Jordan Spicklemire landed her first job as a high-school counselor in Indianapolis in 2012 — the same year half of Americans reported owning a smartphone. In the years that followed, she held a front-row seat as the devices gradually made their way into the hands of students.
“When I started, I noticed kids walking down the hallways talking to each other at their lockers,” Spicklemire said. “That turned into the students all staring at a rectangle with an earbud or headphones on.”
Since then, the age at which kids start using devices has only gotten younger, and the amount of time they spend looking at screens has rapidly ballooned.
Nearly 60% of kids have their own tablet by the age of 4 and are spending more than two hours a day, on average, viewing a screen, according to a 2025 report by Common Sense Media, a digital-education organization.
The amount of screentime skyrockets to nearly nine hours a day on average for 13-to-17-year-olds. Five of those hours are on a smartphone, according to a 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Reality-shifting tech
For today’s American teens, smartphones became popular when they were toddlers and are now woven into every part of their existence, making Generation Alpha the nation’s first digital natives.
Nearly all U.S. teens (95%) have smartphones, with new data showing the average child gets their own smartphone by age 8 1/2, according to the American Psychological Association.
That’s led to a reality-altering shift in how kids understand the world, argued Kate Blocker with Children and Screens, a research and education nonprofit. Digital environments are shaping how children learn, socialize, view themselves and interact with those around them, she argued.
“Every experience matters for how our brain is wired, and this certainly extends to digital environments — especially when you consider the amount of time that youth are spending online nowadays,” Blocker said.
But as mounting research points to the technology’s harmful impacts, parents and lawmakers are asking urgent questions and moving quickly to implement policies aimed at curtailing the health toll on kids.
As many as 35 states are restricting or banning smartphones during school hours, and at least 19 states have enacted laws regulating minors’ use or access to social media.
More parents are joining grassroots movements such as Wait Until 8th, a Texas-based initiative that advocates for kids not owning a smartphone until at least high school. More than 147,000 families have so far signed the pledge.
Today, Spicklemire, now an academic-success coach, runs a local chapter of the initiative in Morton, Illinois. Based on her own experiences, holding off on giving her two kids personal devices was an easy decision.
She and her husband only allow their two young children to watch a limited number of shows on a TV screen, and they’ve opted not to let their 6-year-old get a school-issued tablet in kindergarten like the other children.
“I don’t trust my kids’ childhood to be in the hands of big tech, because they don’t care about childhood,” Spicklemire said. “They just want to make money.”
Good, bad, unknown
Her decision is a reasonable one, argued Ran Barzilay, a psychiatrist with the Youth Suicide Prevention, Intervention and Research Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Barzilay and a research team released a study in December that found 12-year-olds who owned a smartphone were 30% more likely to be depressed and 40% more likely to be obese compared to 12-year-olds who didn’t have a device.
The analysis also followed kids who received their first smartphone at 12. After a year, at the age of 13, more than half had a 50% chance of having a serious mental health symptom compared to kids without a smartphone.
“The message is for parents to think of the decision to give their kid their first smartphone as a decision with immediate and clear health implications,” Barzilay said.
A 2024 study published in JAMA Pediatrics also found children using tablets at age 3 1/2 were associated with more expressions of anger and frustration a year later. Children prone to anger or frustration at age 4 1/2 then led to more tablet use over the next year.
The data suggest early-childhood tablet use may contribute to a cycle that harms kids’ emotional regulation, according to the study.
But assuming smartphones or tablets are inherently bad glosses over the positive experiences they offer kids, argued Blocker with Children and Screens.
Those benefits include social connection, especially for teens, she noted. Isolated or vulnerable populations can use devices for identity exploration and community building. Kids have access to educational tools and apps. Parents feel safer knowing they can easily reach their child.
Middle school students in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, use laptops during a class.
“It’s really nuanced,” she said. “We do see from the existing evidence a clear mix of benefits and risks.”
“For me, I use it for communication between my groups,” Kadeesh Bridgeman, a high school student from Anderson, Indiana, said. “Talking to my groups, my adult allies, student council, just to be able to talk back and forth and get a clear message.”
“A lot of the time, the technology can be overused and it’s not great to be staring at a rectangle all day,” Mehak Sankhla, a junior at North Andover High School in Massachusetts, said. “But I also feel like there are so many benefits and when it’s used right, you can do so much with it.
Barzilay, the youth psychologist, explained many of the outcomes of owning a smartphone depend heavily on how it is used. How much time do kids spend on them? What are they viewing? Who are they interacting with? How are parents regulating their use?
“It may be the problem is really coming from a subset of kids who use it too much,” he said. “Maybe that’s what we need to target instead of issuing an umbrella statement that smartphones are bad for you.”
“I think we should embrace the results with the complexity that they provide to us,” Barzilay added.
But for Spicklemire, the former school counselor, the issue is cut and dry. On a device in which children are just one click away from pornography, violent videos or talking to a child predator, the potential harms far outweigh the perceived benefits, she argued.
“I understand these devices are sold as a tool for connection and learning, but with the current state of social media and smartphones, they have no place in childhood,” Spicklemire said.