When is the best time to give your child their first phone? How to avoid giving them a "poison pill"
WESTBORO - When is the best time to give your child their first smartphone? Several parents in Westboro, Massachusetts are working together to find the right time and to minimize the harm to kids.
When Dr. Neal Tyrrell and his wife gave their daughter a smartphone in seventh grade, they never imagined what would come with it.
"We thought we were giving her something that was fun and exciting and we didn't realize what the data would then show, which is we were giving her a poison pill," Tyrell, a father of three, told WBZ-TV.
As a pediatrician, it's something he now sees in other children daily.
"I cannot go to work and not have a whole group of young people in the hospital for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidality," he said.
Wait for first phone
His observations are backed up by a growing body of evidence. The U.S. Surgeon General calls it an "urgent public health issue." It's one reason why Kelley Petralia is organizing a grass-roots, parent-to-parent movement in her hometown of Westboro.
"I reached out to some parents and said, 'Hey, can we talk about this?'" she told WBZ.
The mission is to delay giving kids their first smartphone and build a network of families with phone-free tweens.
"The influence that I have as a parent is much more minimized since they've had full access to social media," she notes.
Mom of three Marcia Hoffman, who's part of the group, adds, "I don't want my child to feel like the only one without a device. I want his friends to be in the same place as him so they can still play."
Hoffman points out that coaches and other adults also have responsibility for the issue. She says many coaches and other adults use social media apps to connect with kids in various organizations.
"Needing Facebook, needing Snapchat, needing Instagram in order to know schedules and activities and be able to communicate with team members," she says.
For information on Petralia's work in Westboro, click here.
4 new norms
Experts agree that everyone needs to play a part in protecting tweens' best interests. Author Jonathan Haidt offers four "new norms" involving parents, kids, and schools.
His advice:
- No smartphones before high school. Instead, give them basic phones with limited apps and no internet browser.
- No social media before 16.
- Phone-free schools.
- More independence for kids in the real world instead of unsupervised time in the digital one.
Tyrrell has adopted the advice.
"If I was to develop a medicine that you could take every day, and I would cut the chances of you having depression, anxiety, suicidality in half, I would get a Nobel Prize. And you know what? We have that, and it's delaying and not connecting kids to smartphones, to the internet in their pocket, and social media," he told WBZ.
For information and resources on delaying smartphones until eighth grade, click here. For more information on Haidt's work, click here.