Jean Twenge started the debate about kids and phones, now she wants to end it

Researcher and author Jean Twenge's three teenage daughters are not exactly Luddites, but they have put up with stricter technology rules than most of their friends have had to follow.

- Catherine Pearson

NEW YORK — Researcher and author Jean Twenge's three teenage daughters are not exactly Luddites, but they have put up with stricter technology rules than most of their friends have had to follow.

Julia, 13, has a Pinwheel — a "kid's phone," she calls it — with no internet and limited apps.

And Kate, now 18, had a flip phone until she was 16 1/2. Her friends were boggled by how long it took her to plunk out simple texts, but Kate says she learned skills her peers have never had to master. Like, how to find her way without GPS. Or how to have an actual phone conversation.

Professor Twenge, 54, is a psychologist and a best-selling author who, in the past decade or so, has emerged as one of the research world's loudest voices on what she sees as the obvious, incontrovertible risks of smartphones and social media for kids. And she practices what she preaches at home.

"Having concrete rules that are reasonably strict is usually the way to go," Prof Twenge said when I asked her to describe her parenting approach during a Zoom interview.

Chief among her rules: No smartphone until you get your driver's license. And no social media until you turn 16.

Prof Twenge is not necessarily a household name like her sometimes collaborator Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and the author of the megahit The Anxious Generation.

But she has been among the few academics loudly and consistently warning about teenagers and screens for about a decade.

Her viral 2017 article, "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" — adapted from her book iGen