Kids and Smartphones - A Dangerous Combination

Chris McKenna, CEO of Protect Young Eyes joins us to discuss a study linking early adolescent smartphone use to depression, obesity, and insufficient sleep. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If your sons and daughters are anything like ours, the
thing they wanted the most at the earliest age was
a smart device, a smartphone. This is West Michigan's Morning News, Steve, Kelly, Brett,
Pakita Schmidty back with us soon. But a new study says,
hold on before you make that decision. Chris McKenna with
Protect Young Eyes dot Com back on a liveline with us. Chris,

(00:22):
thanks for doing this today.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Good morning, Steve, Hey Brett.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is not news to you, right, but these are
serious problems. They're linking smart phone used to depression, obesity,
insufficient sleep and more so, talk to us a little
bit about your takeaway from what you read.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, this is a recent study that was I think
officially published sort of in the November beginning December, and
it's definitely worth parents taking note of. Right. It showed
that when average age a smartphone acquisition around age twelve,
those who had one you had just as higher rates
forty percent higher odds of all BC these sixty percent

(01:02):
higher odds of insufficient sleep. And to me, this is
the smoking gun. More and more of it, just saying, look,
if there's something here that we need to dig into Further,
we're not saying that you hold a far a smartphone here,
you're all of a sudden going to have all of
these changes instantly, but they're going to contribute to other things.
So as parents, this is a signal that we need

(01:24):
to pay attention to.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
And Chris, I want to get your take on this,
because we haven't had yon since I think this was
last week Steve that we talked about it, or maybe
earlier this week. What did you think of Australia And
now you're seeing countries coming out and saying, hey, wait
a minute, we don't want these things in our adolescence
and in our kids until a certain age sixteen.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Australia is the country that every
the continent country slash that everybody is looking at right now.
That's sort of in this advocacy space. So for those
who don't know, officially, on December tenth, Australia made it
law that everybody underaged to cannot have social media and
the burden is on the platforms to identify who's under
sixteen and to kick them off, and of course because

(02:07):
you're going to be sneaking all this, but this is
what countries are watching now. We have Denmark and France
and Malaysia and others that are shaying that they want
to do the same thing. And there's a lot of
complexity to this, but this is definitely the right direction.
You know, as a society, whenever there is something that
has graphics sexual content can cause violence or harm the children,

(02:30):
we always put gates between children, minors and those things.
And that is a daily experience inside of social media.
And so this, I think it feels shocking to us,
and I feel it's like a big move to us
because we've been polled for the last fifteen or twenty
years into this space. We've been told that it's positive

(02:53):
and there are some small positive benefits to it, But
when you put children inside of that space where there's
some pop but also unfathomable harm, I think we need
to have our eye on the ladder instead of the former.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
And Chris, we have drivers training with kids before they
get into a deadly automobile that DNR does classes for
young hunters before we left them head on into the
woods with a gun. We need to have conversations with
our kids before we just charge the battery and hand
them something that and again according to another survey, can
be detrimental to their mental and physical health.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
And what you're describing is literacy, right, digital literacy, AI literacy.
These are learnings and instructions that we need to be
giving our children. As you said, like anything, whether it's
hunter safety or driver safety or whatever it is, we
prepare our children. Again, it's not bubble wrapping and saying
don't ever drive a car because you could get into
an accident. We're saying these are potentially dangerous activities. Let's

(03:55):
make sure you're ready. Let's go out of our way
to do whatever we can as societies prepare you for that,
and I think we need to. We definitely need to
approach all digital spaces in the exact same way.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
A great way to get that education and to find
out more is protect youongays dot Com. Chris McKenna, thank
you for your time today.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Thanks guys,