Should we give toddlers phones?

0:00Support for today's explain comes from Fetch. Fetch is pet insurance, if you hadn't figured it out. Do you have a pet? According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago, every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over$1 ,000, and it almost never comes at a convenient time. So check out Fetch. You get paid up to 90 % of vet bills. You can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S. and Canada. Every vet is in network. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Support for Today Explained comes from ServiceNow.

0:41AI is moving fast, but without visibility. It's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. A mess. ServiceNow turns that mess into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place. Oh, what it's doing, what it's done, what it's about to do, so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology. Kids create much more what we call solitary space around a tablet. At some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone.

1:26I'm John Gulen Hill. This is Explain It to Me from Vox. And this is Adam Clark Estes. So my wife and I had a kid a couple years ago. And since then, I've not been able to stop thinking about how she's going to grow up in a world dominated by tech. Adam's been covering our tech-dominated world for years now. He's a senior tech correspondent here at Vox and writes a newsletter called User Friendly. It's generally about how technology works in our lives and works for us and against us sometimes. But I'm increasingly interested in what tech is doing to the next generation. Yes, Adam is an expert, but he's a parent first and foremost.

2:04And even he's still trying to figure out how his own toddler should be interacting with screens. Many of you are asking the same questions and coming up with a lot of different answers. I do let them watch TV every day in the morning. I feel okay about it. I don't feel great about it. We are a no-screen household, so we have no screens on our main living level by choice. We've been forced to give him the iPad every now and then just so we can get things done. And we have seen a significant improvement in his math skills. But if I was really being honest, I believe the only positive relationship between technology and toddlers is them not having any relationship at all.

2:47Not too long ago, Adam set out on a journey to figure out if there's actually an expert consensus on early childhood and screens. Today, he's going to tell us about that journey, from the history of our concern to a surprising pro-screens argument he discovered. Plus, we'll talk about how to navigate the overwhelming variety of content made for kids these days. And finally, whether all Adam's reporting has changed his own decision-making about his toddler and her tech. Okay, tell me what your kid is like, Adam. My daughter is amazing. She's super curious, very cheerful, and she's interested in tech.

3:25She's always asking to see pictures of her grandma on my phone. Oh, she loves her grandma. Yeah, or she might just love the alluring glow of a smartphone screen. I don't know. She loves her grandma. Right, you know, okay, I don't have any kids of my own yet, But I'm very invested in the well-being of my cousins' little ones and my friends' little ones. And the sense that I get from the culture at large is that it's generally frowned upon letting kids spend too much time scrolling. Is that right? Do I have my finger on the pulse of where we are when it comes to toddlers and phones? It's definitely generally frowned upon.

4:01Like you hear about iPad kids. I want the iPad. Taking away your iPad. Yeah. Give me the iPad. Or your friend might roll their eyes seeing, you know, a family of four eating dinner at a restaurant and the kids are just staring at tablets or smartphones. People aren't even attempting to raise their kids anymore. I don't know when it started, but I think the delivery room is just giving out iPads. Yo, don't let your kid just be on his iPad. They don't listen. They don't listen. Yeah, I admit that when I see a kid on an iPad at a restaurant, I judge because I'm like, I'm not going to give my imaginary children an iPad.

4:38But I also don't have any kids. I have not faced that actual hurdle, you know. I feel like I'm going to be facing a new hurdle every day for the rest of my life in some respects. But when it comes to tech, I think the big challenge here is that it is constantly changing. And these are new challenges. We don't have clear answers on what the right thing to do is. As a parent, it feels very scary. Yeah. How did we get here? What's the history of, like, kids and this smartphone technology we have now? I'm tempted to go back to the early 80s and Nintendo, when I think that parents first got worried about technology and video games and screens and kids.

5:19You could even go back further to the introduction of television. Or even back further to the introduction of radio. As long as technology has been around, we have worried about kids using it, especially using it too much, being too influenced by it. Yeah, I remember this book, like reading this book when I was little. It was called The Boy with Square Eyes. And it was about a boy who watched way too much TV. So his eyes turned square. So he needed to like read and play outside because the TV was bad and he was watching too much of it. I feel like I was the boy with square eyes. But anyways, to kind of like jump forward to this century, smartphones really began in 2007 with the iPhone.

