I’ve watched enough tweens disappear into their phones minutes after their parents hand them over, and I can’t help but wonder what it’s doing to them. A new study just gave an unsettling answer.
A new study claims that 12-year-olds who owned a smartphone were 49% more likely to develop eating disorder symptoms within two years (via JAMA Network Open).
How big is the risk?
Researchers pulled data from the ABCD Study, a nationwide survey of nearly 9,000 US adolescents, to reach the 49% figure, which reflects a higher relative risk of developing eating-disorder symptoms.
Binge-eating risk specifically jumped 67%. The study also found a 50% higher risk of inappropriate compensatory behaviors intended to prevent weight gain, such as extreme dieting, purging, or excessive exercise, by age 14. Kids became more than twice as likely to tie self-worth to their body weight.
By 14, nearly 1 in 4 kids who’d owned a phone at 12 reported at least one eating-disorder symptom, versus 15.5% of those who didn’t own one. Importantly, this study didn’t say smartphones made kids gain weight. The weight-related findings focused on eating behaviors, concern about weight, and tying self-worth to weight.
The likely reason, per lead author Jason Nagata of UCSF, is exposure. A smartphone puts a constant stream of curated, filtered, appearance-focused content in a kid’s pocket. Also, early teens are when body image and peer comparison start mattering more than they really do.
What should parents do?
Above all, parents lose visibility into what their child sees.
The findings held even after researchers controlled for external factors, including but not limited to income, parental education, race, body weight, puberty stage, and existing depression or ADHD. So, in all fairness, this isn’t just some other risk factor doing the work here.
To save children from the risk of early comparative anxiety, parents should delay handing over their children a phone, especially in the early teens. Perhaps a tablet with restricted access could be a better alternative, specifically for educational purposes.
Almost all operating systems now come with stringent parental control features; you can also install third-party apps for the same. You can limit access to certain apps, adult content, or even block it directly at the ISP level. If you absolutely have to hand your child a smartphone for whatever reason, doing it with utmost caution isn’t an exaggeration anymore.
