Jean Twenge started the debate about kids and phones, now she wants to end it

NEW YORK – Researcher and author Jean Twenge’s three teenage daughters are not exactly Luddites, but they have put up with stricter technology rules than most of their friends have had to follow.

Julia, 13, has a Pinwheel – a “kid’s phone”, she calls it – with no internet and limited apps.

And Kate, now 18, had a flip phone until she was 16½. Her friends were boggled by how long it took her to plunk out simple texts, but Kate says she learnt skills her peers have never had to master. Like, how to find her way without GPS. Or how to have an actual phone conversation.

“I love talking on the phone,” said Kate, a college student. “If someone’s like, ‘Do you want to text?’ ‘No! Call me. I want to hear your voice.’”

Professor Twenge, 54, is a psychologist and a best-selling author who, in the past decade or so, has emerged as one of the research world’s loudest voices on what she sees as the obvious, incontrovertible risks of smartphones and social media for kids. And she practises what she preaches at home.

“Having concrete rules that are reasonably strict is usually the way to go,” Prof Twenge said when I asked her to describe her parenting approach during a Zoom interview from her home in San Diego over the summer. “When stuff has gone wrong, it’s often because I’m like, ‘Okay, just this one time.’ And then it blows up in my face.”

Chief among her rules: No smartphone until you get your driver’s licence. And no social media until you turn 16.

Prof Twenge is not necessarily a household name like her sometimes collaborator Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and the author of the megahit The Anxious Generation, which has spent 75 weeks hovering near the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

But she has been among the few academics loudly and consistently warning about teenagers and screens for about a decade.

Her viral 2017 article, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” – adapted from her book iGen – warned that kids born after 1995, the first generation to spend their full adolescence with smartphones, were experiencing higher rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness in part because they were spending so much time on screens.

Though hardly a novel claim nowadays – when US teens spend an average of 4.8 hours on social media a day and nearly three-quarters of them say they have used an artificial intelligence chatbot for companionship – it made Prof Twenge a lightning rod in the research world, where some academics remain sceptical of the panic over smartphones.

“Jean started the conversation,” Prof Haidt told me, adding that he and Prof Twenge have been locked in a battle with naysayers for years.

“The world has woken up – or rather I should say, parents and teachers and coaches and psychologists and everybody who works with kids” has woken up, he said, after seeing “something was going very wrong, and now they’re taking action”.

Parents face impossible headwinds

A professor at San Diego State University, Prof Twenge has spent most of her career studying generational differences.

She did not set out to spend the past decade warning about smartphones. It has been a natural outgrowth of her research, as she believes technology – whether it is phones or air-conditioning or birth control – is what drives generational differences.

But while much of her research and writing has been big picture- and ideas-driven, her latest book, 10 Rules For Raising Kids In A High-Tech World, is as concrete as it comes. It stems not just from her research and personal parenting experience, but also from years of giving talks and fielding questions from parents who were all but pleading: How do I get my child to put down the phone?

It is a question born out of parental love, she said, but also desperation. Because Prof Twenge believes that despite increasing public health warnings about social media and youth mental health, for now, the daunting task of keeping kids safe online still falls squarely on parents.

“It often feels like the whole world is conspiring to keep our kids tethered to tech,” she writes in her new book. “And that’s because it is.”

Indeed, while developmental psychologists like Professor Candice Odgers have very publicly taken issue with the notion that smartphones are harming adolescent mental health, few experts deny how they have shaped American childhood.

On average, children get their first smartphone around age 11, according to data Prof Twenge cites in her book, and nearly 40 per cent of 10- to 12-year-olds use social media. An oft-quoted 2023 Pew report found that nearly half of teenagers said they used the internet “almost constantly”.

Prof Twenge’s 10 rules – which include first giving kids a basic phone that allows them to call and text but limits apps, and actually using robust parental controls – are simple, obvious even.

In part, that is because “it’s very hard to be both surprising and right”, she said. But it is also because, despite parental concerns and calls for warning labels on social media platforms, “most families are not following these rules”, she said. “That’s why I think they’re needed.”

She is realistic about the kinds of arguments that the rules can set off at home. All three of her daughters have pushed back against her and her husband of 21 years, she said, sometimes fairly hard.

Still, she thinks the risks of giving kids too much access too soon more than justify whatever battles break out at home. And she simply does not buy the argument that limiting kids’ access to devices and social media will ruin their social lives.

“My kids haven’t had any trouble socially,” she said. “In many studies, teens who don’t use social media at all are the least likely to be depressed.”

Navigating the non-negotiables

The rule that Prof Twenge said is “absolutely the most important in the book” is: no screens in the bedroom overnight. It is the easiest one for parents to enforce, she said, doable even for those who have already given their teenagers smartphones and unrestricted access.

“The biggest link to happiness, and the biggest link to depression, is sleep – always,” Prof Twenge said. Teens already struggle because of school start times, she added. “Phones and social media just take it to this next terrible level.”

Perhaps the only truly surprising rule in her new book is the directive to hold off on giving teens their first smartphone until they get their driver’s licence. That is markedly later than groups like Wait Until 8th suggest.

But kids do not really need an internet-enabled phone at the start of high school, Prof Twenge argues, because they can get a basic phone. So, they can still call friends, text and listen to music. And they are old enough at that age, she said, that if they want to see their friends, they can do it in real life.

When Prof Twenge started speaking out about screen time and social media, she was wary of recommending specific age restrictions to parents – something many experts, aside from her and Prof Haidt – remain loath to do.

But she has lost patience with experts who repeat that each family and child is different, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer to how much access kids should have or when they should get a phone.

“With so many other things in society, we choose an age, and we stick with it,” she said. “We don’t say, ‘Oh, some 12-year-olds are ready to drive and some 20-year-olds aren’t, so it’s just up to the individual or it’s up to the parent.’”

The outlook is somewhat optimistic

Despite the ubiquity of social media and the rise of artificial intelligence, Prof Twenge feels optimistic about some of the movement she senses in the conversation around these issues nationally. She pointed to the success of Prof Haidt’s book as proof that people are paying attention.

And there are now more options for basic phones for kids, which she believes is a genuine game changer.

“It can be tempting to give up, but this is too important for us to give up,” she said of the difficult spot parents find themselves in right now. “I believe in doing what you can to fix a problem, even when the situation is frustrating and even when you can’t completely solve it.” NYTIMES