Kids and Phones Resources

My favorite resources, articles and videos

This is a running list of some of my favorite resources when it comes to the subject of kids, phones, and social media.

• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s official advisory about social media and youth mental health

• The American Academy of Pediatrics teamed up with AT&T to produce this surprisingly helpful questionnaire that can help you determine whether your kid is ready for a phone. (I say “surprisingly” because it was funded in part by a phone company — but it really does ask good questions.)

• The American Academy of Pediatrics also has a great tool that you can use to create a customized plan for your family.

• The American Academy of Pediatrics also has a really useful Social Media and Youth Mental Health Q&A Portal

• List of smartphone alternatives , courtesy of waituntil8th.org. Speaking of which. . .

• Waituntil8th.org

• Comments by two early Facebook executives on the potential impacts of the very products they helped to create (and how they use — or more specifically do not use — their products themselves). Watch this with your kids!

• Fantastic Wall Street Journal expose on TikTok and its algorithms/tendencies to pull users into (potentially quite dangerous and destructive) rabbit holes. (Warning: some references to suicide and self-harm.) This is fascinating and I think should also be mandatory viewing for any parent considering letting their kid get on TikTok (and, for that matter, a really important video for teenagers to see for themselves, too.)

• Accompanying WSJ piece: How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors (behind paywall)

• UNESCO report/guidance about smartphones in schools (and BBC article about countries that have banned them). (Full UNESCO report is here.)

• American Psychological Association’s Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence (I think that this is a bit wishy-washy — there’s an increasing body of evidence suggesting a causal, negative link between social media use and mental health)

• Journalist Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel: An excellent resource on the latest research about the effects of smartphones (in particular social media) on mental and physical health (particularly for teenagers). Here are two of my favorite posts — they’re great round-ups of the current evidence, with LOTS of links for anyone who wants to truly dork out on this.

  • Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence

  • Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health

  • The Case for Phone-Free Schools

• Article and mini documentary about an experiment at a boarding school called the Buxton School in which they completely banned smartphones and instead gave students and staff a Light Phone instead

• Diane Sawyer "Screen Time" special about screen time and its effects, particularly on children. I highly recommend checking it out (and that link leads to a YouTube playlist of segments from the special, so that you can watch it in chunks)

• From that feature, here's a segment they did on an updated version of the classic
  “still face experiment,” in which researchers asked parents to interact normally with their children for several minutes and then to check their phones for one to two minutes — and filmed the results. (Warning: it’s heartbreaking.)

• Washington Post piece about schools banning smartphones

• Op ed: It was a mistake to let kids onto social media. Here’s what to do now.