Parents who agonize over the right age to let their kids own a cell phone can stop worrying: A new study from Stanford University School of Medicine has ruled out that there is a relationship between the age at which kids have their first device and their well-being, measured in academic performance, night rest and symptoms of depression.
The work has been published in the scientific journal Child Development. This is an unusual investigation, since to carry it out a group of more than 250 children was observed over a period of five years. In that time, most of them received their first mobile. Instead of comparing kids with phones to their peers without devices at a given point in time, the scientists continued to assess each kid’s well-being before and following they purchased the devices.
Xiaoran Sun, who participated in the research project, explained that the team observed that having or not having a mobile did not have a substantial weight on their well-being. To concerned parents, he sends the following message: “There doesn’t seem to be a rule of thumb when it comes to waiting until a certain age.” The study director is Thomas Robinsonfrom the same faculty.
The group observed were Hispanic children from modest families residing in Northern California, and were part of a preventive program for childhood obesity. Shortly before starting, they focused their research on the acquisition of mobile phones for children and its possible consequences. Studies on this population are scarce, the authors said.
The average age at which children received their first mobile was 11.6 years. Children who had a brace before had no more problems.
Parental doubts
When deciding to give a child a mobile phone, parents usually weigh various factors: if they need it -to let them know where they are, for example-, if they have internet access and if they have contact with their friends through these channels, how much it might distract them from their studies or cause them to lose sleep or academic work, and the risk of accessing violent or inappropriate content.
Until now, the studies that have been carried out in this field have offered mixed resultsbut the authors of this work defend its solidity because they have studied the evolution of children, not only in one or two moments of time.
This work has followed the evolution of participants between the ages between 7 and 11 years old until they turned 11 or 15. Each of them was evaluated annually. In the evaluations, the children answered standard questionnaires validated to detect symptoms of depression. Parents reported progress at school, night rest and other issues. Sleep hours with devices were also measured.
For avoid distortions In the results, variables such as the place of birth of the parents, the level of education, income and other aspects that might have influenced the well-being of the adolescents were also considered.
About 25% of children received their first mobile at 10.7 years; 75%, at 12.6. Almost all of them had them when they turned 15. 99% of children with mobile phones had ‘smartphones’. These ages are similar to those for acquiring mobile phones in other populations studied in the country.
One of the team’s observations was that, as time passed, the symptoms of depression (when they existed) they were getting lighter, and that this improvement was more pronounced among children who had telephones. Furthermore, although the parents said that the children slept less hours since they had a mobile phone, the devices that the children wore for a week to make the measurement objectively did not register this change.
For this reason, they are inclined to monitor what they do children with the phoneand not so much limiting access to mobile phones at a certain age.