6:05A big turning point was when Instagram came out. That was 2010. And then Facebook, which was already a huge social media giant in 2012, bought Instagram and supercharged the growth. And so Instagram was a platform that young people really liked. Very young, teenagers and younger, even though legally you have to be 13 to have an Instagram account, kids find their way. Fast forward a few years and a lot of researchers, psychologists, teachers in school, experts got worried about what they defined as a mental health crisis in young people. The review of research confirms what many parents have long feared.

6:47Social media use is linked with mental distress, self-harm and even suicide. For decades, there's been that Surgeon General's warning on packs of cigarettes. But this morning, for the first time, a new warning about something else. social media and what it means for kids' mental health. The rates of anxiety and depression were really shooting up all in this generation that grew up with smartphones and with apps and with social media. Yeah, you know, I think we think a lot of the time about, like, teenagers when it comes to smartphones and social media and stuff. But what about toddlers? What's going on with them in these screens?

7:24As I've seen with my own kid, toddlers are developing the basic skills of life. Their brains are in a very early stage. They're learning vocabulary. They're learning basic social interaction. And what researchers have consistently found is that time just spent staring at screens is time when they aren't working on those skills. What kind of brought this conversation about young people and technology into the forefront? Is there a particular book or study or something that really set this off? There is a book that has become a movement. The book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He's an NYU professor who wrote about that mental health crisis that researchers picked up on a few years ago and really connected it to the rise of social media and how that also is coincided by a decline in traditional play, playing outside, being friends with people in real life, the kinds of interactions that he had or maybe you and I had growing up.

8:24He really argued that those are disappearing and it's doing tremendous damage to a young generation. I should say that that book was very, very popular. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. And that movement has really taken off. Well, in less than a week, Central Texas students will be heading back to class and they'll have to deal with some new rules. Put your phones away. That's the new law impacting every kid in every school in New York. Okay, so I'm curious where all of this leaves you. As both a tech reporter and a parent, like where do you fall on whether to give your kid a phone or not and when to give your kid a phone?

9:03Well, I read The Anxious Generation when it came out and it blew me away. And I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology and only playing in the woods. for as long as possible. But then I started to do my own research and I started to report on this a little bit. Then I started to report on it a lot and talk to a lot of experts about this. And I started to see a different picture.

9:35Coming up, a look at that picture.

9:46Support for Today Explained comes from Grow Therapy. Summer can be a great time, but when you're dead set on making sure it's a great time, that can be stressful. When it comes to navigating this season or any season, therapy can help, specifically Grow Therapy, whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th. Grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. They can connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the U.S. offering virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, such as insurance, speciality, identity, or availability, and get started in as little as two days.

10:20And if something comes up, you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Grow accepts more than 125 insurance plans. Sessions average$21 with insurance. Some people pay as little as$0 depending on their insurance plan. You can visit growtherapy.com. You can visit growtherapy.com slash explain today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash explain. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

10:56Support for Today Explained comes from Granola. Nobody likes meetings for the sake of meetings. So when you find yourself in an actually productive meeting, you probably want to keep track of the important stuff. Granola can help you do just that, believe it or not. Granola is not in your pantry. It's an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. It works in the background, so you can still take whatever rough notes you like to take. But during your meeting, Granola securely transcribes everything. Then after it's over, it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes.

11:33Granola also works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai.explain. That's granola.ai.explain to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai.explain.

12:08Okay, we're back. This is Explain It To Me. And before the break, Adam left us with a cliffhanger about his reporting on toddlers and screens. I just talked to so many researchers who had a more nuanced idea of what was happening with kids in tech. And those researchers largely disagreed with Haidt and this idea that you should keep tech away from kids as long as possible. Then I talked to this professor, Andrew Shabilsky. I'm a university professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford. I've been pretty keenly focused on this idea of how do you actually raise kids around tech in a way that, you know, doesn't give in to kind of all these stories about tech being either amazing or terrible.

