Excessive smart phone use has already started to affect some of the youngest users. According to a Pew Research Center study, just over half of U.S. teens surveyed said they are online nearly constantly. For better or worse, this trend has already begun to trickle down to younger children.
According to a Common Sense Media study, more than half of children under the age of four now have their own tablet and by age eight, one in four own a smartphone. As a result, parents and researchers have begun exploring the positive and negative effects of smartphones on child development.
The Positive Effect of Smartphones on Child Development
While it may be intuitive to focus immediately on the consequences of smartphone technology on youth, the learning benefits of smartphone technology cannot be ignored. Equipped with miniature computers, students from elementary school to college can develop digital literacies and research skills earlier than previous generations.
To find out more about these scholastic opportunities, USA Today surveyed teachers across the United States. Many believe smartphones in classroom environments can yield three profound benefits in the development of children:
- Self-sufficiency: Through early guidance and support, parents and teachers can help children learn how to self-regulate the time they spend on their phones. This lesson will help them create and practice healthy self-awareness and self-reflection practices that will better prepare them for adolescence and, eventually, young adulthood.
- Digital literacy: As children use smartphones, they effectively prepare themselves to engage with future technologies. Because some schools offer high-speed internet access to students, children can begin to develop a greater knowledge of how to navigate resources online through their smartphones. One teacher interviewed by USA Today found that this level of access has a democratizing effect, which can help bridge the digital divide between families of different income levels.
- Access to emergency services: In the unfortunate event of an emergency, students with smartphone access can find help more easily. As far as the effects of smartphones on child development, this constant ability to reach emergency services can give both children and parents a sense of security that enables growth.
While these perspectives should be measured, considerably more research needs to be conducted to build a solid case for how smartphone use beneficially impacts children as they grow.
The Negative Effect of Smartphones on Child Development
The drawbacks of smartphone use on children has received attention in recent years. In academia, journalism, and other popular forms of media, there has been a growing concern for the ways that children have increased access to smartphone technology.
Specifically, the behavioral consequences of smartphone dependency in children has received the attention of scholars across the world. An article titled “Association between mobile technology use and child adjustment in early elementary school age” used data compiled from a group of 1,642 first-grade children in Japan to determine whether there’s a link between the use of smartphone technology and behavioral development. The researchers found that “routine and frequent use of mobile devices appear to be associated with behavioral problems in childhood.”
Additionally, some scholars have even turned toward the adverse bodily effects that smartphones can have on children. A recent article published by Nationwide Children’s Hospital explored the physical health consequences of smartphone use for children. It stated that, as more children begin using smartphones at earlier ages, “it is of importance that neurological diseases, physiological addiction, cognition, sleep and behavioral problems are considered.” Because of this, parents and clinicians should be aware of the repercussions of early-age smartphone usage.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has begun identifying the risks associated with children using smartphone technology. The Washington Post recently reported on the WHO designation of how much time children — particularly babies — should spend on smartphones. The organization stated that children between two- and four-years-old “should spend no more than an hour a day in front of a screen.” Additionally, the writers found that a research gap exists in the field. They stated that “Long-term consequences can be hard to measure, and ethical concerns prevent experiments” that could explore the topic more thoroughly. As a result, we will likely be unable to grasp many of the negative effects of smartphones that will put children at further risk.
A root cause of the negative effects of smartphones on child development can come from an unexpected place. An article in the Atlantic stated that, before parents should be concerned about their children’s smartphone usage, they should first consider their own. As the ultimate examples of their children, parents need to be mindful of their smartphone consumption since that kind of behavior will set the stage for how children will interact with technology. Parents must consider what image they express to their children and how they communicate responsible smartphone consumption.
Strategies to Ensure Smartphone Responsibility
As parents tap into their own behaviors to reflect a positive relationship with their phone or tablet, they’ll have a much easier time teaching their children how to approach the world of smartphones healthily.
One important note is to remain mindful of different tablet technologies and applications on them. For example, devices like a LeapFrog or Amazon Fire Kids Edition have been designed to engage with children specifically. In these capacities, children can develop digital literacies responsibly, which may not be the case with technologies that weren’t designed with children’s development in mind, such as smartphones or other tablets. Further, parents should remain mindful that some applications in different app stores are more appropriate for children than others. While this may seem overly simplistic at first, it’s still important to note as parents begin considering the most beneficial avenues for their children to use smartphones.
The American Psychological Association weighed in on productive strategies for parents to use as they provide a positive example to their children. Parents should “keep mealtimes, drivetimes and bedtimes tech-free, allowing families to chat about their day or sit quietly and daydream, which can be creative, calming and synthesizing for children.” By establishing specific time slots for both parents and children to tune out their smartphones, both parties will have a greater opportunity to connect more meaningfully.
Finally, PBS offered four guidelines on how parents can best introduce their children to smartphones. They advised that parents should:
- Introduce smartphone technology after preschool: In the context of the WHO designation, it makes sense that parents would be best suited to introduce smartphone technology to their children after they’ve begun preschool. At any earlier stage, children could run the risk of developing adverse tendencies and behaviors.
