News Investigation

On Kids and Smartphones

May 2023 🇺🇸 Cal Newport (calnewport.com)

In this essay, Cal Newport traces the decade-long public debate over whether smartphones are harmful to children, from early concerns raised by mental health professionals around 2012, through Jean Twenge's widely discussed 2017 Atlantic cover story questioning smartphones' effects on a generation, through a period of competing research claims he calls 'the Data Wars,' to what he describes as an emerging research consensus. He argues that unrestricted smartphone and internet access is linked to meaningful harms for young people, particularly pre-adolescent girls, and suggests age sixteen as a reasonable threshold for unrestricted access — a position he notes aligns with guidance from the U.S. Surgeon General. TechKids Foundation cites this essay as a documented, dated public record of a prominent technology critic's position on age-appropriate smartphone access, tracing the same research debate the library's other entries document.

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Newport, Cal. "On Kids and Smartphones." calnewport.com, May 4, 2023. https://calnewport.com/on-kids-and-smartphones/

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