12:48And he told me something really surprising. We decided to actually give our kids access to tech quite early. This is something that my wife and I talked and thought a whole lot about. And really kind of at some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone. Three? Like a three-year-old, like one, two, three. Yeah, and not tablets, but specifically phones. And he explained to me that, you know, you don't put your kid on an adult-sized bike and roll them down a hill where they don't know how to ride. Like, you get them a small bike with training wheels.

13:20In order to have an idea of kind of what kind of journey our daughter would have and later our son, we've reflected on our own experiences, how we kind of encountered technology in the 80s and 90s. And it was a bit of a gradual drip, drip, drip. And so, you know, our daughter, she didn't get a phone with all of its features on day one. She was curious about our family. So at the start, it was a photo gallery of her, you know, members of her family that live here in Europe and all across the world. Then it became a camera so they could take pictures of their own. And then he added podcasts and music.

13:55and eventually when they were older, they got the ability to text and make phone calls with select people with their parents and grandparents and eventually friends.

14:08Okay, podcast. All right, yeah, you should totally let your baby listen to Explain It To Me. But okay, a practical question. Is it easy to tweak a smartphone's settings to limit what kids can access? It's work. I would like to say it's easy, but it does require effort for the parent to go in and do it. But Apple and Google have parental controls built into the operating systems that are on 99 % of the phones in the world. And they're designed to do just this to make it easy for parents to take apps away or limit time on apps. You can even buy phones that are designed to have even more flexibility.

14:49Like there's a company called Pinwheel that sells phone software that gives you really granular control over what's happening with your kid's phone. It makes it easy to actually, like, turn stuff on as they get older and sort of need more tools. I can kind of see, you know, your kid wants to look at pictures, take photos, and that's great. But given the option of, like, looking at pictures that their grandparents are going to play outside, shouldn't we push them in the direction of that second option? Why not both? It's a great question. And I think that this notion that all screen time is bad is incorrect, but it also doesn't mean that only screen time is good, if that makes sense.

15:33Like, you don't want to give your kids unlimited access to really anything. The central idea here always is, you know, making sure that like tech is part of your larger parenting agenda. It's part of those larger hard conversations that you're going to have. Um, I'm happy to say we don't have like screen time rules really in our house because we've got lots of other stuff going on. And, and, you know, if we take a long flight, yeah. You know, if we're visiting our family in Japan, um, our kids are going to play video games for 12 hours. Uh, and, and, and that's okay because it's a horrible long flight.

16:08That's not the same as being permissive, right? Like the hope here is this isn't about like saying no to the online world. It's about teaching our kids how to say both yes and no for themselves, because there's going to be a time when we're not going to be around and we've got to help equip them so that they can equip themselves.

16:32I'm curious what positive screen time actually looks like. Like, I don't know. I watched a lot of TV growing up. Like, I was also the girl with square eyes and I would be sitting on top of, like, the big box television. And my mom would tell me, like, stop, like, sit back, go read a book. And I did do a lot of reading. I also wore glasses probably also in part because I would read in terrible lighting.

17:00But I just but I do know that there were positive ways. Like, I don't know. I also watched a lot of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues and things like that. And I just wonder what positive screen time looks like for kids nowadays. If you can picture the opening screen of a Sesame Street episode, that's what it looks like still.

17:35There's a ton of research that goes back decades, thanks to Sesame Street, that it's good for kids. Kids that watched Sesame Street showed up to kindergarten better prepared. And that was true in 1970, and it's still true today. So it feels like a bit of a cop-out to say that what can kids do on a screen that is good, and for me to say education. But it's also true. And there's growing research that actually even just the design of phones and tablets helps kids learn in a different way. like having a touchscreen where they can interact with what's happening on the screen is helpful, especially for learning vocabulary and language building.

18:17You should handpick what you want your kid to be able to watch. And you can make a YouTube playlist and give them access to just that. Handpick it, pick it with your kid and don't give them access to infinite anything. Don't expose them to algorithms that are designed to keep them watching because, again, their brains aren't developed. They have a hard time putting stuff down, especially when they're young. Kids should have a limited amount of content available. Coming up next, what about all that content for toddlers these days? How to separate the good from the slop.

