The massive Global Mind Project study finds no mental health benefit from delaying children getting a smartphone past age 10

The study shows North American kids who get smartphones at ages 10-12 have better mental health than those who wait until 16 or 18. Naturally, media reports are misrepresenting the study.

The new study by the India-based Global Mind Project, “Protecting the developing mind in a digital age: A global policy imperative,” summarizes responses from 100,000 young adults (ages 18-24) in 163 countries recalling their childhood and adolescence.

The study scored subjects on their Mind Health Quotient index, which measures factors like suicidality, hallucinations, aggression, compulsivity, and reality detachment, crossed with the age they recalled first getting a smartphone. Mental health results differed across the eight global regions summarized, with a worldwide conclusion that teens who first received a smartphone at age 12 did not differ from those who first got a smartphone at age 18.

In particular, North American teens who got smartphones by ages 12 to 15 averaged better mental health than those who received them at 16 to 18. Teens who waited until 18 had worse outcomes than those who got a smartphone at age 9 or 10.

The GMP’s broader finding parallels those of the 2022 Stanford University School of Medicine study tracking 250 children and youth from ages 7-11 to 11-15, which “did not find a connection between the age children acquired their first cell phone and their sleep patterns, depression symptoms or grades… There doesn’t seem to be a golden rule about waiting until eighth grade or a certain age.”

Also refuting popular myths, a 2025 University of Florida Life in Media survey of 1,510 teens ages 13-15 found modest positive results from smartphone acquisition in early teen years. Those with smartphones experienced more in-person interactions, less hopelessness and depression, and less cyberbullying than those without smartphones, the study reported:

On nearly all measures of health and wellness, kids who have their own smartphones fared better, or at least no worse, than kids who don’t have their own smartphones. Kids with smartphones, for example, reported convening in-person more frequently with friends each week than kids who have no phone or share a phone with someone else. Kids with their own smartphone were less likely than kids without them to agree that “life often feels meaningless,” to be cyberbullied, and to say they felt depressed most days in the prior year. Kids with a smartphone or tablet were more likely to say they feel good about themselves than kids who don’t own these devices. Income does not explain these differences; kids in wealthier homes are actually less likely to own a smartphone than those from low-income homes.

The GMP study, like the Stanford and Life in Media studies, directly challenges American advocates pressuring for “no screens before 16,” or before age 13. Those kinds of findings aren’t going to get researchers invited to the best Beltway parties. So, don’t expect the GMP study to be cited by ban-teen-smartphones lobbies – at least, not correctly.

Naturally, that’s not the way the GMP study is being hyped

“Giving kids phones too young tied to poor mental wellbeing,” blared a typical headline on the GMP study, salted with authors’ and experts’ emotionalisms about “protecting” children’s “developing brains” derived from highlighting only a small and extreme part of the study.

There are reasons to question the way this study was conducted. Asking young adults to recall the dates and specifics of childhood experiences going back nearly two decades raises serious concerns about validity. At a minimum, 18-24-year-olds are likely to recall their recent teen years more accurately than their distant childhoods.

That validity threat leads to questioning the GMP authors’ decision to emphasize their drastically narrowed findings focused only on age extremes: “those who received their first smartphone at age 5–6 (average) versus age 13–18 (average)”.

That’s a tiny fraction of youth. Back in 2005-2012, the years ages 18-24-year-olds in the GMP study would have been 5 or 6, the proportion of 5-6-year-olds with smartphones must have been vanishingly small. Pew Research surveys showed just 10% of kids had a cellphone of any kind by age 10 in 2010. It seems very unlikely many parents accessorized their kindergartners with smartphones back then (each cost $500+ in those startup years). If smartphones existed when I was 5 and my parents had foregone two months of groceries to buy me one, my windup alarm clocks’ fates suggested I would have broken it by dinnertime.

Even today, when a hand-down or budget smartphone can be scrounged for a fraction of 2010’s cost, only 7% of American children age 11-13 first got a smartphone by age 6 or younger, the 2025 Life in Media survey found. Nearly 7 in 10 first get their smartphones by ages 10-13 now.

Viewed critically, then, the GMP’s 18-24-year-olds’ recollections straining back 12 to 20 years indicated that if they did possess a smartphone at age 5-6, their mental health is worse than if they first got a smartphone at age 13-18. In the most extreme of extreme findings, 48% of girls who had a smartphone at age 5-6 later contemplated suicide, compared to 28% of those who got a cellphone at ages 13-18 – a purported 20-point increase.

Even taken at face value, then, the study’s surprise is that for 80% to 95% of the young adults (depending on measure) asked to recall their very early ages, it made no difference to their mental health whether they had smartphones in kindergarten or high school.

Still, the GMP study’s data set potentially is better than all the hundreds of other junk studies’, the barrage of which will be an upcoming subject. Joining only the Centers for Disease Control’s 2021 and 2023 surveys, the GMP data include Adverse Childhood Experiences such as sexual assault, poor family relationships, disrupted sleep, and consuming ultra-processed foods. Broader analysis of all of the GMP data is needed to put these vital factors in context.