- Activate parental guidance screening measures: Many electronic devices come packaged with parental guidance options, and PBS recommended parents take advantage of these. Because tablet and smartphone technology could expose children to inappropriate content, parents must be proactive in protecting their children in digital spaces.
- Apply screen time boundaries: As children use smartphone technology, screen time limits can help reduce their likelihood of developing an unhealthy dependency. Parents can get creative about when children can and cannot use their smartphones, and as long as they remain consistent in their boundaries, children will be likelier to build a healthy relationship with technology.
- Screen the content their children consume: Before children use a new smart technology, parents should be mindful about the content their children will consume.
The effect of smartphones on child development will continue to be a hotly debated and explored topic in the coming years. As technology continues to progress at a rapid rate, psychologists and clinicians need to stay ahead of the curve. To help keep this conversation progressing, more research needs to be done.
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What Does Too Much Screen Time Do to Children’s Brains?
Consider this: Nearly half of all children 8 and under have their own tablet device and spend an average of about 2.25 hours a day on digital screens, according to Common Sense Media.
What is all this screen time doing to kids’ brains?
Previous studies have shown a correlation between the amount of screen time among young children and the presence of developmental delays particularly in communication and problem-solving skills.
A landmark National Institutes of Health (NIH) study that began in 2018, for example, found that children who spent more than two hours a day on screen-time activities scored lower on language and thinking tests, and some children with more than seven hours a day of screen time experienced thinning of the brain’s cortex, the area of the brain related to critical thinking and reasoning.
“There is emerging evidence that there may be some structural brain changes associated with greater exposure to screen time as a young child,” says Dr. Jennifer F. Cross, attending pediatrician and a developmental and behavioral pediatrics expert at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital of Children’s Hospital of New York. “If young children spend most of their time engaging with an iPad, smartphone, or the television, all of which are highly entertaining, it can be hard to get them engaged in non-electronic activities, such as playing with toys to foster imagination and creativity, exploring outdoors, and playing with other children to develop appropriate social skills.”
Health Matters spoke with Dr. Cross, also an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, about the impact of screen time on kids’ developing brains and what parents and caregivers can do.
Why is it important for parents to limit screen time for kids?
For young children, especially those under the age of 3, development is happening rapidly. Young children learn by exploring their environment, watching the adults in their lives and then imitating them. Excessive screen time may inhibit a child’s ability to observe and experience the typical everyday activities they need to engage with to learn about the world, leading to a kind of “tunnel vision,” which can be detrimental to overall development.
When I see children walking with a caregiver or being pushed in a stroller, they are often playing on a smartphone or a tablet and not paying attention to anything else around them. They will not learn about the world around them if all they’re doing is looking at a smartphone. This will not just affect their ability to learn new things, but also how they interact with others and how language develops.
Does screen time impact a child’s ability to learn?
To a young child, everything is new. Children need to explore their environment using all their senses to learn about the world, so it is very important that they can interact with three-dimensional spaces and activities. This provides so much more information than watching a two-dimensional picture on a screen.
Studies have shown that children under 2 learn less from a video than when learning from another person. They will be captivated by what’s on the screen, but they’re not learning from it. A child will not learn to stack blocks by watching it on a screen. They will learn by touching the blocks, feeling the texture and weight of different materials, and using trial and error to get one to balance on another. This is early problem solving.
So in addition to limiting screen time, it is important to encourage a child to get involved in experiential learning through playing with toys, because that fosters early problem solving and creativity.
There is also some evidence that children who watch a lot of television during the early elementary school years perform less well on reading tests and may show deficits in attention.
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Associations Between Screen-Based Media Use and Brain White Matter Integrity in Preschool-Aged Children
JAMA Network
Key Points
Question Is screen-based media use associated with differences in the structural integrity of brain white matter tracts that support language and literacy skills in preschool-aged children?
Findings In this cross-sectional study of 47 healthy prekindergarten children, screen use greater than that recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines was associated with (1) lower measures of microstructural organization and myelination of brain white matter tracts that support language and emergent literacy skills and (2) corresponding cognitive assessments.
Meaning These findings suggest a need for further study into the association between screen-based media use and the developing brain, particularly during early childhood.
“Although establishing causation is beyond the scope of this study, a critical question is whether neurobiological differences are directly associated with properties of screen-based media itself or indirectly associated with differences in human interactive (eg, shared reading) time, which tends to decrease with greater use. Aspects of both associations seem likely, as suggested by a recent MRI study of children aged 8 to 12 years that found lower functional connectivity within the emerging reading network was correlated with higher screen time and higher functional connectivity was correlated with more reading time.18 Given the prevalence of “learning” applications marketed for young children and the emphasis on technology in early childhood educational curricula,3 multiyear studies of emergent literacy outcomes are warranted to determine long-term implications.”
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