A groundbreaking new study found surprising mental health findings for kids using smartphones.

Critics say phones ruin children’s attention spans and are causing a mental health crisis. But what if phones are not actually all that bad for kids?

A new study from the University of South Florida is challenging long-held assumptions.

“Many of my colleagues and I on our study team had read ‘The Anxious Generation’ and were quite concerned about many of the things that we read,” said University of South Florida’s Justin Martin, the study’s lead researcher, who referred to social psychologist’s Jonathan Haidt’s popular book, which argues that phone-based childhoods are causing a teen mental health epidemic.

“We expected to go into this study and find that exclusively negative things were associated with smartphone ownership, but that’s just simply not what we found,” Martin said.

In the survey of 1,510 Floridians aged 11-13 years old, kids with smartphones reported better mental health than those without smartphones on a number of different measures, including higher self-esteem and being less likely to feel depressed.

This finding held across the socioeconomic differences of the children being surveyed.

This USF survey challenges the belief that kids with phones are more likely to be shut-ins who never leave their bedroom. In fact, surveyed kids with smartphones were overall more likely to spend time with friends in person.

Martin noted that the surveyed children were using phones to spend time online with their friends, do school-related tasks, play learning games and coordinate hangouts with friends.

The study suggests that, “similar to many adults, kids need phones to have thriving social lives,” Martin said.

Dr. Megan Moreno, the principal investigator of the social media and adolescent health research team at the University of Wisconsin Department of Pediatrics, called the USF survey a........

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