Is Smartphone Use Taking a Toll on Kids? This New Family Foundation Wants to Find Out

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Most of us are hostages to our smartphones to one degree or another. Whether we’re texting friends, checking email, catching up on the news, or clicking on travel pics and cute kitty videos, it’s hard to resist that hit of dopamine. Even late night doom scrolling is difficult to stop, though we know full well we’ll regret it in the morning. 

If smartphones have this effect on adults, what’s the impact on children and teens, whose brains are still developing? It’s a question that troubled Jim Winston, a psychologist and director of the Winston Family Foundation. (Not to be confused with the Winston Foundation, a human rights funder. The Winston Family Foundation doesn’t currently have a website, but one is in development.) 

Several incidents stuck in Winston’s mind. When he dropped his sons off at school, he noticed teens bent over their phones as they headed to class. “Consistently, the upper school students would be glued to their phones,” he recalled. “There was a narrow place on the sidewalk, and they would inevitably bump into me. And they were polite enough to say, ‘Excuse me,’ but they would never look up from their phones.”

In another incident at a party, a woman took her phone away from her eight-year-old son, and the child melted down. “He proceeded to cuss her out,” Winston said. “To me, these were withdrawal symptoms.”

Winston, a psychologist who specializes in addiction, believed these young people were exhibiting signs of dependency. “As a clinician, I’ve dealt with the consequences of people who start using drugs or alcohol early in life, and seen how that creates a really deleterious trajectory for them,” he said. 

Winston talked to experts in the field and read every study he could get his hands on, which only deepened his concern about young people and their devices. During that time, he was also charting a direction for his family’s foundation. His father, James Winston Sr., a real estate professional and an investor, died in 2018 and left his fortune to the Winston Family Foundation. He had far more money than anyone in his family suspected, and Jim, his sister and three cousins, all directors of the foundation, weren’t sure how they were going to disburse what turned out to be over $100 million in assets. 

Jim Winston talked to his fellow directors about what he was learning about kids and technology, and proposed the issue as one the fledgling foundation should tackle. “The idea was not only to educate, but to really see if we could provide some scientific backbone to find out what is actually happening to kids’ brains,” he said. 

The other board members agreed and the result was the Winston Family Initiative in Technology and Adolescent Brain Development (WiFi), which was established at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018. This past March, the foundation increased its commitment by providing $10 million to establish the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development at UNC-Chapel Hill. The center will educate students, conduct research, and provide resources to parents, educators and the public about the effects of technology and social media on teen social and emotional development. 

“The goal of the center is to help families and educators understand how the increased use of technology shapes children,” Winston said when the center was announced. 

Too much screen time?

Reports of a growing youth mental health crisis are everywhere. Last October, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. And last December, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the youth mental health crisis. “Even before the pandemic, an alarming number of young people struggled with feelings of helplessness, depression and thoughts of suicide — and rates have increased over the past decade.” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

The reasons for this mental health crisis are manifold, and it would be a mistake to attribute such a complex phenomenon to a single cause. Still, there is evidence that technology and social media play a role. Facebook’s own research concluded that Instagram had a negative effect on young girls’ body image, for example, and a recent study found an increase in physical tics among young people who watched TikTok videos featuring tics. Images of cutting and other forms of self-harm are easy to find online, and one study concluded that those who viewed self-harm content on Instagram showed “more self-harm and suicidality-related outcomes.” Research by psychology professor and author Jean Twenge found that “teens who spent five or more hours a day online were 71% more likely than those who spent only one hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor.” 

To date, evidence of the impact of technology on young peoples’ brains is correlative, not causative, Jim Winston explains. “There are a lot of correlative studies,” he said. “You can’t prove it, but in 2011, ownership of smartphones went over 50%. That was the tipping point. And adolescents began to get their own smartphones. And concurrent with that, we’ve seen a rise in anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation among adolescents go up every year.”

Mitch Prinstein believes the new Winston National Center at UNC-Chapel Hill will fill in some of the gaps in the understanding of how technology impacts growing brains. Prinstein, who co-directs the center, is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill. He and co-director Eva Telzer, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, have launched several research projects and expect to have preliminary results soon. 

Prinstein’s own children are about to turn 10 and 12, and as of now, he has no intention of giving them smartphones. “The centers in the brain that are activated when we see people respond to us on social media are the same centers involved in addiction to substances,” he said. “Many parents have, with good intentions, handed a very addictive device to their child, and they’ve done it at a time that is particularly concerning. Most kids get phones around seventh to eighth grade, which is the second-most critical period of brain development in a person’s life, the first being from birth to age one.”

First-gen digital natives

The new Winston National Center will continue and expand work initiated by the Winston Family Initiative in Technology and Adolescent Brain Development, conducting research, offering classes, developing curriculum for K-12 students, and providing resources for teens, parents and teachers. 

An undergraduate class called Social Media, Technology, and the Adolescent Brain, first introduced in 2020, is popular with students, many of whom have their own concerns about their generation’s fixation on technology, according to Prinstein.

“When we asked 20-year-olds to tell us about their own social media experiences, many of them said they wish that their parents did not give in to their requests to give them phones as early as they did. We have our first generation of digital natives now able to look back and tell us that they themselves think that it’s too much.”

Prinstein doesn’t expect kids — or adults — to ditch their phones any time soon, but he believes there are ways to lower the risk, including sending the message that moderation and “mindful social media use” is important. We often pick up our phones for a specific reason, such as checking the news, and “find that two hours later, you’ve gotten sucked down a TikTok rabbit hole.” he said. “Imagine if, before you pick up your phone, you spend a moment thinking, ‘What are my goals, and how long do I expect to be on, and how am I feeling right now?’”

The new center at UNC-Chapel Hill is the first institution in the U.S. to directly tackle the issue of technology, social media, and the impact on young brains. It’s a prime example of the way philanthropy can provide seed funding for an emerging, underfunded field of science — and take on a poorly understood social problem. Though it’s motivated by a particular concern of the donors, the funding could end up priming the pump for research that heads in any number of directions. It also provides an interesting philanthropic counterweight, albeit a small one, to the profound influence the tech industry has on all of our lives.

Jim Winston hopes the Winston National Center will play a critical role as the national repository for cutting-edge research and expertise on the topic. “Kids’ mental health has become a major national issue,” he said. “It makes sense to have a national center where everyone can turn when they want to know more. It’s like with COVID — you go to Johns Hopkins, they’ve been at the forefront. We’re hoping that over the next five to 10 years, we can churn out, in a hardcore scientific way, proof of the impact of technology and social media on kids’ brains.”