Kids Should Not Take Their Cell Phones to Bed. Period.
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder makes an emphatic case that children should never sleep with their phones.
Key Takeaways
- This is non-negotiable - No child of any age needs a phone in their bedroom overnight
- The research is clear - Late-night phone use damages sleep, mental health, and academic performance
- Parents: take the phones at night - A simple charging station in the kitchen solves this problem entirely
Transcript
Kids should not be on their cell phones at school all day, but an even more important time to keep kids away from their cell phones is when they go to bed at night.
I think there is no greater opportunity for parents to keep their kids safe and to minimize the negative impacts of phones than at bedtime.
The phone needs to go to bed and it needs to go to bed somewhere that is not the child's bedroom.
You have chargers elsewhere in the house.
There are other kinds of alarm clocks.
Kids do not need to charge their phone by their bed and they do not need to use it as their alarm clock because what happens is they stay up late.
They stay up late at, you know, in the best case scenario, they're not getting enough sleep, right?
Even if you have a kid who's just reading Wikipedia or reading a book in an app on their phone, they're still staying up too late.
They're still getting that blue light that's keeping them from getting good sleep.
And probably much worse things are happening sometimes, right?
They're getting texted, they're getting woken up by texts, they're staying up doing stuff that, you know, might be innocuous.
But, you know, the big thing is like, you don't know, right?
When kids take their phones to bed with them at night, you don't know who's contacting them.
You don't know what they're doing.
And the only thing you do know is they're probably not getting enough sleep and it gets worse from there.
And this is showing up in the data that this is bad for learning.
It's showing up in test scores that students who spend too much time on their phones are getting lower grades.
They're getting lower test scores.
And this is an easy thing we can do as parents to just say, don't take your phone to bed.
Your phone is not going to bed with you.
It is going to charge in the kitchen or it's going to charge in our room.
going to charge somewhere else where you cannot access it and it cannot access you and keep you awake and everybody in the world cannot contact you for who knows what purpose in the middle of the night and another thing that we got to keep in mind is that phones can charge off if you don't want your kids phone in your room because it's going to wake you up with messages turn it all the way off and it'll still charge you just have to use a different alarm clock and i think that's what we should be doing so there is no really greater danger on a chronic basis no greater access to danger and no greater opportunity for us than cell phones at night.
I think we've really got to take this seriously.
Let me know what you think.