A groundbreaking new study found surprising mental health findings for kids using smartphones. Critics say phones ruin children’s attention spans and are causing a mental health crisis. But what if phones are not actually all that bad for kids?A new study from the University of South Florida is challenging long-held assumptions.“Many of my colleagues and I on our study team had read ‘The Anxious Generation’ and were quite concerned about many of the things that we read,” said University of South Florida’s Justin Martin, the study’s lead researcher, who referred to social psychologist’s Jonathan Haidt’s popular book, which argues that phone-based childhoods are causing a teen mental health epidemic.“We expected to go into this study and find that exclusively negative things were associated with smartphone ownership, but that’s just simply not what we found,” Martin said. In the survey of 1,510 Floridians aged 11-13 years old, kids with smartphones reported better men