa started investigating and found that “every single one of them had issues that were rooted back to an overuse of unhealthy screens or social media.“
Smart phones offer many pressures on kids and tweens that can cause suicidal ideation. (Another reason to not give them a smart phone for Christmas!) Some of the negative thoughts come from constant comparison to peers and celebrities on social media. Some desperate thoughts arise from cyberbullying in texts or online. In some cases, kids are driven to suicide due to the trapped feeling of sextortion. Therapist Tessa Stuckey feels that smart phones encourage a mindset of instant gratification, and that when some children have feelings of despair, they act immediately on destructive thoughts. Many kids are not attaining the skills of impulse-control and delayed gratification due to the breakneck-speed of modern day technology.
Tessa explains her fascinating take on kids and technology in her book, “For The Sake of Our Kids.” I highly recommend!
Your Guide To Dumb Phones
Your kids don’t need a smart phone to stay connected!
There are so many smartphone alternatives to choose if you want to keep in touch with your child. (Also known as “dumb phones.”) The name basically means that it’s a phone without internet access (and thus no access to the dangers of social media, gaming, or tracking.) They also work fine if your kid just wants to stay in contact with friends, take photos, or listen to music. Here is a great guide to safer phones from my friend at Thoughts From A Digital Mom.
Should I Get a Phone For My Kid? Reason 48 to Delay
I find it terrifying and shocking that according to studies, the average age of a child’s first internet exposure to pornography is 11 years old. When a child has access to a smart phone, he has access to the entire internet, including the world of pornography. And you would not believe how easy porn is to access. I made a fake Snapchat account, pretending to be a 15-year-old girl. With this account, I was able to access pornography through only two clicks inside the “spotlight” feed.
Porn used to be very difficult to access for children. For good reason.
Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes did an incredibly eye-opening episode with our podcast about how to keep kids safe from porn. He explains, “There was a pretty big distance in my childhood between where I was and the things that could do me great harm. I either [needed] an elaborate plan or a whole lot of friends in the wrong places that would need to be true in order for me to get to those things.” He explains that for him to see porn in 1985 Michigan, he would have either watched fuzzy Cinemax, or get someone over 18 to collude with him. Back then, porn videos were in a separate section of the store, available only to those 18 and over – and they checked IDs! Even more “tame” Magazine’s like Playboy were covered in black plastic bags, and were stored behind the counter for those who could prove their over-18 age.
McKenna explains, “We’ve decided it’s common in the physical world to create friction between humans and things that could hurt them. When it is related to drugs or addiction, when it’s related to violence like knives and weapons, when it’s related to explicit content like adult and gentleman clubs, right? We create friction, whether it’s an ID at the door, or a case with a lock or behind the counter to get it, because we’re stopping humans from hurting themselves. We need to get to a spot where we’re separating kids from adults in digital spaces.”
Unfortunately, the only way to be sure your kids aren’t exposed to inappropriate material is to keep them closely monitored when on the internet. That’s basically impossible to do when you give them an internet-enabled smartphone.
Reason #47 To Not Give Your Child A Smart Phone For Christmas
Studies show that teens receive a median of 240 notifications per day on their phones. This 2023 report by Common Sense Media illustrates how incredibly distracting a smart phone can be.
How are you supposed to sustain attention to a book, a conversation, or a teacher’s lecture when your phone is pinging you 240 times per day?!! That’s an average of 15 times per waking hour.
Reason 46: No Smart Phone For Christmas!
I’m not surprised that 72% of parents feel their teenagers are distracted by smartphones during in-person conversations. Have you tried to talk to a teen with a phone in her hand? This finding comes from the Pew Research Center.
You can extend your years of connection by delaying the age at which you give your child a cell phone. Moreover, you can extend their years of childhood in general by delaying a phone. This heartbreaking and inspiring essay by Benjamin Conlon called “Childhood, No Return” will give you pause about giving your child a smartphone. It’s definitely worth a read!
Reason 45 to NOT give your child a smart phone for Christmas!
Reason 45 to not give your child a smart phone for Christmas is that it erodes memory. According to The Guardian, there is a rising incidence of “digital amnesia.” I think we have all experienced this when not able to remember phone numbers like we used to, or relying on GPS more than we should.
Over-reliance on tech like AI is discussed in a fascinating paper called called “The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI,” which argues that when we offload thinking to a device, our cognitive abilities atrophy. Let’s help our kids to learn, not help them to forget!
Natalie Wexler had a fascinating interview with Screen Less Play More about the detrimental effects of cognitive offloading. Listen here to “How Generative AI Can Rot Your Brain.”
