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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

#191

Post by xwdv »

As an adult I recognize now I was hopelessly addicted to computers as a child, and I wasn’t just playing games and talking to friends on AIM or ICQ, I was figuring out how things worked, experimenting with viruses, trying to understand HTML source code, even trying to make my own games.

As a result, I didn’t really develop like a normal child. I developed little to no empathy, and a worldview where I considered almost everyone around me some kind of moron. My estimation of a person’s worth became directly correlated to how much they knew about technology. Most computer laws were written by idiots and had no good reason to exist, etc…

The difference between me and these social media addicted kids today is that my addiction never led me spiralling into a mentally unhealthy depression – it led me head first into an extremely lucrative career that made me incredible amounts of money and reaffirmed my beliefs in myself and the world.

For most of these kids today though, social media will never lead them to fame and riches, they will never look in the mirror and see themselves look better than what they see in filtered photos of their life. They will spend all their life chasing some ideal that can never be reached, and by the time they realize that, they will look back on all the shallow wasted years of their life and become depressed, they will have no choice but to resign themselves to a shittier life than they imagined.

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

#192

Post by cauch »

rcme wrote: post #11
rtpg wrote: post #6

[flagged]

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.

I think that the problem is that for some, the obvious Occam's razor is that "smartphone is the cause. obviously" and for some "smartphone is a confounding effect of a deeper cause, obviously".

Because it is like that, I would say both of these conclusions is not scientifically acceptable: the fact that some people believe that "obviously it's not the case" is enough to demonstrate that it is in reality not obvious.

It does not mean it is impossible in social science to define causation: it is done in a lot of place, where there is a majority consensus on what is "obvious". The fact that this happened does not mean that you can conclude causation on everything you want.

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

#193

Post by hydrok9 »

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.

my mom is 62 and has started taking her ipad to bed every night, it's definitely affecting her sleep and health and she resists any suggestion that it is bad for her. When I was growing up, she didn't even want a TV in the house.

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

#194

Post by swayvil »

colinrand wrote: post #171
afavour wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Having a teenager, I've seen the bullying and caustic behavior without social media. One classic example is for a group of friends to be on a iMessage thread together, and suddenly nobody posts to it anymore because they've created another thread and left you off.

That's harsh. I cringe to think I was ever a teenager.

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

#195

Post by Tade0 »

marcodiego wrote: post #174

When I was a teenager, my mother, family and friends tried to lure into using a cellphone. They said that it would help them to contact me whenever they wanted and that it would help me to go out with them and have a good time and some fun. I knew my helicopter mother well enough and knew that the only functions a cell phone would get was to call me to tell me it was time to go home, ask where I was, what I was doing…

> but maybe a way to get teenagers not wanting a smartphone is to make it not a instrument of dopamine rush but a bringer of sadness

One doesn't exclude the other.

I was mortified seeing my relatives demonstrate how they track their children's every movement in real time as well as limit their phone usage.

All without much effect because they themselves are glued to their devices.

It's really a question of setting an example and I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason all those children received phones so early was to make them stop demanding attention so that their parents could look at screens.

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

#196

Post by giantg2 »

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…

"give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on."

It's not just them seeing it, but everyone else too. I think with the advances in media, everyone is comparing themselves and others to these higher benchmarks. Expectations seem to be incredibly skewed these days. It feels like people expect me to be some expert dev wizard who is rich, witty, has abs, and an 8" done. Sorry, we don't live in a movie...

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

#197

Post by tough »

escapedmoose wrote: post #126
afavour wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But the form-factor of technology necessarily alters our relationship to it. Compared to a laptop or desktop PC, a smartphone is a constant presence, always in your kid’s pocket or backpack, easily snuck under a desk for a distraction from a boring lecture, easily used by friends or bullies to record you unnoticed. Besides that, parents can learn to restrict their kids’ phones from social media use, but that seems li…

> you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use.

I think you got it backwards, the emergency case is just the -excuse- parents use.

In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I? Real phones, with apps and games and shit.

FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively.

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

#198

Post by AnotherGoodName »

afavour wrote: post #122
jacquesm wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphone = pushy social media in your pocket 24x7. In practice I suspect that amongst highschoolers the ratio of time spent between wikipedia and social media (and gaming as well) heavily favors the latter.

Like I said: > It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed. The problem is parents who don't care enough to get actively involved in their child's lives to this extent.

They care. That's exactly why they are thinking about the problems that having a smart phone would have. You are just drawing the line differently to others.

There's a whole range of solutions. From no smartphone to letting them have a smart phone but lock it down. All have reasonable points and show strong involvement in their child's lives.

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

#199

Post by trgn »

sdfghswe wrote: post #153
afavour wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. C'mon. Guns are dumb. Smartphones are smart. It's entirely possible to set up a smartphone in a way that blocks access to certain apps, limits how many hours you can use an app in a day, etc etc. The only way your parallel works is if guns had the ability to selectively target bad guys.

You can also lock guns away, and people find way past the locks. Someone forgets to lock them or someone actively breaks the lock. Sure, smartphones aren't the problem _in themselves_. But blocking apps is also not the solution.

fwiw - I think we're largely on the same page on this specific issue.

Maybe a philosophical divergence though:

> Sure, smartphones aren't the problem _in themselves_.

It is time we start to accept that some technologies are vile, and yes, they are a problem _in themselves_.

The modernist mind (ie. the human mind as it exists today) cannot accept this because it seems like a fetishistic argument. Consider the evil monkey paw, that thing itself is evil. A modernist will refuse to accept such a reality. We have conditioned ourselves and each other that each inanimate thing is just an inert tool, applied in good or bad judgement. In a materialistic sense this is true. It is also completely trivial. Taking a step back, and surveying the totality of the environment, how some technologies just seem to be misapplied consistently, how some technologies leave a wake of destruction, how some technologies seem to cast an evil spell on everybody in its orbit.

This is the reality in which we find ourselves. The only way out is true. Smashing the idol is the only way to ban the evil spirit.

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

#200

Post by ok_dad »

It's the social media, like everyone here is saying, however the missing point around here is that it's hard to be happy and have great mental health when you have to struggle and hustle everyday to earn enough to live. Not to mention in America if you lose a job you lose health insurance. To me it's pretty clear that the real problem is the world sliding into a new "gilded age" and everyone can see it in real-time because of social media, and we're all fucking depressed about it. I've been using computers quite significantly since I was about 8 in the Prodigy-then-AOL era; probably several hours a day or more and at least as much as I look at my phone today. I wasn't really depressed until things started to become clear that I had a lesser future than my parents had, and I learned that primarily from social media. Shutting down social media would just mask the problem somewhat, not eliminate it, in my view.
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