No smartphone until 14?!? I could hardly believe it when my husband suggested exactly that a few years ago. By the time our son is 12 at the latest, we’ll give in and allow him a smartphone, I bet. By now I’m glad we didn’t commit to 12, otherwise our child would have a phone today. And since to this day we haven’t managed to model balanced phone use ourselves, that might not have gone well anyway.
But why is a phone at 10 or 12 still not a good idea? It’s not only because of the bad example of parents’ excessive use, but also because kids get used too early to a crutch they don’t yet need at their stage of development. So far, many parents have held the view that it’s still good for kids to learn (early) to handle a smartphone responsibly, just as they have to learn to put down the Nintendo or close the book when it’s time for dinner or something else. Some kids turn out to be very willing to learn and responsible, some less so.
But the point of learning responsibility with a device is no longer what this is about. Regardless of that, critical voices about smartphone ownership in the preteen years are piling up. Especially from parents who work in the tech or media industry themselves. The main issues are the smartphone’s character as a babysitter that keeps kids passively entertained, and kids’ use of social media.
The obligatory “phones are bad” list
Owning a phone doesn’t have to be unhealthy, but it quickly brings disadvantages:
- Declining eyesight. “Especially in children, there is a link between frequent use of smartphones, tablets and computers and nearsightedness,” says Dr. Martin Zinkernagel of the Inselspital university hospital in Bern, Switzerland.
- Trouble falling asleep
- Bad for concentration and working memory
- You unlearn the ability to find solutions yourself.
- It tempts you to live less in the moment, because it’s so easy to plan the next step with the phone, for example how best to post the moment on social media.
- Bullying happens faster online, and you get bullied faster; the eye contact of a face-to-face conversation is missing, and with it the chance to read in the other person’s eyes that you’ve gone too far.
- Social media train the endorphins in the brain in an exaggeratedly simple way. Good experiences in the real world are sought less often, even though they reward the brain and our development more sustainably.
- Questionable development of the self against the backdrop of the showcase that is social media and online gaming communities. I’m not myself, I stage myself, possibly in several versions.
- Through the constantly available comparison with the whole world, and especially with wonderfully staged influencers, the risk of self-devaluation rises, and with it the risk of depression.
- It’s all too easy to disappear into groups that all think alike (keyword: the misogyny trap of Andrew Tate).
“Everyone has a phone”: what to do with the pressure?
The obvious challenge, of course, is that our kids don’t want to lose the (digital) connection to their friends. Where I live, in Switzerland, as in Germany, it has become the norm to have a phone by the time you start secondary school at the latest, around age 12. So if everyone has a smartphone and everyone is in the class chat, your child misses out on quite a bit.
So what do we do with the pressure to have a smartphone? We push back. We form a club. We team up with people who see it the way we do and whose kids are the same age.
We first heard from a school principal that his kids don’t get a phone until 14 (“At the earliest!”). By now we hear from other parents at school that they are critical of early phone use. But the best thing that could have happened to us is our neighbors. He’s a psychologist, brimming with knowledge about positive psychology, self-improvement, the much sought-after “good life.” Both parents are influencers on YouTube and Instagram, so their media use is enormous. One evening they asked us, quite shyly, how we saw the question of smartphones for kids. And now they cultivate the friendship with us, relieved, because they’ve found allies in their plan to allow their kids a phone only from 14. Our kids aren’t cut off from media; the first thing the neighbors’ kid did was teach our son a game on the iPad. But they can comfort each other if, before 14, they ever really do feel excluded from a chat. And in the meantime they cultivate friendship the old way: face to face.
Kids need peers, and parents need allies in raising them.
Goals until 14
- The child learns to find their own way in life. Reading a city map or the bus schedule, borrowing a book from the library, cooking a meal, sending something handwritten (by the way, writing by hand strengthens the connection between the two halves of the brain). As a smartphone-spoiled and therefore control-addicted parent, I find this goal a little difficult. I let our son ride the train across all of Switzerland without a phone and only find out at the end whether he arrived safely.
- The child has more time to discover nature with open eyes. As a parent, I send them outside more often. Or do things with them.
- By age 14, the child has already had four years of media and computer classes at school and by then knows more about the strengths and weaknesses of the digital world. The German educationalist Paula Bleckmann, by the way, argues for a kind of driver’s license for media, just as you may and must prove your roadworthiness for a bike, a scooter and a car at different ages.
- The child knows they can come to us parents with anything they experience on the internet. Or to other close, trusted adults. I stay in conversation with my child by regularly scheduling time to go for a walk or a bike ride with them.
- The child trains their social media skills within the family. They FaceTime with the grandparents, make TikTok videos with Mom.
Finding compromises.
What if you’ve already promised your child a smartphone by a certain date and now realize it’s too early? Or you want to stay in touch with your child when they’re out on their own? That’s where good old compromise helps, of course. The critical voices are mainly about excessive smartphone use and the use of social media.
- Maybe a smartphone with strict parental controls is the solution, one that allows only a scant hour of use per day in the first year. Or you ban social media. Recent research on adults shows that limiting social media use to about 30 minutes a day can lead to a significant improvement in well-being.
- Maybe a phone that can only make calls and send texts is the solution until 14. Maybe you also offer your child to run the class chat through your number.
“Kids where I live mostly get a phone early, many already in elementary school, sometimes unsecured with access to everything the phone offers. The kids from our church usually get their phone only at 12 or even at 16. Parents also differ completely in how they handle the internet. Some parents set time limits for Wi-Fi use at home, while others provide their mobile hotspot to control online and offline time that way. But there are also families with no limits at all. What regularly becomes clear in all my conversations with teens: if someone wants to get at something, they’ll find a way. Teens are creative, after all. So older devices get borrowed from friends, or the free Wi-Fi of nearby stores gets used.”
English version: September 2026
