Amid rising worries, parents delay the first smartphone

Topping many a Christmas list this year will be – no surprise – a smartphone. But a growing number of parents are resisting the pressure, offering their kids instead a basic phone with no internet, a watch with text-and-talk capabilities only, or a firm no.

“I totally get that they want it,” said Heather Franklin of Warwick, a mother of two who speaks as a ScreenStrong Ambassador, educating families on how to break free from screen struggles. But handing a teen or tween “the most tempting thing in the entire world” before their brain’s capacity for self-control has fully developed is “setting them up to fail.”

If you do plan to give your kid a communication device, don’t put it under the Christmas tree, recommends Franklin. “If you’re going to give it, give it in January. Don’t give it as a gift, because then they think, ‘Well this is mine.’ But it’s not,” she said. It’s a tool that can be taken away if it’s not working for the family.

Franklin, who works with children and sells children’s books, hopes to wait until her own kids – now 6 and 9 – head off to college before letting them have the unfettered internet access that comes with a smartphone. “I’m sure they’re going to ask all through middle school and that’s fine, they can ask all they want. Their brain isn’t ready for it. They won’t be getting a phone until, you know, they can sign a contract,” she said. “You can’t rush maturity. We know from the science that their frontal cortex isn’t developed until 25 years old. We want to give their brain a chance to develop. I’m giving my kids a chance to do that.”

There is a growing awareness, thanks in large part to the publication of The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt in 2024, of the harms that social media and screen time overload can have on young brains. But with the disappearance of old-fashioned ways of getting in touch (remember pay phones?), along with the pronounced shift of young social life to the digital realm, many parents find themselves navigating an uncharted middle ground through this brave new world as their kids get more independent.

Earning the privilege

“We only got him a phone when he turned 12 because he started doing clubs and after school activities. When he started on the math team, he started getting home at different times depending on where the school was,” said Laura Sullivan of Chester, whose son Hunter is now 13. So Hunter got a Bark phone for his twelfth birthday, which looks like a typical smartphone but can be controlled by a parent to offer only talk and text.

“With all the technology that’s out there, he didn’t need another device to access the internet, right?” she said. “It’s big with kids with ADHD that they get drawn into obsessions. They get very addicted to things. Electronics is one of them. We take away one electronic, he moves to another electronic. He will have the TV going while listening to his Kindle, while playing on his Switch, because they need a constant stimulus. Having a phone with internet, he would be on it all the time.”

Before giving Hunter the phone, Sullivan wrote up a two-page contract which went on the fridge, listing his responsibilities – like chores and grade expectations – and making clear that his parents could take away or go through his phone at any time. “He said it was all reasonable. He signed it, and we pretty much haven’t had an issue,” she said.

The Bark phone itself, she laughed, has more of a hair-trigger sensibility than anyone in the house. It sent her a “bullying” warning when Hunter’s stepdad texted him, “Good morning, nerd.” When Hunter mentions a headache, Sullivan gets a “medically concerning” alert.

“I guess we know it works,” she said.

Sullivan likes the Bark phone because Hunter can’t circumvent her parental controls – and he’s good at such things. “He is the kid who managed to get around the school’s safety settings,” she said, of the time he accessed YouTube from school, then showed the IT team how he’d done it.

She plans to give Hunter access to a weather app and a couple basic games for Christmas (not saying which in case he reads this). “We’re only doing it now because he has been responsible with his phone,” she said – keeping it charged, not losing it, not sending or receiving anything inappropriate, not asking to add contacts that his parents don’t know. “And his grades are to the point where the teachers are going, I don’t know what else to give him.”

The plan is to gradually increase Hunter’s access, “so he can prove that, you know, he’s still being responsible with it. We figure each year we’ll kind of reevaluate. We’re not going to say, okay, you’re 14, now let’s unlock the whole thing, give you full access. That’s not going to come until high school, like, deep into high school.”

Parameters and controls

Nicole Triassi had a similar strategy in mind – gradual and controlled – when she gave her fourth grade son Landen a smart watch. An educator in the Cornwall, N.Y., School District, Triassi has seen how social media can wreak havoc during the vulnerable years of adolescence, and she’s also seen good kids so engrossed in a mindless game like Candy Crush that they can’t answer a waitress who comes to take their order at a restaurant.

At the same time, with middle school beginning in fifth grade in their district, her son – who’s heavily involved in sports – was going to be getting more independent and would need some way to keep in touch with family and, increasingly, friends.

Triassi went with an Apple Watch, looking at it as a long-term investment, a tool her son can use even after he gets a smartphone. She talked to him about taking care of the $250 watch, keeping it either on his wrist or secured in a backpack, and about “digital citizenship,” like time limits and how texts might be read differently than they were intended.

She began by giving him the ability to talk and text family only. “I knew eventually he would want to add friends, but I wanted to do it in a controlled manner. First, I wanted to make sure he was responsible for the watch, that it was working.” Then she added one friend. “I didn’t want to introduce too many different variables at one time, to make sure he understood how to communicate, understood the digital footprint of what’s left in a text.”

