Pulled between the desire to stay in touch and the fear of the devices' harms, parents are turning to other high-tech solutions, such as the Apple Watch, or going in the other direction, with a rotary phone.
Ask any parent how difficult it is to keep smartphones out of their kids’ hands and they will share many stories of struggle. John Turpin will point to the small safe he recently bought.Mr. Turpin, a project manager who lives in Oshawa, Ont., picked up the safe a month ago. Before that, he would often take his teenagers’ phones away for one reason or another, but usually returned the devices early, worn down by their pleading.
Meanwhile, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in his new book, The Anxious Generation, that the accumulation of studies showing smartphones’ negative impacts on teenagers, including rising rates of anxiety and depression, is so strong that kids should be prohibited from using social media until they are 16 and should not have smartphones until high school.
“Epidemiological studies have been fairly consistent in showing associations between these platforms and mental health struggles of all sorts, including anxiety and depression,” he says. When Mehran Redjvani recently gave his 11-year-old son a flip phone and not the smartphone he had been begging for, the boy tossed it aside and told his father he had wasted his money.
“At some point, you know, your kids are going to get left out socially, she explains. “The moms stopped texting each other about getting together and the kids start to take ownership of it when they have their own phones. And so I held out for as long as I could, both with the phone and with Snapchat, and have unfortunately now had to keep to both,” she says.
“We wanted to be able to make sure that if needed, she could contact us or we could contact her or if there’s an emergency,” he says.
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