Gray, Peter. 2025-12-16.

URL: https://petergray.substack.com/p/100-helping-kids-and-ourselves-use

Vinklinger

• : Foreldre bør vise barna tillit og oppmuntre til selvstendighet og uavhengighet, også når det kommer til smarttelefon
• Smarttelefon: Smarttelefoner har en rekke positive effekter for barn, og de negative kan håndteres
• Søvn: Bruk av smarttelefon på soverommet har en veldokumentert negativ effekt på barns søvn

In Letter #89, a few weeks ago, I described the characteristics of trustful, autonomy-supportive parenting (abbreviated TAS parenting), and I cited research showing that young people who experienced such parenting are, on average, psychologically healthier, socially more well-connected, and more self-motivated and self-regulated than otherwise comparable others. I described there eleven parenting practices that characterize this approach. For today’s discussion, the four most relevant of those practices are: (1) striving to see from the child’s point of view; (2) resisting fear-based and defensive modes of parenting; (3) enabling free play and independent exploration; and especially (4) teaching safety rules instead of banning activities, to the degree reasonably possible.

To grow up healthy, children must explore the digital world as well as the physical one. Questions that arise, therefore, to appropriately cautious parents are these: • How much freedom verses constraint should we allow our children in the digital world? • At what ages should specific digital freedoms become available? • How can we help children navigate the digital world safely?

Conscientious parents have always recognized the value of teaching safety and reducing the hazards associated with children’s free-range activities. Parents in band hunter-gatherer cultures are, as a group, the most trustful, autonomy-supportive parents ever found by anthropologists (here), but they are not negligent. They allow children to roam and explore freely from about the age of four on, but they point out, for example, which mushrooms are poisonous and which snakes are dangerous, and they keep the poisoned darts high up in a tree out of reach of little kids. Parents in the U.S. in the 1950s, when I was a kid, were far more permissive of children’s outdoor freedoms than parents today. But they taught us to look both ways before crossing the street, not to chase the loose ball into the street without looking, not to get into the car of a stranger offering us candy or some such enticement, and how to swim before we could take the rowboat out ourselves. Can we, today, take a comparable approach to kids’ autonomy in the digital world?

The benefits of smartphone ownership are rather obvious. Here is a list of those that come most immediately to my mind, most of which were mentioned by readers in comments to Letter # 99:

1. Outdoor safety. The smartphone is an amazing safety device. In an emergency, you can call 911, or home. If you are lost, it can show you where you are and how to get home. If you are out after dark, it’s a flashlight. Kids playing and roaming freely outdoors are much safer with a smartphone than without.

2. Navigation. The outdoor world is far more navigable with a smartphone than without, because the phone’s GPS can provide maps and directions to any destination.

3. Documentation. The smartphone’s ready camera and easy note-taking capacities allows you to document your interesting experiences, to recall later and share with friends and family.

4. Education. The smartphone is, without question, the most powerful educational tool ever invented. With its internet connection, you have immediate access to all the world’s knowledge.

5. Creative self-expression. The smartphone is a tool not just for building yourself, but also for expressing yourself.

6. Amusement. Kids used to carry transistor radios to listen to whatever music was on the air. Now, with the smartphone, they (and we) can listen to whatever music, or stories, or podcasts, or anything else we choose no matter where we are.

7. Connecting with peers. In surveys, kid consistently report that the primary value of a smartphone is to keep in touch with friends. Almost nothing is more important to children’s social and psychological development than friendships and participation in what sociologists call “the culture of childhood” (see Letter #68).

8. Developing digital skills. Children throughout the world and throughout human history have always been drawn to the most prominent tools of their culture. As the philosopher Karl Groos pointed more than a century ago in his book The Play of Man, children come into the world biologically predisposed to attend to and play with the tools and skills most important in the world in which they are growing (see Letter #4).

9. Being trusted. Growing up with a sense of being trusted is a big part of the advantage of having a TAS parent. Trust implies trustworthiness and that can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The TAS parent who gives a child a smartphone is not negligent but is deliberately helping the child acquire skills essential to our time.

The dangers specific to smartphones, contrasted to larger computers, derive from what is also the main advantage of smartphones. For better and worse, the smartphone is always with you, always available. It is an extension of yourself in a way that is not true for a computer on your desk. To keep it from controlling your life, you must learn to control it. Here are some of the dangers:

1. Sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation appears to be the most consistently documented negative effect of smartphone ownership for children. I have found two recently published research studies assessing behaviors and moods of children below 13 years of age who own a smartphone compared to those who don’t. The studies showed mixed, positive and negative findings regarding other indices of wellbeing, but both showed negative correlations between smartphone ownership and sleep. One study revealed that kids who slept with their phones next to them slept on average 8.6 hours per night, contrasted with 8.9 hours for those who kept their phone out of reach in the bedroom and 9.3 hours for those who kept it in another room. The other study didn’t ask where the kids kept their phones at night, but found that those who owned a smartphone slept on average 9.0 hours per night compared to 9.4 hours for those who didn’t own one. Taking the two studies together, it appears that sleep deprivation does not derive from smartphone ownership per se but from where you park the phone at night. The sleep deprivation problem seems to be an easy one to solve!

2. Disruption or prevention of physical world communication. Although research to date does not support the contention that kids with smartphones engage in less face-to-face, physical world conversation, on average, than do those without smartphones, smartphones clearly can have that effect for some children as well as some adults.

3. Loss of practice with real-world communication. For some, digital communication can be a crutch that reduces their chance of acquiring confidence and skills at communication in the physical world.

4. Distraction from appreciation of the physical environment. If your eyes are fixed on your phone, you are not seeing the trees, or birds, or people, or architecture of the three-dimensional world. You are missing a lot of real-world beauty.

5. A time sink. This is especially a problem with social media, so I may discuss it more in my letter on that. Clearly, the algorithms social media use to keep people engaged are highly effective, for adults as well as children. There’s nothing mystical about the algorithms; they just keep feeding you stuff that you seem to like.

6. A potential money sink. It’s one thing to play video games; it’s another to throw away money when the game starts enticing you to purchase something to help you raise your rank. Kids, like adults, may also be subjects of online scams. I personally would give a kid a smartphone (after much discussion) but not access to my credit card. If they want to spend money through their phone it has to be their own money, which they earned themselves. Losing their own hard-earned money is a life lesson for them; losing my money is not.

7. Online bullying. “Bullying” is a term used to mean lots of different things these days. Much of what gets called bullying is normal kid behavior. Kids tease one another; they sometimes display what they call “drama;” and they sometimes truly get mad at one another. That’s normal kid behavior and learning to deal with it, whether online or in the physical world, is part of growing up. Adults aren’t always nice to one another either. In surveys, kids generally point out that real-world bullying at school is much worse than online bullying, because they can, with a twitch of the thumb, turn off the latter but not the former. But there is a kind of ganging up bullying, many tearing down one, which can be extremely hurtful, online or off. Perhaps the most important lesson for your kid to learn regarding such bullying is how to avoid being one of the bullies, online or off. Statistically, when bullying is many against one, your kid is much more likely to be one of the bullies than the one who is bulled.

8. Making public what you don’t want to make public. When you think you are sharing a photo of yourself or making a wisecrack just to a friend, that photo or wisecrack may, through one channel or another, get out to the whole world in a manner that could bite you sometime down the road.

9. Being tracked and continuously monitored by parents. Arguably the biggest problem of smartphones for kids is it’s an umbilical cord that never gets broken. The ultimate purpose of childhood is to become increasingly independent of parents, increasingly in charge of one’s own life. The smartphone can be a tool for independence, but it can also be a tool preventing independence.