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Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#631

Post by ericlewis »

bazmattaz wrote: post #344
ericlewis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have witnessed the same with my wife, we only have one girl.. the only thing I have imagined could work is keeping her busy and teaching her how to be attracted to decent communities that may not necessarily be who she goes to school with. edit: but I have literally no clue what I am going to do, I have like another 5 years or so.

What do you mean you have witnessed the same? Do you mean a decline in mental health?

Yes, sorry. But she now uses it all a lot less after getting on depression meds and being able to clearly see it’s impact on her mental health.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#633

Post by sw104 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #219
warner25 wrote: post #2

I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…

I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…

"It won't happen to me" said everybody who it happened to.

People always underestimate/overestimate their ability to deal with things. Your kid is very mature, but they're dealing with forces way beyond them nonetheless.

These services are built by people who know how to hook you. Young children and even teenagers cannot fully comprehend the long term damage social media can do, and are still in a stage of development in which the effects of social media can have long term, even life-long consequences.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#634

Post by Slava_Propanei »

maegul wrote: post #455
timst4 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle School educator here. I can assure you that your daughters will not be alone when it comes to a moratorium on social media. However, the girls they may very well want to be friends with may be very much into social media and group chats. My advice is to be firm but also take steps to create social opportunities for your daughters. I have a 12yo and I host board game nights with amazing snack trays. I help her…

Sounds like some form of collective action could go a long way here to the point of being imperative. Get like minded parents and teachers and administrators together on this and work together to preview and encourage alternatives. Tangentially, I’m curious if smoking went through a phase similar to this, where all the parents were doing it but there was still some recognition that children/teens shouldn’t and some p…

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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#635

Post by 908B64B197 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #219
warner25 wrote: post #2

I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…

I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…

These studies are honestly incredibly hard to do, because as the author points out, social media is simply part of the lives of the majority of people in the western world. It's impossible to isolate social media from the rest of the changes that happened in society. The attempts at doing "social media cures" and measuring the effects are cute, but since they only lasted a few weeks, are hardly good indicators of something (habits that don't stick are quite pointless to measure). Teenagers are increasingly under more and more stress with high stake testing, an increasingly competitive college admission process and increasingly grim prospects for economic mobility and long term environmental sustainability. Plus, the "smartphone revolution" lands bull's-eye on the aftermath of the 2007 Great Recession, which impacted a lot of families (was the teen depressed because of the smartphone or his house getting foreclosed?). To me, social media sounds like an incredibly convenient scapegoat to ignore all these deeper issues.

Now, your daughter drives a good point and is extremely eloquent.

There's two points where I feel like expanding what she said.

> First of all, the article stated that people using social media moderately (half an hour to one and a half hours a day) had little to no decline in their mental health, compared to a large mental health decline in those using it a lot (3-5+ hours a day)

I don't know how they measure time spent using social media (to me that's vague, is having iMessage running on my Mac "using social media"? If so I'm at at least 7 hours...). But if they measure "active use" (so let's say scrolling) 5+ hours is a lot. 35h/week, almost a full time job.

I'm wondering if the causality isn't reversed here (unhappy and depressed people in an environment where they aren't stimulated enough do end up scrolling 5+ hours a day as a consequence of their mental state).

To me, a kid that ends up on social media 5+ hours a day reeks of bad parenting. He/She should have hobbies and activities to fill that time.

> Yet another point was that people will compare themselves to other people on there.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [0] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [1]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#636

Post by itake »

AlexandrB wrote: post #107
itake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guys also just don't want to go to bars. Even in my 20s, "going out" always felt like a chore that I had to do to find a partner. Approaching girls in public has high social consequences. I've read enough reddit [0][1][2] or seen enough news articles about people banned from businesses because a guy was seen as creepy. Men need to learn what is ok and not ok when communicating with women. This is already an challenge…

> Approaching girls in public has high social consequences. My read on it is that, like cold calling and door-to-door sales, this is a skill. You can be naturally good at it, you can develop it, or you can be self-aware that you suck at it and do something else. As someone who has met all his partners in places other than bars/tinder and without any dramatic public approaches like what you're describing I would say t…

I get it’s a skill you need to develop, but women and society are not forgiving to low skill people.

If you mess up, you could lose your job, kicked out of your social safety net, or lose access to your favorite business.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#637

Post by paledot »

wizofaus wrote: post #581
remarkEon wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and that other generations also struggle with social media is additional evidence that it should be shut down, or at least heavily regulated (or regulated out of existence). There's nothing inevitable about any of this: we don't have to let malicious companies like Meta or TikTok or whoever build products that hijack your emotions for profit.

Except Facebook has since been observed as having deleterious effects on mental health even before it was available to the public, and you'd be hard pressed to describe the Facebook of that period as a malicious company hijacking our emotions for profit. Nor is it clear that they reasonably could have known the effects it was having for quite some years (to be clear, they most certainly qualify as malicious now)

I mean, Facebook orginated as a platform for Zuckerberg and his frat bros to rate the attractiveness of female classmates without their knowledge or consent. It has always been toxic.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#638

Post by IncRnd »

anigbrowl wrote: post #575
IncRnd wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in contrast to the person I replied to, I think we should take teens' perspectives on their social cliques seriously Of course I take teens' perspectives seriously. There really is no reason for you to personalize things in that way. You have talked about being accepting, yet you have consistently 100% dismissed the lived experiences of parents who disagree with your opinions.

I responded to your original comment of 'That's letting kids parent themselves' with an in-depth answer, and then you later went off on me in quite a sarcastic way. A very short comment like that doesn't give others very much to go by.

Kids setting their own bounaries and deciding what and when they can do literally is kids parenting themselves. Parents are more than just older people who ask kids what they want to do, tell them they are perfect, and give them money.

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#639

Post by skyechurch »

sgath92 wrote: post #552
skyechurch wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds awful, and yet 30% of Amish girls don't want to kill themselves. So we can go off on the Amish, provided when we finish we admit we do an even worse job of protecting our daughters' wellbeing. And the Amish are a politically and culturally irrelevant minority, who exist in the general consciousness primarily as a punch line, which makes me wonder if we couldn't come up with a more constructive way of avoiding…

> and yet 30% of Amish girls don't want to kill themselves. You can't swap in a lack of evidence as "evidence of zero." We have no reliable information on how many Amish girls want to kill themselves, so there's no way to compare the two groups in that specific aspect.

Fair enough, although it seems unlikely, being such an extraordinary number. Perhaps we could at least agree that the increase due to excessive social media use among the Amish is likely much lower (as it is in those in the general public who do not partake?).

In any case, the Amish are not a serious social comparison, they are a curiosity, and nothing we can say or speculate about their failings will make ours any less. Does China have this problem? Did the US have it 20 years ago? [SPOILER: no] Is turning our children over to exploitative corporations and addictive algorithms likely to result in good outcomes? Do we have any data about this?

Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

#640

Post by fennecfoxy »

>Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high

Separate issue, I know. But it could be much lower because men/boys often refuse to report such feelings, out of a fear of being perceived as weak/having been taught that "that's not what men do".

Self-reported data can always be a little flakey, especially on sensitive topics like this.

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