Reason 44: Say NO to phones for kids
According to this study, excessive cell phone use is linked to a reduction in the ability to read facial emotions. In the study, Fifty-one preteens spent five days at an overnight nature camp where television, computers and mobile phones were not allowed; this group was compared with school-based matched controls that retained usual media practices. Both groups took pre- and post-tests that required participants to infer emotional states from photographs of facial expressions and videotaped scenes with verbal cues removed. After five days interacting face-to-face without the use of any screen-based media, preteens’ recognition of nonverbal emotion cues improved significantly more than that of the control group for both facial expressions and videotaped scenes.
Should I Get a Phone For My Kid? Reason 43 to Delay
I know that this one is scary, but that’s why it’s so important. According to the National School Safety and Security Services, cell phones can reveal hiding places during active shooter situations. Another important reason to not buy a smart phone for Christmas. Use of cell phones at school impacts safety in a number of ways:
- Student use of cell phones during an unfolding emergency can distract their attention from safety and emergency response directions being given by school staff.
- Cell phones have been used to make bomb, shooting, and other threats to schools
- Cell phones have been used for making threats to individual students, cyberbullying, instigating fights, and other school safety disruptions.
- Cell phone use by students can impede public safety response by accelerating parental arrival at the scene of an emergency when officials may be attempting to evacuate students to another site.
Yet more reasons to not get your child a smart phone for Christmas or any of the holidays!
Reason 42: Delay Gifting A Smart Phone for Christmas
So what the heck is “sextortion?” Technically, it’s the combination of two words: sex and extortion. The dictionary defines it as “the practice of extorting money or sexual favors from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity.” In 2023, the FBI observed a 20% increasing in the reporting of financially motivated sextortion incidents involving minors.
Most often with teens, sextortion begins when a victim is groomed online by someone pretending to be someone else. Your teen son could be contacted on Snapchat or Instagram by a cute teen girl who starts flirting with him. She eventually sends a few sexually revealing photos to him, and asks him to reciprocate. Once he sends a nude photo of himself, or a sexually explicit video, she reveals that she is not in fact a teen girl, but a grown man (often in a foreign country.) That adult extortionist then demands money in exchange for not sharing the explicit photo with family, schoolmates, or the media.
Under the extreme and embarrassing pressure of sextortionists, some victims have committed suicide. One such horrific story is highlighted on a sobering episode of Scrolling2Death Podcast.
If you or anyone you know is a victim of sextortion, report it to the FBI or call 1-800-CALL-FBI (225-5324).
Reason #41 NOT Gift A Smart Phone This Holiday Season
A brief review of the App Store revealed more than 200 “risky or inappropriate” apps rated as ok for children, according to a 2024 report. “Examples included 25 chat apps that connect kids with strangers. One of those was described as being ‘nothing but pedophiles.’ Another category was apps specifically designed to help kids circumvent restrictions on internet access. Others included apps which invited users to upload photos to be rated for ‘hotness,’ as well as those encouraging unhealthy weight loss.”
Uggg. Please make sure to look through any app your child downloads BEFORE giving it to them. Or even better, don’t buy your child a smart phone! There are so many alternatives to choose from!
Reason 40: Don’t Give Your Child A Smart Phone For Christmas
I know that this one seems random, but there are quite a few physical problems associated with extended smart phone use. A 2017 Korean study published in the journal BMC Ophthalmology found that “prolonged smartphone use was linked to pediatric dry eye disease,” and also that “outdoor activity seemed to hedge against the ocular surface disorder.” In fact, children with dry eye symptoms who went four weeks without a smartphone actually showed subjective and objective signs of improvement.
It’s no surprise that staring at a phone all the time makes you blink less, and would cause dry eye problems. Let’s give our kids a fighting chance and not saddle them with geriatric problems before they even turn 20.
Reason 39 To Delay Giving a Smart Phone As A Gift
A study by Jean Twenge and colleagues found that “heavy use of screen media was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.” The sleep disturbances were greatest for those who were on social media or who were surfing the internet in bed.
The Anxious Generation book states, “It’s not just social media on smartphones that has disturbed sleep for Gen Z; sleep deprivation is increased by the ease of access to other highly stimulating smartphone activities, including mobile gaming and video streaming.”
Reason 38 to NOT Give Your Child A Smart Phone For Christmas
Kids who get accustomed to instant gratification have lower tolerance for uncomfortable feelings. Therapist Tessa Stuckey told the Screen Less Play More Podcast that some of her young patients turn to dark thoughts, even suicidal, because they want instant relief from their pain. Forcing kids to delay gratification and wait for answers (the old-fashioned way) is vital to healthy development.
