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Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#131

Post by civeng »

canyonero wrote: post #105

Giving children and teens unfettered access to social media and the internet seems to be more of a problem to me than any particular piece of hardware. The cell phone I had access to as a teen was a flip phone from Virgin Mobile that ran on "minutes". There was no web browser, no apps. I used it for texting and calling. It's up to parents to control access to the content (unfortunately, the tools and hardware that ex…

Check out the thelightphone dot com, they have already done an incredible job doing that for you.

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#132

Post by artursapek »

alexb_ wrote: post #45

There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread, most of which is just "correlation is not causation". Yes, correlation does not equal causation. But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation (we can't exactly give kids placebo phones), we keep seeing the same correlation over and over again, why is it b…

anyone denying this is just coping with their bad parenting decisions lmao, it's obvious that smartphones are bad for mental health.

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#133

Post by mschuster91 »

alexb_ wrote: post #45

There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread, most of which is just "correlation is not causation". Yes, correlation does not equal causation. But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation (we can't exactly give kids placebo phones), we keep seeing the same correlation over and over again, why is it b…

> Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other.

It simply changed the methods. Bullying tended to be extremely physical until the "zero tolerance" crap in the 90s (that had the "side effect" that victims were also punished if they resisted).

In any case, the problem of bullying could be solved by schools having actually approachable and trained staff to serve as a contact point for students being bullied.

> Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.

That was the case before smartphones as well. Stuff like "Jackass" and its culture didn't come out of nothing - adolescents across millennia did and do extremely dumb shit to impress their peers, which is also the cause of societies evolving distinct legal frameworks that differ between adolescents and adults in courts. Again, smartphones just changed the method (and, a bit, the audience potential).

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#134

Post by 0xffff2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #121

Someone tell the local high school here please, they definitely won't listen to me and require that every student have a smartphone.

How? Do they issue the kids phones? Assuming not because that seems implausibly expensive, what happens if you just don't give your kid a phone?

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#135

Post by tootie »

afavour wrote: post #100
alexb_ wrote: post #45

There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread, most of which is just "correlation is not causation". Yes, correlation does not equal causation. But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation (we can't exactly give kids placebo phones), we keep seeing the same correlation over and over again, why is it b…

> Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. No, social media does. I think it's important to be specific about that because a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is (when I was a kid there was plenty of bullying that went on via AIM!) Having access to e.g. Wikipedia is of enormous benefit to young people. Having the means to easily call your pa…

Purely anecdotal, but my kids don't use social media at all and aren't interested. They were, however, both part of a years-long group text with a dozen of more classmates. I only peaked once or twice, but it was mostly mundane and at least once saw kids gang up on the side of social justice.

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#137

Post by wussboy »

IceHegel wrote: post #40
23B1 wrote: post #24

This is one of those obvious correlations that for some reason everyone needs to question. It's not the cellphone itself that's the problem, it's the addictive content readily accessible therein. I'm no luddite, but it's pretty obvious that humans aren't meant to be bent over little black rectangles all day, addicted to our own insecurities.

There was a period of time from about 2011-2013 where it felt like many parents would complain about everyone being on their phone. Then they started using them too and stopped complaining.

> Then they started using them too and stopped complaining.

This is not a good thing.

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#139

Post by thenerdhead »

I have no problem admitting this as an adult that I was addicted to the internet. My free and near unlimited access as a kid to the early internet, addicting online video games, and newfound smartphones apps like social media definitely led to mental health challenges in my late 20s and early 30s that were hard to overcome.

I even wrote a 200+ page book on this whole topic where I had "Enough" and wanted less in my life now that I'm a parent of two young kids.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9NZ1T8C

(If anyone else is struggling and wants a free copy, send me an email and I'd gladly send you one)

Also more thoughts on this: https://jondouglas.dev/entertained-from-disappointment/

Re: Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

#140

Post by Loughla »

naravara wrote: post #87
IceHegel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a period of time from about 2011-2013 where it felt like many parents would complain about everyone being on their phone. Then they started using them too and stopped complaining.

If anything parents are as bad or worse than the kids now. I'm about 40 and am constantly having to remind my own parents to put the phone away and be more present with their grandkids when they come to visit.

Went to a high school graduation this weekend. Because we were running behind, we were in the top of the seats, right in the middle. It was nice because we could see absolutely everything, and I did notice a trend -

In the crowd, the 50+ year olds were the ones getting their phones out to dick around during the ceremony.

Youth would get the phone out to take pictures, post quickly on socials, then put the phone away.

Older folks would take a picture, post on socials, scroll through socials, check the news or whatever, then take another picture and repeat.

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