Today, Explained - Should we give toddlers phones?

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

What we know about early childhood and screens, including a surprising argument for introducing tech at a tender age. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Megan Cunnane, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Adriene Lilly and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images.  You can find Dr. Jenny Radesky and her colleagues’ tool kit for parents here.If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here.

Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training tread plus at OnePeloton.C.A. I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology. Kids create much more what we call solitary space around a tablet. At some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone.

I'm John Gulen Hill. This is explained it to me from Vox. And this is Adam Clark Estes. So my wife and I had a kid a couple years ago, and since then, I've not been able to stop thinking about how she's going to grow up in a world dominated by tech. Adam's been covering our tech-dominated world for years now. He's a senior tech correspondent here at Vox and writes a newsletter called User Friendly. It's generally about how technology works in our lives and works for us and against us sometimes, but I'm increasingly interested in what tech is doing to the next generation. Yes, Adam is an expert, but he's a parent first and foremost. And even he's still trying to figure out how his own toddler should be interacting with screens.

Many of you are asking the same questions and coming up with a lot of different answers. I do let them watch TV every day in the morning. I feel okay about it. I don't feel great about it. We are in no screens household. We have no screens on our main living level by choice. We've been forced to give him the iPad every now and then, just so we can get things done. And we have seen a significant improvement in his math code. But if I was really being honest, I believe the only positive relationship between technology and toddlers is them not having any relationship at all. Not too long ago, Adam set out on a journey to figure out if there's actually an expert consensus on early childhood and screens.

Today, he's going to tell us about that journey from the. the history of our concern to a surprising pro-screens argument he discovered. Plus, we'll talk about how to navigate the overwhelming variety of content made for kids these days. And finally, whether all Adam's reporting has changed his own decision-making about his toddler and her tech. Okay, tell me what your kid is like, Adam. My daughter is amazing. She's super curious, very cheerful, and she's interested in tech. She's always asking to see pictures of her grandma.

on my phone. Oh, she loves her grandma. Yeah, or she might just love the alluring glow of a smartphone screening. I don't know. She loves her grandma. Right. You know, okay, I don't have any kids of my own yet, but I'm very invested in the well-being of my cousins' little ones and my friends' little ones. And the sense that I get from the culture at large is that it's generally frowned upon letting kids spend too much time scrolling. Is that right? Am I, do I have my finger on the pulse of where we are when it comes to toddlers and phones. It's definitely generally frowned upon, like the, you hear about iPad kids. I want the iPad. I'm taking away your iPad. Yeah. Give me the iPad. Or your friend might roll their eyes seeing, you know, a family of four

eating dinner at a restaurant. The kids are just staring at tablets or smartphones. People aren't even attempting to raise their kids anymore. I don't know when it started, but I think the delivery room is just giving out iPads. Yo, don't let your kid just be on. on his iPod? They don't listen. They don't listen. Yeah, I admit that when I see a kid on an iPad at a restaurant, I judge, because I'm like, I'm not going to give my imaginary children an iPad, but I also don't have any kids. I have not faced that actual hurdle, you know? I feel like I'm going to be facing a new hurdle every day for the rest of my life in some respects. But when it comes to tech, I think the big challenge here is that it is constantly changing. And these are new

challenges. We don't have clear answers on what the right thing to do is. As a parent, it feels very scary. Yeah, how did we get here? What's the history of, like, kids and this smartphone technology we have now? I'm tempted to, like, go back to the early 80s and Nintendo when I think that parents first got worried about technology and video games and screens and kids. You could even go back further to the introduction of television. Or even back further to the introduction of radio, as long as technology has been around, we have worried about kids using it, especially using it too much, being too influenced by it. Yeah, I remember this book, like, reading this book when I was little,

it was called The Boy with Square Eyes, and it was about a boy who watched way too much TV, so his eyes turned square, so he needed to, like, read and play outside, because the TV was bad, and he was watching too much of it. I feel like I was the boy with square eyes. But anyways, to kind of like jump forward to this century, smartphones really began in 2007 with the iPhone. A big turning point was when Instagram came out. That was 2010 and then Facebook, which was already a huge social media giant in 2012, but Instagram and supercharged the growth. And so Instagram was a platform that young people really liked very young.

