What age should a kid get a phone?

Ask five people and you get five ages. Ask the research and you get something less satisfying: there is no threshold anyone has established, because the question as posed doesn’t have a general answer.

What we do have is a picture of what families are actually doing. Pew Research Center surveyed 3,054 parents of children aged 12 and under in May 2025 and found that 23% said their child had their own smartphone. Sixty-one percent said their child used one, which is a different and larger number, since plenty of children use a parent’s phone long before they own anything.

So a quarter of under-13s have a phone of their own. That is neither permission nor prohibition. It tells you that if your ten-year-old says everyone has one, they are exaggerating, and that if you hold out until fourteen, your child will not be the only one.

The number most parents are actually reacting to

Somewhere behind the age question is usually a fear about hours. The Common Sense Census put tweens aged 8 to 12 at five and a half hours of screen media a day, and teens at eight hours thirty-nine minutes. Those figures come from the 2021 census. Common Sense’s 2025 edition covers ages zero to eight only, so the tween and teen numbers are four years old and predate the current shape of short-form video.

Treat them as a direction rather than a measurement. The direction is up: the same 2025 Pew survey found daily screen use among under-13s rose from 43% in 2020 to 51%, driven largely by YouTube.

Worth separating two things that usually get argued as one: the device and the habit. Handing over a phone raises the odds of heavy use, but they are different problems with different fixes, and most household arguments treat them as a single decision.

Readiness beats birthday

The useful version of the question is not how old, but what for. A phone that exists because a child walks home alone on Tuesdays has a job. A phone that exists because their friends have one has no job, and a device with no job drifts toward whatever is most engaging, which is exactly the outcome the parent was worried about.

Three questions worth more than an age:

• Is there a specific thing this phone is for? After-school pickup, a bus route, a parent working late. If the honest answer is social pressure, that is worth naming out loud rather than dressing up as logistics.
• Can they tell you what they’d do if a stranger messaged them? Not whether they know it’s bad. What they would actually do, in words, right now.
• Do they lose things? Unglamorous and highly predictive.

None of that requires a birthday.

What the age debate misses

The public argument has hardened into a number. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation pushed four norms into policy conversations across 2025 and 2026: no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, more unsupervised play. Whatever you make of the evidence base, the norms are clear and easy to act on, which is most of why they spread.

The part we think gets lost is that “not yet” is not a plan. A child handed a locked-down device at ten and an unrestricted one at sixteen has had six years of practice at nothing. The skill they need — deciding what to do when something uncomfortable appears on a screen — is not learned by waiting.

That is the case for a first phone that starts narrow and widens as the child demonstrates they can handle each step. Not because restriction is wrong, but because restriction alone has no exit.

A reasonable position

If you want a number: most families land between 10 and 13, and there is nothing in the research that makes 11 safer than 12.

The decision that matters more is what the phone can do on day one, and what has to happen before it does more. Agree that before you buy, not after the first argument.