The sources behind the pamphlet

Are They Ready for a Phone? 2026 edition

Everything the pamphlet claims, with a link to where it came from. Follow along with the pamphlet, panel for panel.

Download the pamphlet (PDF)

The research on kids and phones is honestly unsettled. Some of what follows supports being worried and some of it points the other direction. I have linked both so you can decide which you find convincing.I will note where a study is weaker than its headlines made it sound.

Panel one: what the research says

Four claims on that panel. Here is where each one came from.

"Nobody has shown the phone is the cause"

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine put a committee on this in 2024. They went through the evidence and concluded it "did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level."Read that phrase carefully, because it is doing less work than it looks like it is. "Population level" means the average across all kids. An average can sit at zero while some kids are being hurt quite a lot and others are perfectly fine, and those two findings cancel each other out in the arithmetic. It is a real result and it is not a result about your kid.The part both camps actually agree on is that the effects vary enormously from kid to kid. That is the finding with something in it for a parent: the research is telling you to watch your own child rather than to relax or to panic.The biggest recent review landed in JAMA Pediatrics in 2026, covering 153 studies that followed kids over time. It does find real associations. They are just small, around 0.09 to 0.21 as correlations, and strongest in early adolescence.Worth reading right next to it: the expert reaction collected by the Science Media Centre. Amy Orben called the review useful and pointed out that this kind of study still cannot establish cause. Chris Ferguson was blunter, saying the authors overinterpret their results and that publication bias turned up for some outcomes.

"Sleep is the exception"

This is the one the pamphlet quotes. A 2016 review in JAMA Pediatrics pulled together twenty studies covering 125,198 kids and found that a phone just sitting there within reach at bedtime, not even being used, still raised the odds of not getting enough sleep by about 80 percent.A consensus statement from more than 120 researchers across 11 fields put some numbers on the agreement: 97.6 percent agreed heavy phone and social media use can cause sleep problems, and 100 percent agreed that chronic sleep loss damages mental health. That is about as close to agreement as this field gets.That same panel also said the evidence is still too thin to support or argue against delaying smartphones or going phone-free at school. Which is exactly why the pamphlet does not hand anybody an age.

"What they do matters more than whether they have one"

The Life in Media Survey out of the University of South Florida asked more than 1,500 kids aged 11 to 13 about this in 2025. Kids who often post publicly reported moderate to severe depression at 54 percent, against 25 percent for kids who rarely post.Here is the catch, and it is a real one: this is a snapshot, not kids tracked over time, it is a single state, and it cannot tell you whether posting makes kids miserable or miserable kids post more. It is in the pamphlet because it shows that "how many hours" is the wrong question, not because it proves anything caused anything.

"Most harm through phones actually comes from other kids"

Same survey. Nearly six in ten of those kids said they had been bullied online in the previous three months.

The ownership numbers

Pew Research Center asked 3,054 parents in October 2025. Roughly three in ten kids aged 8 to 10 have their own smartphone, and about six in ten 11 and 12 year olds do.You may have seen "half of kids have a phone by 11" somewhere. That comes from a Common Sense Media survey last run back in 2021, which is why I did not use it.

The argument, from both sides

Jonathan Haidt argues that phones and social media caused a real collapse in teen mental health, and that the fix has to be collective: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools. The Anxious Generation is the book. After Babel is where he works the argument out in public.Candice Odgers reviewed that book in Nature and came out the other way. Most of the data is correlational, she argues, and kids who are already struggling tend to use these platforms more, and differently.The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory is the one everybody cites, and it hedges itself. It warns of "a profound risk of harm" and also says "we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents."

If you read all three and come away unsure, that is the right reaction to where the evidence actually stands.

Panel two: deciding

Wait Until 8th

The pledge is to hold off on a smartphone until the end of eighth grade, and it does not bind you until ten families in your own kid's grade have signed it too. There is a list of which schools have one going, and six Vermont schools are on it.Keep in mind that wait Until 8th is an advocacy group, and it publishes no study showing the pledge changes outcomes. It is strictly a coordination tool; a good thing, because coordination is the actual problem.

As of the Wait Until 8th list dated October 7, 2026, these six Vermont schools have an active pledge:Browns River Middle School, Jericho
Camels Hump Middle School, Richmond
Christ the King School, Burlington
Jericho Elementary School
Richmond Elementary School
Stowe Elementary SchoolMostly the Mount Mansfield schools, in other words, plus one in Burlington and one in Stowe.

If your school is not on that list, that is the normal situation and it is also the thing you can change. A pledge starts with one parent, and Wait Until 8th has a How to Start page for exactly this, plus a page aimed at school leaders if you would rather bring it to the principal than to the class email list. Ten families in one grade is a smaller number than it sounds like.

Worth saying: I could not find any Vermont news coverage of the pledge, so there is no local article to point you at. The six schools above come from Wait Until 8th's own list, which they update periodically. Check it rather than taking my word for it, especially if you are reading this a while after it was written.

One catch on smartwatches

This one came off the pamphlet for space and it is worth knowing. Vermont schools are phone-free from arrival to dismissal, and the Agency of Education model policy that every district has to meet names smartwatches, earbuds and smart glasses right alongside phones.So a watch is a fine answer to the walk home and to after-school pickup. It is not a way around the school day, and that is the part most of the news coverage missed.Your district's own policy has to be at least as strict as the state model, so check the school handbook for anything stricter.