With a smart phone you have everything at your fingertips: answers from Google, your paper written by AI, the route determined by GPS, quick delivery through Amazon or UberEats. But if you are forced to wait for a response, determine the route yourself, or research the paper yourself, you strengthen your mental muscles for grit and patience.
The ability to tolerate boredom, and to have patience are LEARNED skills. Let’s give our kids the years they need to acquire those skills before life becomes overly easy with a smart phone.
Reason 37 to Delay The Smart Phone
Top addiction therapist Mandy Saligari warns parents that allowing your child to have a smartphone could be as damaging as “giving them a gram of cocaine.” One study finds that smartphone addiction affects the brain in the same way as drug addiction.
This will definitely hit home to those of you who have asked a child or teen to put down their phone or iPad, thus resulting in an enormous tantrum, or worse.
Richard Freed explains the addictive nature of phones so well in his interview with Screen Less Play More podcast. Listen here about exactly how the tech companies design their products to addict:
Reason 36 NOT to Gift Your Children a Smart Phone
Would you let your teenager drive a brand of car that the creator banned her children from driving? Would you give your children a type of food that the makers didn’t eat themselves? Then why are we giving devices to our children that the inventors don’t let their children use?
Steve Jobs, creator of the iphone and ipad did not allow his children to use the devices. The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a Waldorf school which uses no computers, but instead pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, banned his children from having cell phones until the age of 14.
We finally know the dangers that their products can inflict, so it’s time to act. Or, not act, as the case may be. Don’t buy your child a smart phone for Christmas. Full stop.
Should I Get A Phone For My Kid? Reason 35 to Delay
Should you get your child a phone for Christmas? Well, checkout the findings of this study called “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” Author of “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt summarizes the findings by saying “The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.”
Reason 34 To Delay Smart Phone Use
Reason 34 to NOT give your kids a cell phone is that extensive phone use has been found to cause changes in neck alignment resulting in pain. Nobody wants neck pain, but it’s especially ridiculous for a child to be saddled with that. You can see how that could happen if a child is staring down into their lap all the time instead of running, jumping, climbing trees, and enjoying childhood!
Should I Get A Phone For My Kid? Reason 33 to Delay
Therapist Tessa Stuckey explains to the Screen Less Play More podcast that her tween and teen patients are not as able to self soothe as past generations. If a child is feeling big feelings, they need to learn how to sift through those feelings, not just turn to a video game or social media feed to feel better.
Reason 32 to NOT Give Your Kids A Smart Phone
According to a study about 8-11 year olds, posted by the American Academy of Pediatrics “the increased risk of cyberbullying related to phone ownership could be tied to increased opportunity and vulnerability.” It continues, “Continuous access to social media and texting increases online interactions, provides more opportunities to engage both positively and negatively with peers, and increases the chance of an impulsive response to peers’ postings and messages.”
This research is a reminder for parents to consider the risks when deciding whether to provide elementary school-aged child with a cell phone. It’s up to you- but I certainly won’t be doing it!
When Should I Get My Child A Phone? Reason 31 to Delay
This study found that online gaming can lead to addiction fragmented attention, and aggression. The researchers studied young gamers in Singapore. They found that individuals who suffered from gaming disorder had, on average, poorer grades, and were more likely to skip school or show up late. “The researchers found “heightened depression and anxiety, social phobias, and poor grades more likely to result from addiction than to cause it.”
Today’s video games are purposefully engineered to addict. These are not the Nintendo games of your youth that had a beginning, middle, and end. Richard Freed, author of “Better Than Real Life” explains to our podcast in depth about how Fortnite is designed to addict young men. It’s fascinating- take a listen here:
Reason 30 NOT To Give Your Child a Phone
Boredom can improve mental health, increase creativity, and motivate a search for novelty. Without boredom, humans would not have their taste for adventure or pursue lofty goals. According to an article in Psychology Today, “The ability to focus and self-regulate is correlated with the ability to handle boredom. Learning to endure boredom at a young age is great preparation for developing self-control skills (regulating one’s thoughts, emotions, and actions).”
Should I Give My Child A Phone? Reason 29 to say NO!
In 2023, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy put out a warning against social media for youth. He believes that “extreme, inappropriate, and harmful content” is so widely accessible by children online, that there should be a cigarette-style warning on all social media. Dr. Murthy’s entire advisory is available here.
Reason 28 To Delay Cell Phones for Kids
Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Anxious Generation” has put it very succinctly: “The creeps and predators are not at your child’s playground. They’re on Instagram.” As of December 2005 there are over 2,191 lawsuits against Instagram and Snapchat related to child harm. It makes perfect sense – why should pedophiles risk being arrested lingering around playgrounds and public spaces when the internet has made it so incredibly easy to target children?
