Want to avoid giving your kid a smartphone? Mental health experts say you're not alone — and have 5 tips

It's hard to avoid giving your child a smartphone in this new digital age, but some parents around the world are looking to buck the trend and seek out guidance on how to protect their kids from the harms of smartphone use.

Smartphone Free Childhood, a recently founded U.K. organization is aimed at uniting parents who are not giving their kids smartphones. It has since expanded internationally as research around the topic grows.

Young people who acquired a phone before the age of 10 reported worse mental health outcomes than those who acquired a phone over the age of 15, a Sapien Labs study of 27,969 18–24-year-olds from 41 countries last year found.

Meanwhile, at least 42% of children in the U.S. had a smartphone by the age of 10, according to a Common Sense report in 2021.

Some parents give their children smartphones for safety reasons, including being able to contact them and track their location when they're outside the home, but this may lead to mental health harms.

"The analogy that I often have in mind with the cell phone and technologies today is the automobile and when the automobile was first invented people were thrown from their cars and the number of fatalities was dramatic," Kathleen Pike, CEO of One Mind at Work and psychology professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told CNBC Make It in an interview.

"There were no seatbelts, there were no airbags. The construction of the chassis made people vulnerable and in recognizing the vulnerabilities that came along with this tremendous technological innovation, we instituted regulations and better design and policies that protected the health and wellbeing of drivers and passengers. We're in the earliest days with cell phones and technology broadly where