The Vermont school rules

Vermont schools are phone-free from arrival to dismissal. The law is Act 72 of 2025, resulting in the statute 16 V.S.A. section 583.The part most coverage missed: the Agency of Education model policy names smartwatches, earbuds and smart glasses too. So a watch is not a workaround for the school day.Your district's own policy has to be at least as strict as the state model, so check the school handbook for anything stricter.

What they actually want

The pamphlet makes the point that what a kid usually wants is not the device, it is not being the one left out. That part you can answer without handing over a smartphone. Here are the options, with no affiliate deal on my end and no reviews, just pointers.Apple Watch Family Setup lets you set up a watch for a kid with no iPhone of their own. It needs a cellular model and its own monthly plan.Galaxy Watch for Kids is the Android version, run through Google Family Link. It needs a Samsung phone to pair with, which rules it out for a lot of households.Gabb, Pinwheel, Troomi and Bark all sell locked-down phones built for kids. Compare the all-in monthly cost rather than the headline price, because some of them bill the device separately from the service. At least one lets you keep your own carrier and just pay for the controls, which is a lot cheaper than buying a second wireless plan.If you are thinking about a plain flip phone, make sure it is a current 4G model. Old ones out of a drawer often will not activate at all anymore.

What we do at our house

The pamphlet has the short version. Here is the longer one, and the same caveat goes first: we are on the strict end of this, I know it, and I am not holding our family up as the standard. Different households land in different places for good reasons.Our daughter is 11 and has no device of her own. When she uses one of ours it is locked to a single app with Guided Access, so she can do the thing she needs to do and nothing else.When friends come over, we set the Apple TV so it will only play music and appropriate, purchased shows and movies, and anything else needs our say-so. That one solves a problem every parent has: a houseful of kids will always find the one screen you forgot about.She is getting a Tin Can, which is a little Wi-Fi landline for kids. Calls only, to numbers we approve, no apps and no texting. It means she can call her friends without any of the rest of it arriving at the same time.We are planning on high school before a smartphone. That is our aim and not a prediction, and we will see how it goes.

Tin Can is around $100 for the device. Calling other Tin Cans is free, and calling regular phone numbers, which is what most families will want, runs $9.99 a month. I have no affiliate deal with them, we just bought one.

Panel three: before the box is opened

The written agreement

Common Sense Media has a free Family Media Agreement, written in both English and Spanish in the same file. It has signature lines for both kids and parents, and promises from the parent too, not just rules for the kid. That part matters more than it sounds like it should.The American Academy of Pediatrics has a Family Media Plan as well. It is a builder you fill in rather than something you print, and it adjusts by age.

Turning the controls on

Apple calls it Screen Time, inside Family Sharing. Google calls it Family Link. Both have their own instructions and both companies move these pages around constantly, so I am sending you to the source rather than writing a walkthrough that goes stale.

The 13 versus 18 thing

The short version, and the one on the pamphlet: on both Apple and Google, the controls are yours until your kid turns 18.You may hear that they stop at 13. They do not. Apple's own documentation says Limit Adult Websites is on by default for children under 18, that Ask to Buy is on by default and in some places cannot be turned off under 18, and that content restrictions keep applying by age. On the Google side, a supervised kid moves to a supervised teen account at 13, supervision carries on, and teens aged 13 to 17 need a parent's approval to end it. A parent can end it at any time, and only a parent can.Where the 13 story comes from is a bit of fine print. Apple lists turning 13 as one of the few ways a child account can be removed from a family group, and says that at that age a child "may be permitted to maintain their account without participating in Family Sharing if certain conditions are met." Apple never says what those conditions are. Reading that as "my 13-year-old can walk out of Family Sharing" is almost certainly wrong: unspecified conditions in a legal disclosure are usually there to cover narrow situations, not ordinary families. If your kid tells you the rules change on their birthday, they are repeating a rumor.One real wrinkle: the child-account age is not 13 everywhere. Apple sets it by location, under 18 in Texas and Brazil, under 16 in places like Germany and Ireland, and under 13 in most of the United States including Vermont.Worth knowing either way: Google changed its policy here in early 2026, after a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. Before that, a kid really could switch supervision off at 13. Any guide written before 2026 will tell you so.

Both companies can change this again, so it is worth checking Apple's parent disclosure and Google's Family Link FAQ before you lean on it.

Panel four: if something already happened

Take It Down is free, and it is run by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. If a nude or explicit picture of someone under 18 has been shared, or somebody is threatening to share one, this creates a digital fingerprint of the image so participating sites can find it and take it down. The picture never leaves the device, and you can stay anonymous.Report it to NCMEC's CyberTipline. That is also how law enforcement gets involved.Do not pay. Paying does not stop it, and it marks the account as one that pays.Keep the messages. Screenshots, account names, all of it, before anybody blocks anything.

Your kid is not in trouble. The people who do this are adults running a business, and they are good at it.

If the picture is of somebody 18 or over, StopNCII is the equivalent service.

If you want to go further

Common Sense Media reviews apps and games by age, which is handy once the phone is actually in the house.The full consensus statement from further up the page is worth a read if you want to see what 120 researchers agreed and disagreed on, rather than taking my summary at face value.Vermont's Age-Appropriate Design Code, Act 63 of 2025, takes effect January 1, 2027. It changes the default privacy settings on services Vermont minors use, and the Attorney General is writing the rules now.

Stuck on the setup?

I set up first phones for families around Burlington and northwestern Vermont: controls on, accounts right, and a walk through what we just turned on so you can change it yourself later. I don't sell phones, and I have no opinion to sell you about when your kid should have one.Call, text or email. My door's always open!

Travis Jones, Trav Does Tech
(802) 438-8728
[email protected]