What if my child already has a smartphone?
Most of what we talk about at Wait Mate is the case for waiting. But plenty of families reading this are past that point. The phone's already in the house, and "wait" isn't really the question anymore. This one's for you, and there's no lecture in it.
There's no shortage of opinions on kids and phones, which doesn't make deciding any easier. So this post gives you three views: what we hear from parents and carers, what the research says, and what the professionals say. Then it ends with a few small changes you can make tonight if you want to.
What we hear from parents
The phone almost always starts with good intentions. Wanting a text when she's got on the bus home. Making sure he gets the message when training moves. A birthday present from the grandparents. Not wanting her to be the only one left out. We get it. They're valid reasons.
Then, parents tell us, the bus problem got sorted in about a week, and everything else turned up. Where it charges. Who pays for the plan. What happens when it breaks. Which apps are allowed, and who decides. Whether it leaves the bedroom at night, and who walks it out. Sleepovers. How much is too much. How you find out what they're really watching. Whether they'll come to you when something scares them.
The other thing we hear, usually when parents open up in the Q&A at the end of a Wait Mate Parent Session, is that nobody really wants to be the bad guy. Parents say they're closer to their kids than their own parents were to them, and they like being someone their kid wants to be around. Taking something off them puts a dent in that.
And yet they say the same thing about timing, over and over. Saying no to a phone in the first place is a lot easier than taking one back later.
From here, parents tend to go one of two ways.
If you decide to keep it
Most families reading this are keeping the phone, and the parents who keep it and still feel alright about it tend to do a couple of the same things.
The first is changing who owns it. It's a firm line, drawn calmly. I paid for it, I pay for the plan, you're borrowing it. It changes the argument, because you're no longer taking away something that belongs to them.
The second is writing it down. A lot of parents find the borrowing idea only really sticks once it's on paper. A phone contract is just the two of you agreeing the terms together and both signing it: when it's used and when it isn't, where it charges, which apps are allowed, that you'll keep some visibility while they're still learning, and what happens if the terms slip. Kids argue with a rule that appeared out of nowhere. They argue a lot less with something they helped write and put their name to. And if the phone's already been in the house a while with no rules attached, it's never too late to sit down and start one. You're not springing a punishment, you're naming out loud how it should have been working all along.
If you decide to take it back
The ones who've done it say the timing made more difference than anything they said. Rather than picking a day, they waited for one.
- Wait till it breaks, and don't fix it.
- Wait till it goes missing, and don't replace it.
- Or do it the week you're going away, when there's often no signal anyway. And if there is, you've at least got the bandwidth to handle the pushback.
In each case the phone goes, and the removal isn't sitting entirely on the parent.
Most describe about three weeks of it being awful, and then things settle. The biggest changes showed up in the kids who'd been struggling most. Those same parents are the first to say it isn't every family's answer.
Whichever way you go, the change parents notice fastest is sleep. More on that below.
What the research says
A large study followed more than ten thousand young adolescents and found that the ones who got smartphones younger tended to be getting less sleep.
A follow-up looked at the kids who already had a phone. More time on it was linked with low mood, poorer sleep and weight problems. And one habit stood out: the kids who kept the phone out of the bedroom slept better.
Hours matter too. Big surveys put tweens at around five and a half hours a day on screens for entertainment, and teens closer to nine (this is outside of school).
Having your own phone nearby, even silent and face down, has also been shown to leave you with less attention and memory for whatever's in front of you. The distraction is real whether the phone is in their hands or not.
We're still in the early days of smartphone research, but two things stand out if your child already has one. How much they're on it matters, and so does where the phone spends the night.
Sources: Barzilay et al., Pediatrics, 2026. Bren et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2026. Common Sense Media, 2021. Ward et al., Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017.
What the professionals say
Delaying is much better than removing. Deirdre Brandner has been a child psychologist for more than thirty years, and it's the first thing she says. Taking a phone back is harder than never giving one, and she says parents shouldn't be surprised when it turns out that way.
A phone shouldn't be a gift, she says, because a gift belongs to whoever got it. She suggests saying "I'm allowing you to have a phone" instead. It makes it much harder for a kid to come back with "you can't take that off me, it was my birthday present."
Sleep is where a difference shows up fastest. Dr Marco Gleeson is a GP with a paediatric background. Kids this age need eight and a half to nine hours a night, and teenagers need more.
Phones affect sleep in two ways. The backlit screen holds off melatonin, the hormone that winds us down, so the brain keeps thinking it's daytime. And just knowing the phone is in the room is enough on its own. Face down and silent still means something might have come in.
His advice for kids who already have one: the phone doesn't come into the bedroom, and it goes down two hours before bed. It charges somewhere shared, where they can grab it on the way out in the morning, not the second they wake up.
And if something's started to niggle at you, pay attention to it. Deirdre says watch four things:
- how often they're looking at it
- what they're doing on it
- how secretive they are about it
- how reluctant they are to be without it
Small changes that add up
The research points to two things: how much they're on it, and where the phone spends the night. The good news in that is you don't have to fix everything at once. Anything that trims the total, or gets the phone out of the bedroom, is a real change. A few that parents find doable:
- Set a couple of device-free spaces and times, and actually hold them. The dinner table, the car, the first hour after school. It's less about the particular room than the habit of the phone not always being in hand.
- Keep phones out of bedrooms overnight. It's the change parents notice fastest, for the reasons Dr Gleeson gives above.
- Mirror the main apps to your own phone. Most platforms let you see their activity from your own device. Set it up together, out in the open, so it's visibility and not snooping.
- Once a week, sit down together and go through the browsing history, the messages, and who's turned up in their contacts and chats. On a predictable day it becomes a check-in rather than a raid, and it can ease off as they show you they've got it.
The thread through all of it is that none of it is secret. It's part of the deal you've agreed on, and it's meant to loosen as they earn it.
Where to start
- Tonight, the phone charges outside the bedroom.
- This week, notice the four things above: how often, what, how secret, how reluctant.
- Pick one device-free time and hold it. The dinner table or the car is an easy start.
- When you're ready, change who owns it and write the terms down together. You paid for it, so it's yours, and they're borrowing it.
Have more advice to share? We'd love to hear it. Reach us on email.