Parents who collectively make a pact to delay giving their children smartphones until they are 14 years old improve the mental health of the group as a whole, a new study has suggested.
A new working paper outlining “the first quasi-experimental evidence” on community efforts to delay children’s smartphone ownership found that groups who delayed the introduction of smartphones to the mid-teens reported better mental health than those who did not.
Economist Gregory Veramendi examined more than 12,000 UK state primary schools, using government data and school surveys to track the differences in reported child mental health issues between schools that had a high uptake of the policy (over 20 per cent of parents) and schools with a low uptake (below five per cent).
He found that in the high uptake schools, the number of pupils with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs fell by around eight per cent when compared to low-uptake schools.
“My main finding is that children’s recorded mental-health needs fall substantially where the pact is widely adopted,” he wrote in the paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and has been published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
“The findings support coordinated ownership delay as a near-zero-cost complement to school phone bans and statutory age limits, and they give parents causal evidence for delaying a child’s first smartphone through the primary-school years.”
Mr Veramendi noted that while schools are now legally obligated to have a smartphone ban, this only restricts exposure to smartphones during school hours. He said there was no substantial mental health benefit from in-school phone bans alone.
“Coordinated ownership delay is a different policy,” he noted. “It changes the norm for when children first receive a smartphone, and it costs almost nothing to operate. The evidence here indicates that where communities adopt it intensively, children’s mental-health need falls.”
In 2024, campaign group Smartphone Free Childhood launched its “parent pact”, encouraging parents to collectively agree not to give their children smartphones until they turn 14. The pact has been signed by more than 165,000 families, according to the group.
Speaking to The Times, Cadice Odgers, professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, warned against reading too much into the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
She said: “I would not place this in the ‘causal’ evidence category … it does not actually measure whether the students had lower smartphone use or exposure; the measure is parents’ intent to give the child a phone as indicated by signing a pledge. It is a bold jump here to making this claim. Where is the evidence that signing this pledge led to reduced smartphone ownership, use and delay?”
Previous research from King’s College London showed that one in four children and young people have a problematic relationship with smartphones consistent with behavioural addiction.
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