Could Phones Actually Help Teens Mental Health?

The Life in Media study from the University of South Florida talked to more than 15-hundred kids ages 11 to 13 about smartphone ownership and usage, social media use, gaming, cyber-bullying, relationships, their mental health offline and more.

And it turns out, kids who have their own phone scored better than kids who don’t on just about every measure of well-being assessed. It’s a twist even study authors didn’t see coming, and it’s reassuring since 78% of these tweens and young teens already have their own phone. “We expected to go into this study and find that exclusively negative things were associated with smartphone ownership, but that’s just simply not what we found,” explains lead researcher Justin D. Martin.

According to the study:

• Kids are getting their phones young - at age nine and a half, on average.
• They also spend a lot of time on screens - four and a half hours on a school day and six and a half on weekends and holidays.
• It’s not just rich kids getting phones, in fact, less wealthy kids are more likely to have one than their more affluent peers.
• But kids who have their own phone are less likely to report depression and anxiety symptoms.
• They also have higher self-esteem and are less likely to report being cyber-bullied.
• Kids with phones are more likely to spend more time with friends in-person and be physically active.
• Of course, there are some downsides, too. A quarter of kids report sleeping with their phone in bed and they get less sleep - 8.6-hours versus 9.3 for kids who don’t sleep with devices in bed.
• The study concludes that letting kids have their own phone as young as 11 may actually be good for their mental health, as the phone isn’t the problem, it’s what kids are doing with them that can be bad for mental health.
• “We don’t find evidence that smartphone ownership is harmful to children,” Martin says, “I guess I would say that the kids are probably going to be just fine.”