teenagers and younger, even though legally you have to be 13 to have an Instagram account, kids find their way. Fast forward a few years. And a lot of researchers, psychologists, teachers in school, experts got worried about what they defined as a mental health crisis in young people. The review of research confirms what many parents have long feared. Social media use is linked with mental distress, self-harm, and even suicide. For decades, there's been that Surgeon General's warning on packs of cigarettes. But this morning, for the first time, a new warning about something else. Social media and what it means for kids' mental health. The rates of anxiety and depression were really shooting up all in this generation that grew up with smartphones and with apps

and with social media. Yeah, you know, I think we think a lot of the time about, like, teenagers when it comes to smartphones and social media and stuff. But what about toddlers? What's going on with them in these screens? As I've seen with my own kid, toddlers are developing the basic skills of life. Their brains are in a very early stage. They're learning vocabulary. They're learning basic social interaction. And what researchers have consistently found is that time just spent staring at screens is time when they aren't working on those skills. What kind of brought this conversation about young people and technology into the forefront? Is there a particular book or study or something that really set this off?

There is a book that has become a movement. The book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. He's an NYU professor who wrote about that mental health crisis that researchers picked up on a few years ago and really connected it to the rise of social media and how that also is coincided by a decline in traditional play, playing outside, being friends with people in real life, the kinds of interactions that he had or maybe you and I had girls. growing up, he really argued that those are disappearing and it's doing tremendous damage to a young generation. I should say that that book was very, very popular.

It was on the New York Times bestseller list, and that movement has really taken off. Well, in less than a week, Central Texas students will be heading back to class, and they'll have to deal with some new rules. Put your phones away. That's the new law impacting every kid in every school in New York. Okay. So I'm curious where all of this leaves you. as both a tech reporter and a parent, like where do you fall on whether to give your kid a phone or not and when to give your kid a phone? Well, I read the anxious generation when it came out

and it blew me away. And I felt like I needed to keep my kid off of social media and away from phone and away from technology and only playing in the woods for as long as possible. But then I started to do my own research and I started to report on this a little bit. Then I started to report on it a lot and talk to a lot of experts about this. And I started to see a different picture. Coming up, a look at that picture.

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Then I talked to this professor, Andrew Shibelsky. I'm a university professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford. I've been pretty keenly focused on this idea of how do you actually raise kids around tech in a way that doesn't give in to kind of all these stories about tech being, either amazing or terrible. And he told me something really surprising.

We decided to actually give our kids access to tech quite early. This is something that my wife and I talked and thought a whole lot about. And really kind of at some point between the ages of two and three, we decided to give our daughter her first phone. Three? Like a three-year-old? Like one, two, three. Yeah, and not tablaced, but specifically phones.

And he explains to me that, you know, you don't put your kid on an adult-sized bike and roll them down a hill. where they don't know how to ride, like you get them a small bike with training wheels. In order to have an idea of what kind of journey our daughter would have and later our son, we reflected on our own experiences how we kind of encounter technology in the 80s and 90s. And it was a bit of a gradual drip, drip, drip. And so, you know, our daughter, she didn't get a phone with all of its features on day one. She was curious about our family, so at the start it was a photo gallery of her, you know, members of her family.

that live here in Europe and all across the world. Then it became a camera so they could take pictures of their own. And then he added podcasts and music. And eventually, when they were older, they got the ability to text and make phone calls with select people with their parents and grandparents and eventually friends. Okay, podcasts. All right.

Yeah, you should totally let your baby listen to explain it to me. But, okay, a practical question. Is it easy to tweak a smartphone's settings to limit what kids can access? It's work. I would like to say it's easy, but it does require effort for the parents to go in and do it. But Apple and Google have parental controls built into the operating systems that are on 99% of the phones in the world. And they're designed to do just this to make it easy for parents to take apps away or limit time on apps. You can even buy phones that are designed to have even more flexibility.

Like there's a company called Pinwheel that sells phone software that gives you really granular control over what's happening with your kid's phone. It makes it easy to actually turn stuff on as they get older and sort of need more tools. I can kind of see, you know, your kid wants to look at pictures, take photos, and that's great. But given the option of like looking at pictures that their grandparents are going to play outside, shouldn't we push them in the direction of that second option? Why not both? It's a great question. And I think that this notion that all screen time is bad is incorrect,

but it also doesn't mean that only screen time is good, if that makes sense. You don't want to give your kids unlimited access to really anything. The central idea here always is making sure that tech is part of your larger parenting. agenda. It's part of those larger hard conversations that you're going to have. I'm happy to say, we don't have like screen time rules really in our house because we've got lots of other stuff going on. And, you know, if we take a long flight, yeah, you know, if we're visiting our family in Japan, our kids are going to play video games for 12 hours. And that's okay because it's a horrible long flight. That's not the same as being permissive, right? Like the hope here is this isn't

