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You can basically say the same thing about any study that isn't a double blind randomized control trial. At some point, you need to take out Occam's razor.
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
11–20 of 420 posts
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#12The 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_...
Disconnected parents existed before iPhones, though. Why has mental health deteriorated so much since 2010?
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#13[dead]
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#14Yeah, 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 th…
> She might be a weird outcast but oh well […]
Which totally won't affect her mental health.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#15Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#16I wonder, if it's possible to test the hypothesis that smartphone (or whatever internet connected device) allows one to learn more about the world without the filter
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#17[flagged]
There is nothing else than correlations. How in heaven's name are you going to find a causal relationship? Giving children a placebo phone?
> very very dishonest
It isn't dishonest. You know what's dishonest? Calling it "5 minutes of Excel". Jonathan Haidt isn't in the business of selling substack. He's a professor at NYU.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#18Aren't there "parental controls" to limit access?
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#19How early is too early? Also the phone can be set up for like one hour a day of usage too.
Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
#20I'm not sure how you would control for this. I was born in 1981, not long after the Vietnam war ended, and my Dad was a veteran with PTSD who never went to a therapist. My home life sucked and I came out of it with pretty severe depression. I became addicted to computers as a means of escape, and thankfully -- luckily -- it turned into a lucrative career.
However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.
Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.
I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.