Mobile phone ownership at young age can impact negatively on girls’ development

Getting a mobile phone at a young age affects the well-being of girls, new research has found.

The research by the ESRI comes less than a month after another body of work found children who own a phone at the age of nine performed less well in tests - in both reading and maths - by the time they reach 13, prompting fresh calls for more detailed research by policymakers.

The latest research, by Seraphim Dempsey, Seán Lyons and Selina McCoy of the ESRI, used detailed data from 8,500 children involved in an ongoing longitudinal study called ‘Growing up in Ireland’.

It set out to examine how children with longer or shorter periods of mobile phone ownership scored in terms of their wellbeing.

The children were first surveyed in 2007 and 2008, when they were nine and when 40% said they owned a mobile phone. They were followed up again in 2011 and 2012, when they were 13 years old.

Prof McCoy, an associate research professor at the ESRI, said the research team used a scale to measure how the children felt about themselves in areas like physical appearance, anxiety, behaviour, happiness and popularity, and used a questionnaire to measure areas like emotional symptoms, conduct, hyperactivity and peer relationships.

The findings show no relationship between early mobile phone ownership and children’s socio-emotional development.

But there is evidence that girls who get a mobile phone earlier fare less well in terms of their behavioural adjustment and their academic self-concept - how they view their own academic achievements.

“These findings suggest that girls may be aware of a negative impact of mobile phone usage on their cognitive skills development, but boys are not,” the research found.

It may also reflect differences in the way in which girls and boys use mobile phones, and a potentially more detrimental impact of excessive or problematic mobile phone use on girls’ wellbeing.

“While mobile phone ownership creates greater opportunities for peer interaction, perhaps it also creates greater opportunities for peer comparison, which may impact negatively on girls’ development.

“The challenge for policymakers and society more generally is how to maximise the potential of digital technologies for education and other purposes, while mitigating any negative effects from access, particularly for children.”

The study was funded by the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment and the Commission on Communications Regulation, ComReg. It is now being assessed by both bodies with a view to informing policy.

In 2018, the former Education Minister Richard Bruton published a circular directing schools to engage with parents and students on if and how smartphones and other tablet devices should be used in schools.

Schools were asked to have regard to the appropriate use, if any, of smartphones in schools, the issues governing the use of smartphones and tablet devices in relation to recording videos or taking photos, the type of restrictions that might be applied by the school on the use of the devices, and if the phones should be allowed outside of class time.

Many schools have now prohibited certain class or age groups from bringing phones to schools and other schools have insisted that students hand their phones up to class teachers at the start of a school day.