"This study…does NOT show that smartphones are beneficial to children," Jonathan Haidt told me on X last week. He was responding—in a somewhat baffling way—to my post about a new survey of 11- to 13-year-olds in Florida.
Baffling, because I did not write—not on X, and not in my Sex & Tech newsletter about the survey—that smartphones are beneficial to children, even if that's how some of the folks promoting the survey framed it. In fact, I was very careful not to overstate what the study found: Kids who had their own smartphones scored better on certain measures of well-being than kids who did not.
I was careful, in part, because saying smartphones caused these positive outcomes in their owners would be unwarranted, as would saying that not owning a smartphone triggered negative effects in the nonowners. There are some demographic differences between the groups, and probably less quantifiable differences at play here, too. It could be these differences, rather than phone ownership, driving the differences in attitudes (something I pointed out in my original post about the survey).