about, like, saying no to the online world. It's about teaching our kids how to say both yes and no for themselves, because there's going to be a time when we're not going to be around and we've got to help equip them so that they can equip themselves. I'm curious what positive screen time actually looks like. Like, I don't know. I, um, I watched a lot of TV growing up. Like, I was also the girl with square eyes. And I would be sitting on top of, like, the big box television. And my mom would tell me, like, stop, like, sit back. Go read a book. And I did do a lot of reading. I also wore glasses, probably also in part because I would read in terrible lighting. But I just, but I do know that there were positive ways. Like, I don't know,

I also watched a lot of Sesame Street and blues clues and things like that. And I just wonder, what positive screen time looks like for kids nowadays. If you can picture the opening screen of a Sesame Street episode, that's what it looks like, still. There's a tonny day that goes back down the way. There's a ton of research that goes back decades thanks to Sesame Street. that it's good for kids. Kids that watched Sesame Street showed up to kindergarten better prepared. And that was true in 1970, and it's still true today.

So it feels like a bit of a cop out to say that what can kids do on a screen that is good and for me to say, education. But it's also true. And there's growing research that actually even just the design of phones and tablets helps kids learn in a different way, like having a touch screen where they can interact with what's happening on the screen

is helpful, especially for learning vocabulary and language building. You should handpick what you want your kid to be able to watch, and you can make a YouTube playlist and give them access to just that. Handpick it, pick it with your kid,

and don't give them access to infinite anything. Don't expose them to algorithms that are designed to keep them watching, because, again, their brains aren't developed, they have a hard time putting stuff down, especially when they're young, kids should have a limited amount of content available.

Coming up next, what about all that content for toddlers these days? How to separate the good from the slop. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and car. Comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes.

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Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. When it comes to content to watch, kids have way more options than I did when I was little. There are the classics, of course, like Sesame Street, but there's also YouTube. According to Pew Research, over 80% of parents with children between two and four say their kids watch YouTube. And that number is a little over 60% for parents with kids under two. To get a better sense of what those kids and their parents might be running into out there, we brought it an expert. I am Jenny Redesky.

I am a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan Medical School. Ginny's also a media researcher and one of the directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. She has a pretty good handle of the children's media landscape these days. So what are the kids watching? Well, it's really different. Like, I grew up in the 80s when, you know, we would go watch Saturday morning cartoons all huddled together while my parents slept. It was usually a bunch of fun, entertaining stuff, like super friends. In the great hall of the Justice League, there are assembled the world's four greatest heroes.

Superman. Looks like you flew all this way for nothing. Wrong, Wonder Woman. I flew all this way for you. And it was not on demand. There was a time and a place when technology could be watched. And that's what's really different about today. That's one main difference, is now we have on-demand.

just like endless content. And we have marketplaces and platforms where these pieces of content are competing for kids' attention. That's so interesting. Can you rank the best for children's media out there? You know, I'm thinking everything from TV to that YouTube algorithm.

What is good content? And why is it good content? Our research team at the, University of Michigan and I collaborate with folks at Georgetown, University Wisconsin, Brigham Young University. We've gotten together to try to create a coding scheme that means just what are the reliable aspects of kids' media that meet definitions for quality? And it could be quality around educational, like this can teach you something. It could be quality just for like lovely storytelling that's like meaningful to a child. But we also code for things like,

designs that just try to capture attention. We call this bedazzling. It's just this extra stuff that's on a YouTube video, but it often is kind of shallow and it's really just gimmicky, you know, attention-grabbing content. We have now watched thousands and thousands of YouTube videos ranging from Sesame Street to AI-generated slop. And I'd say AI-generated slop is definitely at that bottom. You know, if you ever see a video that just looks like a computer generated, like a bunch of cars being driven by Spider-Man and Elsa. Let it go. And the whole crashing into a bunch of soccer balls, like that's the worst. And not worth your kids' time and attention. But it's just all the sort of gimmicky things that kids want to click on. So that's why it trends in the algorithm that

in those sorts of videos have just billions of views. The really best stuff, the stuff that is clearly, like, made with some care and some thoughtfulness is still the Sesame Streets, the PBS kids stuff like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. And then there's some newcomers like Bluey and Miss Rachel. Hi, friends. Who wants to play a game? Okay, bingo, let's do this. Try to magic my ears. They are showing signs of really meeting kids where they're at. They might be slower pace.

