[dead]
Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#52In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription. There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm befor…
Driving is restricted because of responsibility (same way marriage and contracts in general require someone legally responsible)
Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.
It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#53It really depends. Not all kids are extremely dumb and get hooked by very obvious attempts from evil social networks. I still have hope for future aaron swartzs and linus torvaldss
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#54Soon: Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.
Is "smartphone usage" merely a proxy for "social media usage"?
When I got my first smartphone almost two decades ago as a 16yo, I used it mostly to play with the system, write my own UIs, debug system daemon issues, tinker with bootloaders and ended up contributing to a community distro for it. It was a fun computer in my pocket that taught me a lot and a massive upgrade over earlier phones where I had to use Opera Mini and Bombus via J2ME.
The vast majority of smartphones of today are toys with very little potential to tinker, and even when it's there, the entry barriers are enormous. Compiling Android is a huge undertaking, while as a teenager, I could already launch vim on my phone screen in a tram and hack on a SMS daemon written in Python. It's incomparable, and even if you do start, you quickly encounter hard barriers like device attestation.
These days I'm not immune to social media either, as evidenced by me writing this on my phone right now - but wouldn't these "worse mental health outcomes" be rather connected with social media usage, media consumption in general, intrusive notifications etc. that are commonly associated with but aren't inherently necessary part of smartphone usage? At the same time, my mental health isn't becoming immune to social media damage when I doomscroll on a PC just because I used a bigger screen with a physical keyboard.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#55Soon: Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.
I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass. But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing…
I'm finding "smartphone, but with Google Play disabled" a pretty good compromise.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#56Honestly seems like a proxy for bad parents have sad kids. Makes logical sense to me.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#57In the US, we restrict driving to around age 16, alcohol consumption to 18, voting to 18, and tobacco consumption to 21. Then there are industry-applied age ratings, like the MPA’s PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings. Barbiturates and amphetamines we’re once available without a prescription. There’s official/unofficial wiggle room, but there are limits. For example, if you live on a farm, you may be driving on the farm befor…
> In the US, we restrict ... alcohol consumption to 18 isn't it 21 all over the US? it was changed to cut drunk driving in the late 70s at the federal level, tied to highway funds, so the states needed to cave
Not only that, but at least in my home state you can buy tobacco at 18. Maybe the person you replied to got the two mixed up?
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#58Reading Jonathan Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' broke me. I have two kids, still far too young for smartphones, but his book and all of the surrounding research has made me DRASTICALLY alter the way I use my own smartphone and will shape the way I treat phones with them. If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/ No smart phones until after 8th grade.
Real talk, if I had kids they wouldn't get a smartphone until they turned 18. Kids have no business having smartphones.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#59Soon: Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.
This may actually be false! Owning a smartphone is so normal, even required, nowadays that people who don't even own one are often "edge cases". For example people who believe in fringe conspiracy theories, people with severe health problems, elderly people, etc. Even if resigning from phone helps by itself, "average people" rarely do.
Similar statistical effect happens with alcohol usage: from raw data it often looks like people who drink almost nothing - let's say one drink a month - are healthier than people who drink absolutely nothing.
Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study
#60Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat? "Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-... > "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"
My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat? I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom: > Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results. > One study found no significant associa…
>A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students
Sometimes I think that psychology students mental health must have extremely large influence on the field of psychology.