Sarah Gallagher Trombley tells the Screen Less Play More Podcast, “There’s a lot of predators on Snapchat. Predators don’t necessarily raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, I’m a drug dealer. Hey, I’m a sextortionist.’ What they do is they infiltrate friend groups. They try to appear like maybe they go to your high school. And so all it takes is one kid in a friend group to maybe think they know this person.”
Reason 27 to Delay Phones
It’s a no-brainer, but here’s research stating that in-person communication promotes better mental health than digital communication. Kids aren’t going to remember the funny memes, but they will remember laughing over in-person jokes and goofing off with friends. I know that you still remember those inside jokes from fifth grade or those pranks you pulled in high school!
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 26 to say NO
The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that “Forty-two percent of youth Internet users had been exposed to online pornography in the past year. Of those, 66% reported only unwanted exposure.” Many times this exposure is through advertisements, which can’t be filtered through parental controls. Please reconsider if you’re contemplating getting your child a smart phone. There are many alternatives to choose from that serve the same purpose, without the dangers.
Reason 25 To Not Buy Your Child A Phone
Researchers studied London taxi drivers who obtained “the knowledge” and those who did not. Obtaining “the knowledge” is a long-term training by taxi drivers to memorize and understand the complex layout of the London streets. Those who trained their brains how to traverse London gained an increase in grey matter in their brains. The trainees who relied on GPS and not memory, had no changes in brain matter. The opposite was shown when taxi drivers retired, (thus no longer utilizing spatial memory daily,) and lost areas of grey matter.
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 24 to Say No
Very scary, but phones facilitate the spread of misinformation during school shootings, according to National School Safety and Security Services. According to the organization there are a few dangerous problems with kids having cell phones in an emergency. “Student use of cell phones during an unfolding emergency can distract their attention from safety and emergency response directions being given by school staff. Additionally, cell phone use by students can hamper rumor control and, in doing so, disrupt and delay effective public safety personnel response. Lastly, cell phone use by students can impede public safety response by accelerating parental and community arrival at the scene of an emergency during times when officials may be attempting to evacuate students to another site.”
Reason 23 to Delay Phones For Kids
In his watershed book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt argues that “when American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted….From 122 minutes per day in 2012 to 67 minutes in 2019.” Both parents and researchers know how vital social interaction is to child and adolescent development. Phones suck the attention of kids away from real life experiences, with detrimental effects.
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 22 to say No – For Now
Research states that group texts can cause anxiety, cyber bullying, and exposure to sexting. “Social media use is often associated with depression and anxiety. Different patterns are thought to predict poorer mental health outcomes like multitasking, emotional investment, appearance-based activities, passive media use, problematic social media use, cyberbullying, sexting, and disaster awareness.”
So how do we regulate this wild world of group texts and social media? Former Snapchat Exec, Sarah Gallagher Trombley has your answers on this episode of the Screen Less Play More podcast:
Reason 21 To Not Get Your Tween A Phone
There are many alternatives to smart phones if you want to stay in touch with your child. My amazing friend at Thoughts From A Digital Mom has a list of great alternatives on her substack.
Should I Give My Kid A Cell Phone? Reason 20 To Say No
It is widely reported that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, did not allow his children to have smartphones until the age of 14. Its’ not like Bill Gates invented the cell phone, but he did found the world’s largest software firm, leading him to become the world’s richest man. However, one of humanity’s greatest technical innovators set an age limit on phones for his kids, forbade them at the dinner table, and says “We often set a time after which there is no screen time, and in their case that helps them get to sleep at a reasonable hour.” You can draw your own conclusions from these tech habits.
Reason 19 to Delay The Smartphone For Kids
I know that it’s a bold statement to say that tweens who spend more time on their screens have a higher likelihood of developing disruptive behavior disorders. However, this information comes from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 18 to Not
Studies show that individuals with “smartphone addiction” have altered activity in the prefrontal cortex — the area of self-control and impulse regulation. Findings suggest “that smartphone addiction can detrimentally influence decision-making, behaviorally and neurologically, particularly in uncertain contexts. This study supports the classification of smartphone addiction as a genuine addiction and underscores its significance in psychiatric research. In essence, our research underscores the adverse effects of excessive smartphone use on decision-making processes, reinforcing the necessity to treat smartphone addiction as a pressing public health issue.”
