Savvy Auntie Staff Writers
February 28, 2018

Are smartphones as bad for teenagers as we are often lead to believe? To quote a term often used by adolescents for their relationships: “it’s complicated.”

Candice Odgers, a fellow in CIFAR's Child & Brain Development program and professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who has been tracking the mental health of adolescents and their use of smartphones for a decade, finds that smartphone usage is positive for many teens, supporting the development and strengthening of friendships. But for some teens, this isn't the case. In fact, it can lead to negative effects offline.

Odgers's study, published in last week in Nature's special issue on the science of adolescence, finds that smartphone usage should not be considered universally bad as the effects largely depend on the teens' lives online. In her survey of North Carolina schoolchildren, nearly half of 11-year-olds (48%) owned a cellphone, and by age 14, 85% owned one. And while for some, this may raise eyebrows as to how this usage affects teens, Odgers did not find a “negative association between mental well-being and ‘moderate’ usage.”

A New Kind of Digital Divide

Odgers says that many teens can translate their online relationships to making positive social plans with friends offline, for other kids, it has the opposite effect. "What we're seeing now may be the emergence of a new kind of digital divide, in which differences in online experiences are amplifying risks among already vulnerable adolescents," Odgers reports. Teens from low-income families with a household income under $35,000 per year spend three more hours a day in front of screens, including TV and online videos, than teens from wealthier households, according to a large-scale U.S. study. Odgers argues that the additional screen time among teens from lower-income families may lead to problems offline. These teens surveyed by Odgers reported “more physical fights, face-to-face arguments and trouble at school that spilled over from social media.”

"In the past 25 years, income inequality and the opportunity gap between children from low-income families and their more affluent peers has been growing. They have increasingly less access to resources, and lower levels of adult investment," says Odgers. "It would be disastrous for many children to see this gap replicated in the online world."

While Odgers understands the concerns some parents (and presumably aunts and other close relatives) may have, she cautions that “giving into fear could prevent researchers and policymakers from identifying the real determinants of mental health.” Instead, Odgers proposes that researchers “use the data to understand the very different experiences that young people from diverse backgrounds are having online," she writes.

Photo: icefront