The Real "Digital Divide"
Wealthier families are getting their kids off of screens. Poorer kids are very online. We are turning reading, physical fitness, and normal attention spans into luxury goods.
Sometimes, you don’t need a study to confirm the obvious, but it can certainly help. And a new one published in the journal Pediatrics confirms what should, by now, be astoundingly obvious: That giving children smartphones is bad for them. The study found that children who are given smartphones before the age of 12 wound up with higher rates of insufficient sleep, obesity, and depression than children whose parents waited until they were teenagers to give them phones.
What struck me about this study, though, wasn’t just the conclusion, which should be clear to anyone who has picked their head up and looked around in the past decade; it was the ways in which it pokes at various strains of growing inequality among the rich and the poor (and relatedly, between those who have lots of education and those who have much less): Not just in educational outcomes, but in basics like getting enough sleep so your brain functions, and getting the kind of physical movement we all need to live in healthy bodies.
As recently as a decade ago, lawmakers and do-gooders and casual observers were worried that a “digital divide” could fuel inequality because poor kids would have less access to tech: Their parents wouldn’t be able to afford a laptop or consistent wifi, and that might set poor kids back and give wealthier ones a bigger leg up. Instead, with the broad proliferation of smartphones in pockets and school-issued laptops in classrooms, something very different has happened: Poorer kids spend more time on screens than wealthier ones, and see worse outcomes as a result.
This starts really, really young. This is purely anecdotal, but I know very few college-educated city-dwelling white-collar-job-working parents who let their babies see screens (with exceptions for, say, FaceTiming Grandma). This shifts as their children turn two or three and might get an airplane iPad or a half-hour of Miss Rachel so the parents can cook dinner, but among the kind of highly-educated parents who read the New Yorker (and their global equivalents), I’ve observed almost none who will, say, hand a one-year-old their iPhone so they can enjoy a distraction-free dinner. These parents are giving their babies wooden blocks and child-development-expert-designed Lovery play kits, enrolling them in music and tutu school and sensory play classes, and shelling out for plastic-free Montessori-inspired preschools and nannies who agree to keep their phones put away in their purses. Outside of these rarified communities, though, it’s a totally different story: Babies holding smartphones in their strollers; toddlers playing interactive iPad games in the middle of restaurants; children who are barely walking but are highly adept at scrolling through YouTube Kids.
I don’t say this to judge every single parent who hands their kid a screen (just some of them). Sometimes you’ve gotta get dinner on the table or get through a flight; when kids are older and their peers start getting phones, having one becomes not just a luxury but a means of staying socially connected. The “screens are bad for young kids” conversation is still a pretty new one, and the advice has been muddled; for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics long said no screens before 2, but then changed that rule in 2016, basically saying that FaceTiming family members or even playing some educational games alongside parents is ok after 18 months of age. Conversations about kids and screens are also cultural; parents who don’t spend their workdays behind a computer where they can click over to nytimes.com are (ironically) probably less likely to have the water-cooler conversation be about Jonathan Haidt’s latest book or the study that just came out showing that watching a lot of short-form video is correlated with a series of cognitive deficits, including decreased attention span and inhibition. People who get most of their information from TikTok are not hearing the message that they should get themselves and their kids off of TikTok.