Reason 17 to NOT Give Your Child A Smart Phone For Christmas
The Center for Economic Performance published a paper entitled “Technology, Distraction, and Student Performance.” They explain in this paper that, “highly multipurpose technology, such as mobile phones, can have a negative impact on productivity through distraction. Schools that restrict access to mobile phones subsequently experience an improvement in test scores.”
Interestingly, they found different results depending on the economic situations of students. “Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present. Given 18 heterogeneous results, banning mobile phones could be a low-cost way for schools to reduce educational inequality.“
Reason 16 to Not Buy Your Child a Smart Phone
Research shows that “the rapid rise in smartphone usage, particularly among younger populations, has brought about significant health concerns, especially regarding hand functions and the incidence of hand disorders. Excessive smartphone use is linked to diminished hand and pinch-grip strengths and several musculoskeletal disorders such as CTS and DQT.”
Should I Get My Child A Phone? Reason 15 to Delay
A study done in Iceland found “Icelandic children’s interest in reading has declined since the turn of the century. In 2000, 33% of 10th graders said they only read when needed. Today the percentage is 60% and even more.
Students who spend more time on smartphones during school hours are less interested in reading than those who use smartphones little or not at all. The interest in reading is waning faster and faster as students spend more time on the devices.” I suppose this shouldn’t surprise anyone. The more time you spend staring at a phone, the less time you have for everything else – including reading.
Reason 14 To Delay Giving Your Kid A Phone
A London study found “In a series of tests conducted before and after [the UK’s Online Safety Act went into effect] investigators set up new TikTok accounts using a child’s birthdate and turning on TikTok’s “restricted mode”. According to TikTok’s own website “restricted mode” protects users from seeing “sexually suggestive content”. Despite this, TikTok regularly suggested sexualised and explicit search terms when investigators clicked on the search bar of TikTok’s For You feed… In all tests, investigators encountered pornographic content. In one test, such content was encountered within just two clicks from setting up a new account.”
Should I Get My Child A Phone? Reason 13 to say No.
The Digital Wellness Lab conducted a survey and found that 46 percent of adolescents ages 13 to 17 saying social media makes them feel worse about themselves.
Reason 12 to Delay Buying A Phone For Your Kids
Many adults don’t even know how to spot a scam, so we can’t expect kids to be able to navigate the digital world. Kids need someone guiding them through training as they learn that some emails can’t be trusted, some links should never be clicked, and many people aren’t who they say they are. If you haven’t taken the time to explain extortion, sextortion, junk mail, spam, computer viruses, password protection, and similar topics…. then I highly suggest you refrain from buying your child an internet connected phone.
Reason 11 To Say No To a Smart Phone
Sharing locations on sites like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and X can be very problematic for kids, tweens, and teens. A child may think they are broadcasting their location only to friends, when in reality they may be letting predators or stalkers find them in real life locations.
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 10 to Say No
In her groundbreaking book Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist Anna Lembke states “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” Lembke is an addiction specialist, and understands how similar the smart phone can be to many other addictive vices such as drugs, sex, alcohol, and porn.
Should I Get My Child A Phone? Reason 9 to Delay
Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” sites a study that explains the “brain drain effect.” The study explains The “brain drain” effect found that those who were in closer proximity with their smartphones (i.e., those with their smartphones on their desk during the task) performed worse on a cognitively demanding task.”
So even having your phone in your pocket or in a nearby backpack can alter performance. This is consequential information when we realize that millions of school children and teens are performing worse on tests and learning less in class, simply due to the mere presence of their phone in the classroom.
Reason 8 To Say No To An Internet Connected Device
Health Professionals For Safer Screens found that “each extra hour of screen/social-media use in 9-14-year-olds was linked to higher odds of disordered eating.” The algorithms used in social media can amplify even small eating disorders and turn them into a life-threatening problem.
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 7 To Refuse
Wow, talk about a damning quote. Below is the full quote to Axios from former president of Facebook, Sean Parker. It really explains exactly how purposefully Silicon Valley is engineering their product to addict.
“When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.'””I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and ccious attention as possible?‘” “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.” “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.””The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” – Sean Parker
Reason 6 to Delay Smart Phones For Kids
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? Reason 5 To Say No
Reason 4 to Do a Dumb Phone First
Should I Get My Kid A Phone? No! Here’s Reason 3
Reason 2 To Delay A Smart Phone For Your Adolescent
And the #1 Reason To Not Get A Phone For Your Kid is:
Here’s What To Buy Them Instead!
Check back soon to learn why you shouldn’t give your children a smart phone for Christmas! And in the meantime, check out more resources on my Substack!
If you need resources on raising neurodivergent kids, checkout this new site!
