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Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

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Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#101
I've struggled throughout my life with anxiety, ADHD, and bouts of depression.

I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.

I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:

- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.

- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)

- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.

- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).

From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc. And for anything "restricted" that I can't do on my phone, I largely can do on my computer (though I still block sites like reddit, youtube). But this is much healthier as I'm much less likely to pick up my laptop for hours on end, vs. opening my phone at every moment I'm bored.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#102
post #3

Soon: 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 isn't entirely true, the prefrontal cortex doesn't finish forming until age 25-26.

Also, The brain from age 4-12 is highly impressionable and quite different from 13-26.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#103
post #62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it. I think I'm immunized from it because I hate using smartphones, especially when I'm at home and could be doing the task on a PC with a big screen and keyboard. I have a few but just use them for practical tasks when away from home (occasional text, deliveries on porch, looking something up in the store, listening to podcasts, to do list for th…

Starting at a bigger screen doesn't make it better

A bigger screen isn't better? I'll have to respectfully disagree. Having a huge screen on the PC has been a godsend.

A PC isn't just a smartphone with a bigger screen. I keep a bunch of things open and fully visible at the same time (file browser, text editor, terminal, smaller browser window, larger browser window, and some space for other things). This is nothing like using a smartphone. Every one of those programs is a content viewer/editor, where I set what they show. No notifications. Most of the time they're all static, showing what I chose and waiting for my command. If this is how you use your smartphone, then I stand corrected.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#104

Is 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,"

There's a popular saying about correlation and causation

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it, it's not that hard. Also don't go for a full fledged plan for the non-dumb phone (or for the dumb one). Pick one as the main outside and live with the downsides of it too. We tend to forget that we didn't always have Google maps to help us, so we would ask a stranger for directions, we would have to wait before being able to call someone, etc.

Problem is with a dumb phone is that there are applications you may REQUIRE and it is only supported on relatively recent smartphones. This situation sucks though. Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.

So why not use a card? What does that have to do with phones?

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#106
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is with a dumb phone is that there are applications you may REQUIRE and it is only supported on relatively recent smartphones. This situation sucks though. Same with cash vs. card. You prefer cash? Well, tough shit, because many places accept only cards, and some countries are going cashless as well.

So why not use a card? What does that have to do with phones?

It is only loosely related.

You cannot get your job done if you are using a phone on which applications are not supported.

I ran across it a couple of times.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#107
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negative outcomes aren’t health outcomes as in lung sickness. Instead early consumption correlates with increased likelihood of future addiction. I’ll see if I can find some studies but it might be some weeks before I get back to this post.

Addiction is difficult to properly evaluate IMHO. For instance alcohol addiction is extremely destructive at pathological levels, and we have a flurry of studies coming to a "no safe dose" conclusion. But we also have plenty of evidence on what happens when outright banning alcohol at large scale and it's not great either. I'm not sure we have a good model or understanding yet of what it actually means to have addict…

I don't think that's true. We have thousands of years of experience. Not everything needs the perfect study taken in the perfect lab conditions for folks to make conclusions which are useful for operating in the real world.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#108
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is junk. The leading cause of Toxoplasma gondii infection in humans is under cooked meat. Cat ownership is not actually linked to higher prevalence of T. gondii infection[1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3497129/

And the second most common cause is - if I remember correctly - working a garden/field without gloves.

I think contact with contaminated soil is the vector here.
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