Study: Kids With Smartphones Are Less Depressed, Anxious, Bullied Than Peers Without Them
It’s funny how much media coverage is devoted to anything suggesting that phones might be ruining kids—and how little coverage goes to studies suggesting the opposite. So it goes with a new report from researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) that links smartphone ownership among 11- to 13-year-olds with a number of positive indicators of well-being.
“We went into this study expecting to find what many researchers, teachers and other observers assume: smartphone ownership is harmful to children,” said Justin D. Martin, the study’s lead researcher. Instead, “most of the time we found the opposite—that owning a smartphone was associated with positive outcomes.”
Martin’s research is part of a major undertaking meant to “track digital media use and wellness across the lifespan,” notes USF in a press release.
Less Anxiety, Higher Self-Esteem
For the first part of this study, researchers surveyed 1,510 Florida kids ages 11 to 13. On almost every metric measuring well-being, smartphone-owning kids showed better results.
For instance, kids with smartphones were more likely to spend in-person time with friends. “Contrary to the position that smartphone use is associated with fewer in-person meetups with friends, on average, smartphone owners spend nearly three days a week in-person with a friend(s), while kids with no smartphone spend closer to two days a week in-person with friends,” write the researchers. “The same trend was seen for tablet ownership, daily video gaming, and daily social media use.”
Kids with smartphones were less likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depression and more likely to report feeling good about themselves. Eighty percent of kids who own smartphones and 82 percent of those who own tablets said they felt good about themselves, compared to 69 percent for those without smartphones and 71 percent for those without tablets. Asked if they agreed with the statement that “life often feels meaningless,” 18 percent of kids with smartphones said yes, compared to 26 percent of those without their own smartphone. And length of smartphone ownership was not correlated with depression or anxiety symptoms, either.
Kids with smartphones were also significantly less likely to be “cyberbullied” than their peers without smartphones. For instance, 32 percent of those without phones said someone had spread rumors or lies about them online, compared to 18 percent of those with phones. And 28 percent of those without phones said they had been called mean or hurtful names online, compared to 16 percent of those with smartphones.
Not All Screen Time Created Equal
This doesn’t mean that smartphone use was universally positive. Kids who slept with their phones in their rooms got less sleep on average, suggesting that parents might want to think about confiscating phones before bedtime. (Though even the group that slept with phones in their rooms reported an average of 8.6 hours of sleep per night.)
Heavy video gamers were more likely than light gamers to report trouble stopping tech use once started, and heavy users of social media were more likely than lighter users to report sleep issues.
And respondents who reported posting publicly and often on social media were more likely to report sleep issues and symptoms of depression and anxiety, possibly related to the exposure to mean comments and other forms of cyberbullying that posting could bring. Unsurprisingly, kids who experienced online bullying were more likely to report negative effects from technology.
Of course, these statistics—like the stats wielded to argue that screen time is bad for kids—don’t actually tell us what comes first, the issues in question or the heavy use of technology. For instance, kids suffering from anxiety, insomnia, depression, and social isolation could find these issues triggered by social media, but it seems at least as likely that frequent posting to social media or heavy consumption of such posts may be a symptom of anxiety, insomnia, social isolation, or depression that they already felt.
It’s Complicated
While we’re on caveats, there’s a big one on this study overall. The kinds of families that get smartphones for their 11- to 13-year-olds may be fundamentally different from those who don’t. And the kinds of kids in this age group whose parents deem them ready for
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