Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
jonathanhaidt.substack.com
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
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Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#2I have zero doubt about that.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#3first smart phone (iphone): 2007
2023-2007 = 16 years
Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me.
Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#4The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#5This is only tangentially related to the main point of this piece, but it's a bit concerning that the average 18-24 yo of both genders has a mental health quotient somewhere between struggling, managing, and enduring, as opposed to succeeding and thriving.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#6[flagged]
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#7The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
> The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
No, because the kids aren't the agents here: their parents are.
It's not even plausible for a kid to be able to independently acquire their own phone until they are a teenager, and even then a parent can put up many roadblocks to cripple its use (e.g. refuse to get it a cell plan).
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#8The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
Or disconnected parents give their kids ipads and iphones the earliest and with the least oversight.
And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#9The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.
The question being used to derive this data is:
> “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?”
6 year olds can't acquire smartphones on their own. So there is definitely an element of parental agency here.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#10Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet. She might be a weird outcast but oh well, it's not worth the possible damage to her mental health.
I think in few decades we'll look back at this generation of parents who just shoved smart devices in their kids hands with no filter akin to handing kids cigarettes.
It turns them into sociopaths. I have some younger Gen Z cousins and it's just weird to watch them film everything they do and post it to social media. Oh, I'm meeting a friend I haven't seen in months, let me set up my phone in the driveway and film us hugging like it's an all natural reaction that we totally didn't film multiple times.