A majority of American parents want kids to have access to their phones at school, a new survey finds. In addition, most parents think cellphones have a positive effect on their kids' lives.
Debates over teens and smartphones often contain the (assumed or explicit) premise that parents want their kids to stop living what author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a "phone-based childhood." Popular wisdom today says parents think phones are negatively impacting their childrens' lives and want kids to have less access to phones but feel powerless to change the situation—a premise baked into Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (read my review here).
