Anne Malinoski
Smartphones for Kids?
What parents need to know When I set out to write this article, I was hoping to provide an antidote to the alarming stories I’d read about kids and smartphones. However, the research really does paint a clear picture. Study after study confirms that smartphones—and the apps children access on them—are highly addictive with the potential to cause significant developmental harm. Unlike the bulky flip phone that once lived in my high school backpack, smart devices are a gateway to the Internet, social media and gaming apps. Tristan Harris, President of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) and subject of the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, famously compares smartphones to slot machines. Every time we check
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our phones, he says, we pull that lever. Occasionally, something exciting pops up, prompting a surge of pleasure in the brain, courtesy of the chemical messenger dopamine. It should come as no surprise that most of us check our phones about 160 times per day. We’re hooked! What’s more, our children have been watching. They want what we have, and they are even more susceptible to screen addiction. Clinical Psychologist and Neuroscientist Divya Kakaiya, PhD is the founder of San Diego’s Healthy Within wellness center and speaks frequently about the impact of technology on the developing brain. She was not surprised to hear that my 8-year-old has been asking for a phone since preschool. “From a neuroscience
perspective, they beg for it because it hits all those dopamine pathways the way cocaine or alcohol hit,” she says. “It’s the biggest dopamine hit they will ever get in their life.”
The Social Media Problem Social media platforms have been carefully engineered to keep users scrolling, clicking and staring compulsively. The highly curated and edited images kids see tend to reflect an impossible standard of beauty. According to CHT, social media use has been shown to increase body dysmorphia in young people. Plastic surgery is on the rise, with the greatest increase among people in their teens and twenties. Not surprisingly, several studies have linked adolescent social