Now in seventh grade, Landen has no limit on his number of contacts and he can add them himself. He uses his watch to text and sometimes call friends, check the weather, monitor his sleep or his heart rate when working out, ask Siri an occasional question (What was the score of the Giant’s game last night?), and he’s in a handful of group chats with friends and sports teams.

Group chats can be a blessing or curse depending whom you ask. “Sometimes there’s fun or important information that’s shared within that group, and if you don’t have access to that you’re a little bit left out,” said Triassi. “I felt like in some ways it would almost be like not letting my child go out to play with his friends. That being said, I have to monitor group chat to make sure it’s appropriate.”

Her son would prefer to have a smartphone, and at this point he’s in the minority of his peers for not having one, said Triassi. But he understands his parents are set on this question and it’s futile to ask. “He is happy that he has a watch,” she said. “He’s happy that he has some type of communication.”

Triassi checks his activity about once a week at this point, scanning texts and clicking on a few, seeing if there’s anybody new. Only once did she have to talk to her son, not about anything he’d done, but about something he hadn’t done: another member of a group chat had written something Triassi felt her son should have come to her to discuss.

This roadmap is clearly working for the family. Following in his footsteps, Landen’s younger sister also got an Apple Watch in fourth grade.

Down the road, Triassi knows it’s inevitable her kids will get smartphones. “I believe strongly in you can’t just deny your child access to something in order to control them or to keep them from going down the wrong path,” she said. “Eventually they’re going to get access to the cell phone. Eventually they’re going to be able to stay out late at night. Eventually they’re going to go live outside of your roof, right? So you can try and put parameters and controls in place as long as you can.”

She plans to make the move from watch to smartphone sometime during eighth grade. “I don’t like to introduce things with too many variables. High school is going to be a big transition. I want to open up the world of the cell phone when I still have a little more supervision over him. If something negative were to happen through opening up some other access, I would be more likely to see it, to know about it, to help him navigate it, during a time in middle school where he’s pretty established, as opposed to potentially everything happening at once or getting lost in everything else that’s going on,” she said.

Triassi realizes that the window during which she can guide her kids on technology is limited. Eventually, if they want to, they’ll be able to outsmart her in a hundred ways: apps that look like a calculator, chats that self-delete, lingo that seems to mean something else. She attends parents’ educational nights on kids and social media when they’re offered, but she’s well aware that at some point her kids will be interacting with tech on their own terms.

When that time comes, she hopes that “all the other work that I’ve done will help to still have my kids make appropriate decisions.”

Changing social dynamics

So much of young life now happens online that many teens and tweens fear they will pay a social toll for not having a smartphone, a concern felt deeply by parents who want nothing more than to help smooth their child’s way.

“Most parents don’t want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their children to social isolation,” as Haidt puts it in The Anxious Generation.

“I know with last year, my son not having internet access on his phone, the teachers kept asking me, ‘Does he have friends? He’s not hanging out with the other kids,’” recalled Sullivan, of Hunter’s sixth grade year.

He does have friends, she explained, but “he doesn’t want to hang out with them because they’re on their phones. My son preferred to sit and talk with the teachers.”

Now that phones are banned during the school day in New York, Hunter once again hangs out with a couple of friends during lunch.

Learning how to be a little different may be the best thing for a kid long-term, says ScreenStrong founder Melanie Hempe, a nurse whose younger three children went through adolescence with flip phones after their older brother dropped out of college because of video game addiction.

“It’s a little bit of a stretch in middle school, but that stretch – doing that hard thing – is really so good for kids,” Hempe said in a Nov. 19 podcast. “It does start to build these leadership skills. Because when you stand out from the crowd, you’re a leader.”

That’s not an easy message for young people to swallow, since acceptance from peers is, as Haidt puts it, “the oxygen of adolescence.”

The pendulum swings back

Adolescents are often loathe to volunteer the fact that they don’t have a smartphone – and some will go to lengths to pretend they do, like stowing a flip phone out of sight and carrying an empty iPhone case in their back pocket. But studies show growing numbers of Americans are opting for a more minimalist form of communication. This “Slow Tech” movement is giving rise to a second wind for the retro flip phone, along with modern remakings of the landline like the Tin Can.

Part of the reason Franklin decided to become a ScreenStrong Ambassador was to build the critical mass necessary to shift norms. “Hopefully when my kids are in middle school, maybe a fourth or a third of their class won’t have smartphones and they can have a tribe of kids in the same boat,” she said.

That momentum seems to mounting. “I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out how many of my kids’ friends only had access to... either a smart watch or a tablet that was at home,” said Triassi. She had initially assumed the kids her son was chatting with all had smartphones, but gradually came to realize that some had set-ups much like her son’s. “There were more kids than I realized.”

When Triassi mentions to other parents that her seventh grader doesn’t have a smartphone, she’s gotten used to hearing some version of the same reply: “Oh good for you,” they tell her. “I wish I had waited. Almost every time.”