If you’re a parent, you’ve probably grappled with the question of when your kid should get a smartphone. There’s a nationwide movement, Wait Until 8th, that argues that devices should be kept out of kids’ hands until they’re deep into middle school. Some families manage to hold out even longer. Andrew Przybylski, a professor of technology and human behavior at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute and father of two, has a different idea.

“The kids have always had phones — since they were 3,” he told me a few months ago. I almost fell off my chair.

Before you come for us with pitchforks, it’s not as extreme as it sounds. Przybylski didn’t take an iPhone out of the box, connect it to the internet, and let his children start downloading apps. Introducing the device into his children’s lives was an incredibly intentional process, akin to putting a series of training wheels on a bike. At first, the only app on the toddler phone was a photo album filled with family pictures. Then, when they got a little older, the kids got access to the phone’s camera, then audiobooks and music handpicked by the parents, and eventually, they could call and text their family.

“It’s designed so that everything about technology is a conversation,” he said. “And it’s a conversation that we and the kids have now with the idea that the kids will have this conversation with themselves in the future.”

Przybylski didn’t take an iPhone out of the box, connect it to the internet, and let his children start downloading apps.

Giving phones to toddlers is a counterintuitive idea, and that’s putting it lightly. If you’ve read any of the reporting on the mental health crisis that struck young people around the time they gained access to social media, parents are rightfully scared to give their children phones. However, once you come to terms with the fact that these devices are also a vital tool in an increasingly tech-dependent world, the concept of teaching kids how to live with a phone from an early age — with guardrails, of course — makes perfect sense.

In the past two years, the debate over kids and smartphones has been heating up. Thirty-five states have laws or rules restricting or outright banning phones in schools to address a converging set of problems, including cyberbullying, classroom distraction, and the youth mental health crisis. Social media use, specifically, has been linked to depression and anxiety in kids. Parents and teens actually agree that social media in particular is a threat to mental health. It’s one thing to try to put controls around kids’ social media use but many parents are trying to prevent their children from having smartphones for as long as possible, if at all. It’s even driving parents to sign pledges that they’ll hold out and not buy their kid a phone until eighth........

© Vox