Should we give toddlers phones?

Support for Explain It to Me comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

Ever have a question where you just can't find the answer?

Claude is an AI that's designed for exactly that: those mysteries that need real exploration.

It can help you dig into the layers, piece together scattered information, and work through complexity until things start making sense.

It's the thinking companion for anyone who refuses to accept, I guess we'll never know.

You can try Claude for free at claude.ai/slash explainitomy.

Support for Today Explain comes from The Economist.

If you're like me, you're a little bit obsessed with The Economist.

And The Economist has a new feature for you.

Insider is a brand new video offering from The Economist that lets you feel like a fly on the wall of their editorial meetings.

With Insider, you get direct access to the internal debates that shape how The Economist makes sense of an increasingly complex and turbulent world.

Here, trusted voices debate the biggest global issues with Insider free at launch for all subscribers to The Economist.

Huh, learn more at economist.com/slash insider.

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 called solitary space around a tablet.

At some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone.

I'm John Glenn Hill.

This is Explain It to Me from Fox.

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.

And 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-screens 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 get things done.

And we have seen a significant improvement in his math scope.

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.

Not 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.

She'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 cousin's 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?

Am I, 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.

Like the, you hear about iPad kids.

I want the iPad.

Type can buy your iPad.

Yeah, give me the iPad.

Or your friend might roll their eyes seeing

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 judged because I'm like, I'm not going to give my imaginary children an iPad, but 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 What's the history of like kids and this smartphone technology we have now?

I'm tempted to like 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.

You 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.

A 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.

Social 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?

As 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.

He 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?

Well, 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 talked to a lot of experts about this.

And I started to see a different picture.

Coming up, a look at that picture.

Support for Explain It to Me comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

Some questions need more than a quick search, the kind where you want to really understand what's happening, not just get a basic overview.

That's where Claude comes in.

Claude is an AI thinking partner designed for people who enjoy digging deeper.

It lets you upload documents, explore multiple perspectives, and piece together the context that might make complex topics finally make sense.

CLOD can analyze documents up to 200 pages, search current sources with proper citations, and work through problems step by step.

What makes it different is how it explores complexity with you rather than rushing to simple answers.

It helps you connect scattered information and understand the deeper patterns.

Whether you're researching for work, trying to understand current events, or working through personal decisions that matter to you, Claude matches your curiosity and commitment to getting the full picture.

You can try Claude for free at claude.ai/slash explainitomy and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

Support for Explain ItTo Me comes from Hydro.

Have you ever had one of those workouts where you finish and wonder, did that actually make me stronger?

Hydro says that now, you don't have to guess.

In just 20 minutes, they say you can work 86% of your muscles.

And with the new Hydro Arc, you you can actually see your progress measured in power, endurance, and precision every single time you row.

Hydro also says they have a huge library of Olympian-taught rowing workouts filmed in real locations all around the world.

One Hydro user even said, Hydro isn't just an exercise, it's a lifestyle.

It's transformed my approach to fitness.

Okay, y'all, it's been raining in DC and dragging myself to the gym has been just such a task.

I could totally see how having a hydro in your house could make going to the gym way easier.

You can skip the gym, not the workout.

Stay on track with new Hydro Arc, Hydro's most advanced rower yet.

For a limited time, you can go to hydro.com and use code EXPLAIN to get $100 off any hydro rower, including the ARC.

That's H-Y-D-R-O-W.com.

Code Explain.

Okay, 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 Height and this idea that you should keep tech away from kids as long as possible.

Then I talked to this professor, Andrew Szzabilski.

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 doesn't give in to kind of all these stories about tech being either amazing or terrible.

And 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.

In order to have an idea of kind of what kind of journey our daughter would have and later our son, we 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 her 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.

And 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.

Okay, podcasts.

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.

Like 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 of 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 like yeah 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.

I'm happy to say we don't have like screen time rolls really in our house because we've got lots of other stuff going on.

And

if we take a long flight, yeah, you know, if we're visiting our family in Japan,

our kids are going to play video games for 12 hours.

And that's okay because it's a horrible long flight.

That'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.

I'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.

But

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 Blues 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.

There'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 where they can interact with what's happening on the screen is helpful, especially for learning vocabulary and language building.

You should hand pick what you want your kid to be able to watch and you can make a YouTube playlist and give them access to just that.

Hand pick 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?

I need a job with a steady paycheck.

I need a job that offers health care on day one for me and my kids.

I want a job job where I can get certified in technical roles, like robotics or software engineering.

In communities across the country, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $23 an hour with opportunities to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs and apprenticeships.

Learn more at aboutamazon.com.

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?

With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

You just have to hire one.

You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app.

Download today.

When 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 Radeski.

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.

She 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.

And 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.

And 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.

You know, if you ever see a video that just looks like a computer-generated

like bunch of cars being driven by Spider-Man and Elsa.

Let it go.

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.

And 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 matching 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 in to 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.