They might have a good sense of humor. They tell stories that are meaningful to a child's experience. And that is one way that we define good content. Like, it is reflecting back the world that children are into children and helping them make meaning of it. So we've mentioned some of the greatest hits. Miss Rachel, she's like Beyonce for children. They love Elmo still, which, wow, even I loved Elmo. You got your blueie, you got all these things.

I got to ask about cocoa melon. Cocoa melon. Autumn veggies start out small. Where does cocoa melon fall in the spectrum of children's entertainment? You know, to speak like my 16-year-old son, Cocoa mound's pretty mid. It's like it. And it gets middling scores from our team of coders because it is, you know, kind of surface level educational content. Everybody's happy.

We're helping each other in the house. You know, we're going to the beach and the popsicles never melt and I never get sand in my toes. There's no friction. And life is full of friction for little kids. Even kids need conflict. Even kids need conflict in their media. Every developmentalist all assumed there'd be a little bit of developmental friction in kids' life. And that's both how kids grow skills, but it's also how they grow their sense of self.

Like, huh, I handled that. I figured out how to put a spoon into this, you know, slop of baby food and try to get it to my mouth. We don't need to spoon feed kids. We've talked about what kids watch, but what about how kids watch? You know, we got a question from a listener. Hey, my name is Liz. And I'm going to quote it for you. When we go on vacation and we're using the iPad instead of the TV, the reaction when we turn it off is so much more amplified and so much more emotional.

And I'm wondering if there's any data behind small screens like iPads and phones. versus big screens like a TV. That's a great question. What we have found, we've done a little bit of research comparing when kids read off of a print book versus a tablet or when they play physical games versus digital games, kids create much more what we called solitary space around a tablet. Like it's just me in this tablet, it's me in this little sensory cocoon hanging out, you know, playing this game.

they don't see it as a shared object, the same way that a TV or a deck of cards, you know, or a print book is seen as a shared object by young kids. And when I say it's seen as there's so much informal learning that children do in early childhood. Informal learning means I'm observing the world around me and I'm learning what the unwritten rules are about the way things work. and so we can really teach kids media is for sharing it's for sitting around a TV it's not for when each of us is stressed out and doesn't want to talk to each other we all ignore each other by staring at our phones right like we can yeah we can we can we can set those norms make it predictable make it shared if you can or at least in like a shared space so you can monitor and also make it not just whenever your child is fussing if your child is you know

used to being calmed down or managed behaviorally by media, that could create a dependence on like every time I feel stressed, I need media. And really, in early childhood, it's such a great opportunity for kids to learn other emotional awareness and coping skills. Dr. Jenny Redeski and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have a toolkit coming out for parents all about kids media. You can find a link to it in our show notes. Okay, y'all, we are back with senior tech correspondent, Adam, Clark Estes. Adam, you set out on this journey to figure out what's the deal with kids and phones.

You have your own toddler, and at the beginning, you were a little like, probably not going to give her a smartphone. Where do you land now? It would be great if I had a clear answer, but I actually think that I've got a great foundation for a conversation that we have to have. in our family. I need to talk to my wife about this, see what she really thinks. I need to let my daughter grow up a little bit more. Will I give her a phone at age three? I don't think so, but will I wait until she's 13? Definitely not. Is this like a roundabout way of saying your wife

is going to make the call? Because that's how it kind of was in my family. I'd be like, Dad, can I have such a such such and she'd be like, let me check with your mom. Yes, this is a roundabout way of me saying that I need to ask my wife. That's real. You know what that is? That's partnership. That's marriage. That's healthy. I know that's right. We have an upcoming conversation about medicine and AI. We want to know. Have you used chat GPT to self-diagnose? Was it right or did you get it all wrong? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or you can send a voice memo to AskVox at Vox.com. If you like our work and want to support it, consider becoming a Vox member. You'll be able to hear this show with zero ads, and you'll also get access to a ton of special content, like members-only newsletters and articles. We're having a sale right now, and membership is over 30% off.

To become a member, head on over to Vox.com slash members. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, and it was edited by Megan Canaan. Fact-checking was by Melissa Hirsch, and it was engineered by Adrian Willie. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. I'll talk to you soon. Bye!