I grew up in a somewhat technologically unadvanced family. Our kitchen phone, which was tethered to the wall, had a 10-foot spiral cord, and my family never answered the phone during dinner. During middle school, I memorized home phone numbers while my friends texted each other about plans.

There was no Snapchat, Instagram or Vine for my siblings and me until high school. It’s not like we didn’t have running water or electricity. My parents weren’t hippies, either. They just didn’t want screens in front of their children’s faces at a young age. They wanted us to go outside and live presently in the world around us.

Although cell phones are a staple in everyone’s lives, parents today should keep technology away from their children until high school. That, however, is not the current situation. 

A Nielsen report published in 2017 stated that approximately 45% of children aged 10 to 12 and 15% of 8-year-olds owned cell phones while even more at least have access to one. Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Wayne State University investigated the negative effects of heavy screen time on the brain at a young age and found that while screen time stimulates the brain with a rush of dopamine causing executive functioning, which controls self-regulation, to slow for a period of time. Poor executive functioning causes difficulties in controlling emotions or impulses, completing tasks, paying attention and multitasking.

Cell phones also open the door to social media. Again in 2017, the Clinical Psychological Science journal found that high schoolers had increased rates of depressive symptoms as time spent in front of screens and social media increased. Not everyone who uses social media will suffer from these possible negative effects, but there is an existing risk to which we should not subject children. But since having a cell phone is unavoidable in today’s society, we should wait to navigate social media until high school, when people are more mature and better equipped to handle the possible stress of validation and comparison that social media can create. Children should worry about as little as possible, and especially not about complex emotional concepts of comparison and validation-seeking. 

Today, I barely remember why I thought I was missing out on so much in middle school. What I didn’t miss out on was getting to find out who I am without a cell phone. Life is definitely more difficult logistically without a smartphone, but growing up cell phone-free taught me that I do not need one to survive. Children don’t need to worry about validation from likes and comments or a screen full of notifications. Even teenagers and adults can benefit from less of our phone’s chaos. Our experiences away from screens are what matter when considering how well we lived. Phones distract us from our reality, where we should all spend more time living.