You got your bluey, you got all these things.

I gotta ask about Cocomelon.

Cocomelon

Autumn veggies start out small.

Where does Cocomelon fall in the spectrum of children's entertainment?

You know, to speak like my 16-year-old son, Cocomelon's pretty mid.

It's like,

and it gets middling scores from our team of coders because it is,

you know, kind of surface level educational content.

Everybody's happy.

We're helping each other in the house.

You know, we're going to the beach and the popsicles never melt and I never get sand in my toes.

We'll have some fun out in the sun.

There's no friction.

And life, life is full of friction for loads.

Even kids need conflict.

They even kids need conflict in their media.

Every developmentalist all assumed there'd be a little bit of developmental friction in kids' life.

And that's both how kids grow skills, but it's also how they grow their sense of self.

Like, ha, I handled that.

I figured out how to put a spoon into this, you know, slop of baby food and try to get it to my mouth.

We don't need to spoon feed kids.

We've talked about what kids watch, but what about how kids watch?

You know, we got a question from a listener.

Hi, my name is Liz.

And I'm going to quote it for you.

When we go on vacation and we're using the iPad instead of the TV,

the reaction when we turn it off is so much more

amplified and so much more emotional.

And I'm wondering if there's any data behind small screens like iPads and phones versus big screens like a TV.

That's a great question.

What we have found, we've done a little bit of research comparing when kids read off of a print book versus a tablet or when they play physical games versus digital games, kids create much more what we called solitary space around a tablet.

Like it's just, it's just me and this tablet.

It's me and this little sensory cocoon hanging out, you know, playing this game.

They don't see it as a shared object the same way that a TV or a deck of cards,

you know, or a print book is seen as a shared object by young kids.

And when I say it's seen as, there's so much informal learning that children do in early childhood.

Informal learning means I'm observing the world around me and I'm learning what the unwritten rules are about the way things work.

And so we can really teach kids.

Media is for sharing.

It's for sitting around a TV.

It's not for when each of us is stressed out and doesn't want to talk to each other.

We all ignore each other by staring at our phones, right?

Like we can,

we can, yeah, we can, we can set those norms.

Make it predictable.

Make it shared if you can, or at least in like a shared space so you can monitor.

And also make it not just whenever your child is fussing.

If your child is, you know, used to being calmed down or managed behaviorally by media, that could create a dependence on like, every time I feel stressed, I need media.

And really in early childhood, it's such a great opportunity for kids to learn other emotional awareness and coping skills.

Dr.

Ginny Radeski and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have a toolkit coming out for parents all about kids media.

You can find a link to it in our show notes.

Okay, y'all, we are back with senior tech correspondent Adam Clark Estes.

Adam, you set out on this journey to figure out what's the deal with kids and phones.

You have your own toddler, and at the beginning, you were a little like,

probably not going to give her a smartphone.

Where do you land now?

It would be great if I had a clear answer, but I actually think that I've got a great

foundation for a conversation that we have to have in our family.

I need to talk to my wife about this, see what she really thinks.

I need to let my daughter grow up a little bit more.

Will I give her a phone at age three?

I don't think so, but will I wait till she's 13?

Definitely not.

Is this like a roundabout way of saying your wife is going to make the call?

Because Because that's how it kind of was in my family.

I'd be like, dad, can I have such and such?

He'd be like,

let me check with your mom.

Yes, this is a roundabout way of me saying that I need to ask my wife.

That's real.

You know what that is?

That's partnership.

That's marriage.

That's healthy.

That's what, I know that's right.

We have an upcoming conversation about medicine and AI.

We want to know: have you used ChatGPT to self-diagnose?

Was it right or did you get it all wrong?

Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or you can send a voice memo to askvox at vox.com.

If you like our work and want to support it, consider becoming a Vox member.

You'll be able to hear this show with zero ads and you'll also get access to a ton of special content like members-only newsletters and articles.

We're having a sale right now and membership is over 30%

off.

To become become a member, head on over to Vox.com/slash members.

This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and it was edited by Megan Canan.

Fact-checking was by Melissa Hirsch and it was engineered by Adrienne Willey.

Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer.

I'm your host, John Clan Hill.

I'll talk to you soon.

Bye!

I need a job with a steady paycheck.

I need a job that offers health care on day one for me and my kids.

I want a job where I can get certified in technical roles, like robotics or software engineering.

In communities across the country, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $23 an hour with opportunities to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs and apprenticeships.

Learn more at aboutamazon.com.

The world is changing faster than ever.

Now, with The Economist Insider, a new premium video offering, we're giving you unprecedented access to the debates shaping our world.

I have sat around that table at NATO.

There is an incoming missile attack now.

Could you answer the question?

I'm sorry, we've got very little time left.

With a few surprises along the way.

I can't promise we'll have a cocktail every time, but we'll try.

So, don't just be an economist reader.

Get on the inside track with The Economist insider.

Go to economist.com to join the conversation.