New research links getting a smartphone before 13 with dramatically worse mental health in young adulthood… and the younger the child, the worse the association is.

My daughters were the last kids in their classes and social groups to get smartphones.

Like, VERY last.

At one point another parent asked us if we weren’t worried they might get teased.

Of course they got some ribbing. (About that AND the fact that they’ve never, ever eaten at McDonald’s.)

And for sure there were plenty of moments when giving them phones earlier would have made life easier for all of us.

But we stood our ground. (Full credit to my wife for leading these smart-but-hard initiatives.)

So I’ll admit that a new study on early smartphone ownership gives me a certain amount of gratification.

It also makes me really sad.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 100,000 young adults aged 18 to 24 across 163 countries, looking at the age when participants received their first smartphone and their psychological well-being in young adulthood. 

The pattern worldwide is scary.

Receiving a smartphone before age 13 is associated with progressively poorer “mind health,” a broad measure covering emotional, social and cognitive functioning.

The average score was 30 among people who got their first smartphone at 13, versus 1 among those who got one at age five. 

The relationship curve gets particularly steep below age 13. 

Among girls who received smartphones at age five or six, 48% reported severe suicidal thoughts as young adults, compared with 28% among those who received one at 13.

Among men, the respective figures were 31% and 20%. Earlier ownership is also associated with more aggression, detachment from reality and lower emotional resilience. 

If THAT doesn’t disturb you, something is wrong.

But the most important part may be what happened between getting the phone and those later outcomes.

Globally, the age at which people first accessed social media explained about 40% of the association between early smartphone ownership and poorer later mind health.

In developed English-speaking countries, it explained as much as 70%.

Cyberbullying and poorer family relationships are also associated with early smartphone ownership, largely downstream of early social media access.

Sleep disruption appears separately, suggesting other smartphone activities such as gaming and video also contribute. 

There’s (as always) an important caveat.

This was an observational study using retrospective reports. It can identify associations, but it can‘t absolutely prove that receiving a smartphone early directly causes poorer mental health later.

But, yeah. It’s enough data on a wide enough scale that you can’t ignore it away.

I think the smartphone may be the most consequential product innovation of my lifetime.

The automobile transformed where we could go, and the personal computer revolutionized what we could do.

The smartphone put computing, communication, entertainment, social status, photography, shopping, gaming and an effectively infinite stream of algorithmically selected crap into everyone’s pocket.

Then we handed that to children, and keep starting ’em younger and younger every year.

One of the ideas I explore in I Need That is that extraordinarily compelling products deserve more scrutiny, not less.

Product makers dream of creating something customers don’t want to put down.

Smartphones achieved that at a scale few products in history ever have.

And that raises a hard but undeniably question:

What happens when a product gets more compelling than the user is developmentally equipped to manage?

The researcher behind this study makes another point I think parents should hear.

Keeping one child off smartphones while every friend has one can create its own social isolation. Sure.

The more effective solution must therefore be collective: families, schools and communities setting expectations together rather than leaving each child to be the lone holdout. 

That certainly matches what we experienced.

Waiting was super inconvenient and often uncomfortable for the kids.

It occasionally made our daughters feel different.

I’m still glad we did it.

But I’m increasingly concerned that we’ve made screen-addicted parents individually responsible for resisting the most persuasive product ecosystem ever built.

That makes for a fight with really lousy odds.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.