A Child Development Perspective
The debates on kids and the digital world are heating up. The main focus now—as in the past—is on protection. Protecting children from harm is fundamental. But if we only pay attention to limits, our efforts will fall short. We can’t ignore an axiom of child development—children need both limits to stay safe PLUS autonomy to grow. If we use the lens of young adolescent development, then the solutions we create will be much more effective.
What Are Limits Plus Autonomy?
Limits are the guardrails of development—reasonable rules, clear expectations, warm guidance, and consistency. Limits help kids feel and be safe and competent. Within these guardrails, children need to learn to walk on their own, which they learn through having some autonomy. Studies find it’s best to provide limits in autonomy-supportive ways. When children are new to a situation, they need more limits/less autonomy but as they become more familiar with it, they need fewer limits/more autonomy. The ratio of limits plus autonomy varies for individual children too, but all children need both and they necessarily go together. Rather than adults fixing things for children, they help them learn—as is age appropriate—how to begin to fix things themselves.
What Do We Know From Research?
The question I hear most is whether social media harms children’s mental health. That’s the argument Jonathan Haidt makes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The scientific community has been quick to rebut. As Candice Odgers of the University of California, Irvine writes, “his tale is one searching for evidence.”
The most comprehensive answers come from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) in a 2024 consensus report, Social Media and Adolescent Health. Committee Chair Sandro Galea of Boston University admits it was tempting to conclude social media “causes” mental health problems. However, based on the evidence, the committee reached more nuanced conclusions:
The science suggests that some features of social media function can harm some young people’s mental health.
What Do We Know From Kids?
The online world is kid’s currency—the world they grew up in, the language of their generation. It’s also a major way they access information and connect with others.
In the nationally representative Breakthrough Years Study, many of the nine- to nineteen-year-old respondents wrote about phones when asked, “What do you want to tell adults about people your age?” Their consistent message: “We aren’t social media-obsessed, our phones don’t define us, and the internet is not going to be the end of us.” They also wrote that while overusing phones is a real problem for SOME, it’s not a problem for ALL.
Setting Limits on Access to Technology in Autonomy-Supportive Ways
As of June, 2024, Education Week found that 11 states have banned or restricted cell phones in schools statewide or recommended districts create rules. But do bans work? The answer depends. A 2023 Common Sense Media study tracked the weekly smartphone use of 200 11 to 17-years-olds and found 97% used phones at school for a median of 43 minutes each day. Additionally, policies on usage varied classroom to classroom and weren’t consistently enforced.
Bans have mainly been enacted to curtail interference with learning. The Pew Research Center found in a 2024 survey that 33% of all K-12 teachers and 72% of high school teachers reported the distraction of cellphones to be a major problem. And, as Jacqueline Nesi of Brown University reports, some studies have found that following bans, there’ve been small gains in academic performance, attention to class materials, mindfulness and less nervousness.
Small gains are good but if educators want to see bigger gains on other goals, they need to work intentionally toward those goals too. This is where Limits plus autonomy can help. An approach I’ve used, Shared Solutions, provides an example:
- The adult states the problem/rule and determines the goal. Autonomy support begins with the adult providing limits, then jointly problem-solving: “Phones can’t interfere with schoolwork—how do we make this work.
- Young people generate as many solutions as possible. These ideas are written down, without judgment.
- Young people evaluate the solutions. They talk about how each solution would work for them and the adult.
- The adult and young people select a solution to try that work best for all involved. They jointly set criteria, a timeframe for determining effectiveness and consequences for infringements.
- The adults and kids meet to evaluate the solution. If it isn’t working, they repeat the process.
Setting Limits on Online Content in Autonomy-Supportive Ways
There are instructive lessons here from the youth anti-smoking campaigns of years past where rigorous evaluations found that messages like “just say no” actually increased smoking. Successful efforts, instead, combined limits plus autonomy. For example, The truth® campaign depicted teens who didn’t smoke as using their autonomy to stand up to executives who wanted to addict them. While other campaigns increased smoking, this one decreased it.
Another autonomy-supportive approach is for young people to become content-creators, not content-consumers. Schools can create courses on new media, as West Clermont Middle School (Batavia OH) is doing. They recently won an AMLE Successful Middle School Grant for their Innovation Media Center concept that support students exploring their interest through a variety of future-focused courses, including a marketing pathway that equips students with the skills needed to succeed in a digital landscape.
Building Skills
While many state legislatures have called for digital literacy programs, the NASEM report finds these efforts can fall short. They call for ongoing teacher training in digital literacy, state standards for these program and research to identify essential digital literacy skills.
We would do well to recognize the importance of promoting executive function (EF) skills as part of digital literacy. Studies consistently show that they are highly predictive of academic and life success. These attention-regulation skills are foundational for all intentional learning and are the cognitive building blocks for Life/Learning Skills, like setting goals, problem solving, thinking creatively and critically, learning self-control, and taking on challenges—all central to managing the digital world and the real world too.
In Sum
Whatever approaches we use to help children live in the digital world, we will do much better if we heed child development findings: children need limits to stay safe plus autonomy to help them grow.
Ellen Galinsky is the author of The Breakthrough Years: A Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens and President & Co-Founder of the Families and Work Institute. She also serves as Senior Research Advisor for AASA, the School Superintendents Association.