19:02Support for the show comes from HIMSS. ED is more common than many people realize, and a lot of the time it may be easier to address than you'd think. What is ED's address? With HIMSS, you can connect online with a licensed provider to discuss treatment options tailored to your needs, all from the privacy and convenience of home. Getting started with HIMSS is simple. Just complete a brief online intake and a licensed provider will review your information to determine whether treatment may be appropriate. Then if prescribed, your medication is shipped directly to your door in discreet packaging.

19:41To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss, and more, visit HIMSS.com. That's HIMSS.com. For your free online, visit HIMSS.com. Prescription required. See website for details and important safety information. Sedenafil is the generic version of Viagra. Viagra is a registered trademark of Viatris Specialty LLC. HIMSS is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatris.

20:14Heat up your 4th of July at the Home Depot with our wide variety of grills under$300 and make every gathering one to remember. Give your outdoor space a glow up. Whatever your budget is, with savings on seasonal plants starting at$5. With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party. Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at The Home Depot. Prices may vary by store. Exclusions apply. See homedepot.com slash price match for details.

20:50When it comes to content to watch, kids have way more options than I did when I was little. There are the classics, of course, like Sesame Street, but there's also YouTube. According to Pew Research, over 80 % of parents with children between two and four say their kids watch YouTube, and that number is a little over 60 % for parents with kids under two. To get a better sense of what those kids and their parents might be running into out there, we brought in an expert. I am Jenny Radesky. I am a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan Medical School. Jenny's also a media researcher and one of the directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.

21:31She has a pretty good handle of the children's media landscape these days. So what are the kids watching? Well, it's really different. Like, I grew up in the 80s when, you know, we would go watch Saturday morning cartoons all huddled together while my parents slept. It was usually a bunch of fun, entertaining stuff like Super Friends. In the great hall of the Justice League, there are assembled the world's four greatest heroes. Superman, looks like you flew all this way for nothing. Wrong, Wonder Woman. I flew all this way for you. And it was not on demand. There was a time and a place when technology could be watched.

22:14And that's what's really different about today. That's one main difference is now we have on demand, just like endless content. And we have marketplaces and platforms where these pieces of content are competing for kids attention. That's so interesting. Can you rank the best for children's media out there? You know, I'm thinking everything from TV to that YouTube algorithm. What is good content? And why is it good content? Our research team at the University of Michigan and I collaborate with folks at Georgetown, University of Wisconsin, Brigham Young University. We've gotten together to try to create a coding scheme that means just what are the reliable aspects of kids media that meet definitions for quality?

23:08And it could be quality around educational, like this can teach you something. It could be quality just for like lovely storytelling that's like meaningful to a child. But we also code for things like designs that just try to capture attention. We call this bedazzling. Like it's just this extra stuff that's on a YouTube video, but it often is kind of shallow and it's really just gimmicky, you know, attention grabbing content. We have now watched thousands and thousands of YouTube videos ranging from Sesame Street to AI generated slop. And I'd say AI generated slop is definitely at that bottom.

23:49You know, if you ever see a video that's just looks like a computer generated, like bunch of cars being driven by Spider-Man and Elsa, and the whole crashing into a bunch of soccer balls, like that's the worst and not worth your kids time and attention. But it's just all the sort of gimmicky things that kids want to click on. So that's why it trends in the algorithm that in those sorts of videos have just billions of views. The really best stuff, the stuff that is clearly like made with some care and some thoughtfulness is still the Sesame Streets, the PBS kids stuff like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.

24:37And then there's some newcomers like Bluey and Miss Rachel. Hi friends, who wants to play a game? Okay bingo, let's do this. Try to magic my ears. They are showing signs of really meeting kids where they're at. They might be slower paced, they might have a good sense of humor. They tell stories that are meaningful to a child's experience and that is one way that we define good content. Like, it is reflecting back the world that children are into children and helping them make meaning of it. So we've mentioned some of the greatest hits. Miss Rachel, she's like Beyonce for children. They love Elmo still, which wow, even I loved Elmo.