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I call shenanigans on this. Suicide rates are not a reliable signal for underlying mental health issues in isolation Bullying via social media and group chats is endemic, and phones function as a massive signal amplifier in this regard. Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence which link early smartphone use to poor outcomes in social skills, degraded critical thinking ability, and elevated rates of depressio…
Ironically, the whole thing reads like someone did all the research and writing on a smartphone and didn't take the time to really construct an argument.
I don't disagree with the title—my assumption is also that parenting would have the largest impact—but the article does a very bad job justifying it and the conclusion that therefore technology isn't worth talking about is absurd. We do a lot of research that is aimed at helping out with marginal gains because marginal gains matter! The entire field of K-12 education exists to be a marginal improvement on top of what parents are already offering. Should we stop researching that field because there's evidence that parents are the single biggest factor in educational outcomes?
Most of our policy choices surrounding children are there explicitly to be a safety net for children whose parents can't provide the environment that they need.
First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
Yes, most of us have a gut instinct that no harm was done, but that's likely down to presentism and selective perception.
First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
Not disagreeing but this new era brought its share of issues that didn't exist before, from social fame anxiety, sexuality/gender anxiety, news doomscrolling .. Also, sadly, psychology is hyper relativistic.. the same person with a different psychological education can become suicidal or give zero damn about the same situation.
Gay people existed well before smartphones, you don't think sexuality anxiety might've been a significant issue for people in less tolerant societies?
First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
That said I have little doubt that less aware families are not enforcing sleep times as much as they used to. The moral panics on TVs and video games came with the advent of the tech then hung around for decades. People knew that kids awake late at night was bad for them. With phones, how many high schoolers have them in their rooms next to their beds? How many of us do?
Why does the chart only include data from 2003, 2020, and 2023? I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing. It is hard to get a sense of the actual data supporting the claims in the article.
I also found this confusing at first, but I realized that the author uses "American Indian" and "Native American" interchangeably. In the chart, this group is labeled "Native American Men".