Children are increasingly using smartphones at an earlier age, but this may not be healthy including for their mental health, according to research published in late July.
The definition of mental health has evolved and changed over the years. In today’s society, mental health encompasses emotional, psychological and social well-being and how to handle relationships.
A study published in the “Journal of Human Development and Capabilities” examined the impact of childhood smartphone ownership on mental health and well-being in young adults.
Findings associated smartphone usage before age 13 to poorer mental health outcomes later in young adulthood, including suicidal thoughts, detachment from reality, poorer emotional regulation and a diminished self-worth, particularly among girls.
Previous research found links between smartphone use and anxiety and depression. This newer body of research looked at lesser-studied symptoms like emotional regulation and self-worth.
The study’s results were self-reported.
Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson, a clinical and community psychologist, noted how children who are “just trying to develop a sense of self” are “learning from systems that don’t interact with them the way humans do.”
“Humans have nuance. Humans have movement. Humans can explain things, or you could go back to that same human, even a few days later and say, I didn’t like the way that felt.
It’s a very circular kind of movement with humans, whereas on phones, it’s 2D,” she said to The Final Call. “So, you’re interfacing with, potentially, an anonymous thing that you can’t always go back to days later. You don’t understand anything beyond the text.
You don’t know the tone, you don’t know anything. So that’s really tough for anybody to understand, but certainly for young people as they’re trying to learn what the world even is and how folks interact with each other. That’s why anyone 13 and under may have a difficult time just processing what that information is for them.”
Smartphone usage grants access to social media, cyberbullying and unregulated content and can also lead to disrupted sleep and poor family relationships, the study says.
It exposes “young users to a vast and often harmful digital landscape of developmentally inappropriate content including pornography, deepfakes, violent material, and extreme ideologies,” the study reports.
Such exposure can be particularly harmful for Black children. A study published in early 2024 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry looked at “Online Racial Discrimination, Suicidal Ideation, and Traumatic Stress.”
Researchers analyzed data from more than 500 Black children and teens aged 11 to 19 and found an association between online racial discrimination and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a further link between those PTSD symptoms and suicidal thoughts.
Dr. Anderson, who focuses on racism’s impact on Black children and their mental health and well-being, cited previous studies her team and others have done suggesting that the digital space can have different impacts depending on race or ethnicity.
“For example, if Black youth are looking at a racial event online, they may not necessarily take the information to a trusted family member or adult and process it,” she said.
Dr. Anderson explained that this internalized response happens because Black children may find it challenging to bring up their experiences, especially in a society that tells them they’re making a big deal out of nothing and that they’re just “playing the race card.”
“If you’re now the child that’s witnessing this in a space where you’re spending the vast majority of your day—this is now children’s primary space. They’re spending 10-plus waking hours on devices, particularly in the summer.
So, you have a new space that children are trying to understand and explore with adults that we don’t know how to cope with yet,” Dr. Anderson said. “This a whole new way of being in communicating about race that we haven’t even caught up with yet, but that children are facing on a daily basis for themselves.”
But there are ways Black children can use smartphones while still maintaining a positive mental well-being. Dr. Anderson and her team and colleagues have conducted research on extracting moments from media, technology and personal experiences and teaching families how to engage with young people about those moments.
“If young people don’t know how to talk about it, we have to be the ones to be able to zoom in and say, how can we pull things off of our phone or off of the news, to be able to point to it and say to the young person, have you seen anything like this today?
Or how does this make you feel? We can use tech to our advantage, to pull in examples, to help young people,” Dr. Anderson said. She and her team are also developing tools and methods to help young people engage with certain experiences and learn strategies for navigating technology spaces and real-world encounters.
“We’re trying to create technology that instead of being these anonymous faces where folks are talking to young people or showing videos to young people, where there’s no talkback, there’s no feedback, there’s no therapeutic strategy, that we’re actually building that into the technology so they can feel safe in that online and real-world space,” Dr. Anderson said.
But for her, at the end of the day, understanding the digital spaces young people are constantly residing in boils down to sparking new levels of conversation. She champions families gathering around the dinner table and making the conversation into a game by doing things like placing questions into a hat.
“You can do all of these things that can help that conversation be more consistent and less like we’re putting the weight on the child, but we’re making it a family expectation that we talk about any and everything … .
Whatever it is, there’s this expectation as a family, we’re going to talk about whatever just pulled out of this hat,” she said. “Make it a habit, make it a practice, so that your child knows that there’s a loving space that they can come back to, to talk about it.”