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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

#261

Post by rcme »

cauch wrote: post #192
rcme wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> or some "smartphone is a confounding effect of a deeper cause, obviously".

But isn't this equally admitting smartphones are the issue? Like whatever deeper cause you're talking about existed before the smartphone. Like imagine you're a farmer and you grow crops that need a lot of water and climate change causes water to dry up in your area. What you're saying is basically "climate change didn't cause your crops to fail because you weren't growing drought resistant crops. Climate change is just a confounding effect on a deeper issue."

I think what makes the discussion about smartphones unique vs. other social topics is that the adoption of the smartphone and social media was so swift that it's very easy to study mental well-being before the smartphone and after the smartphone without worrying about other changes in lifestyle.

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

#262

Post by philsnow »

> Wait Until 8th asks parents to sign a pledge, when their children are in elementary school, that they will wait until 8th grade to give them a smartphone. The pledge only takes effect once ten families in that child’s grade have signed the pledge so that the child will have a community of peers and will not feel so isolated before 8th grade.

> We think this is a great idea, we just suggest that the pledge should be: Wait Until 9th. Or Wait Until High School. Children are usually 12 or 13 at the start of 8th grade; that is still within the period of early puberty.

I'm going to contact the Wait Until 8th people and ask them if they'd consider adding a "I'm willing to wait until before giving my kids a phone" field. Maybe there are enough people in a given community who would be glad to wait until 12th grade, but just "wait until 8th" doesn't let them discover each other.

> Plus, if 8th graders have smartphones, that means that smartphones will be everywhere in middle schools, increasing the desire of 7th graders to get them.

A while back I was considering a school system for my kids where the grades are split up into a K-5th campus and a 6th-12th campus, but they didn't have any policy about cell phone usage at either campus. I guessed that every 6th grader was going to feel pressure to have a cell phone by Christmas of their first year on the upper campus, and this was my top issue with this school system.

They're now in a school where students have to turn in phones into a phone bucket in the office before the school day starts, and have to pick them up after school. I've seen the bucket in the middle of the day and there's only like 6 phones in there, so (it seems) there's very low rates of phone ownership for kids at the school.

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

#263

Post by cpsempek »

newsclues wrote: post #189
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I’m seeing a very clear division in parenting style among my peers. Some parents allow screen time with moderation and caution because they know what excessive use leads to. The other group sees nothing wrong and screens are everywhere all the time. My friend circles are exclusively in the first group, from daycare to schools to friends. So much so that at first I thought everyone was like this. Then I s…

Smartphones and social media are tools. Drugs are tools. Both can be used or abused.

Who are the trained professionals prescribing and dosing out smartphones and social media? Like, I get your analogy, but they are so dissimilar in practice that it just ends up reading naive.

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

#264

Post by MSFT_Edging »

adastra22 wrote: post #166
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…

My kids don’t have phones. They are the only ones among their peers who don’t have a phone. I told them they can get one when they write an app and get it listed on the App Store, not before. Most people I tell this to are impressed. The only time I got crucified was the last time I mentioned it on HN. This seems to be a particular bone to pick that HN users have.

How would they have any kind of interest in making an app without an interest garnered by using the device?

My interest in technology was garnered from getting a device then wanting to do more with it.

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

#265

Post by ericmcer »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #225

This situation has been well known for years . It isn't news to any of us. So why aren't we learning more about the problem? Why are we just beating the same dead horse instead of investigating further? There is no way you could just convince the majority of children (or their parents) to just stop using mobile computers. Is there a more direct approach that could be taken? Most of the comments here can tell you from…

Your idea that if you give people space and resources they will explore and learn and do creative things is talked about in regards to many issues. I don't totally buy it.

Smartphones and computers in general are a pretty strong example of the opposite. Sure OS's are more restrictive than in the past, but anyone who has a laptop and smartphone has access to programming tools and device sensors that would have been sci-fi 20 years ago. The reality is the average person when enabled will flow down the path of least resistance, and consume whatever requires the least effort. An endless scroll of meme videos and pictures of friends is going to beat out learning a challenging new skill for 99% of kids, and most adults as well unless they are consciously avoiding it.

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

#266

Post by 908B64B197 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #110
908B64B197 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation You can also get causation and correlation reversed. Think about it: "The longer a teen uses (per day) smartphone the more he/she is depressed" could also be "The more depressed teens tend to have more smartphone use per day because they are depressed".

This would imply depressed kids get smartphones earlier. Which is a pretty large unexplained leap.

Not necessarily.

Parents that are less involved in their kids lives might get them a smartphone earlier. Could also be a proxy for how involved they are with their kids school (the private schools all try to de-emphasize phone use and some exclusive private schools here in the valley ban them altogether).

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

#267

Post by lotsofpulp »

treeman79 wrote: post #259
throwaway3838g wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not convinced that an enterprising kid couldn’t easily bypass these restrictions

My teenager has fake icons on her phone that say Snapchat, instagram, etc. they open up the calculator apps. She doesn’t like being embarrassed that she’s not on social media, so she fakes it to fit in. Her Grandma didn’t smoke, but all her friends did. So she kept a pack in her purse for years, never touched it. But had to fit in.

The people your teenager are trying to fit in with check to see for an app icon, but not the friend request from the social media account and posting history?

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

#268

Post by dv_dt »

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 always difficult, but exclusionary slights between various clicks happen and have happened just as easily in person.

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

#269

Post by SoftTalker »

jacquesm wrote: post #161
0xffff2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then they won't be able to follow the courses because all of the data required for homework/tests etc is only available in some stupid app. And no, they don't issue the phones (obviously...). Though they probably should since it is their requirement.

My kids' schools always issued a tablet or laptop for online courseware. It was not optional, you got a device locked down and pre-configured with the software the school was using.

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

#270

Post by naasking »

cauch wrote: post #253
naasking wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now, there are two identically possible situations (well, even more, but you get the jest): This is misleading. They are not "identically possible", which I assume to mean that you think they are "equally plausible". There is more evidence for smartphones and social media causing issues, because we don't see those declines until after the smartphone is introduced, regardless of age. Furthermore, other factors…

("identically possible" as: as legitimately grounded. But of course, if you are convinced that people who are not convinced by your argument can only be dishonest, of course, for you, they are not identically possible) > because we don't see those declines until after the smartphone is introduced, regardless of age. Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became g…

> Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became globally more anxiogenic

It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media.

> the measurement of the decline may be biased as people are nowadays more incline to be honest with their mental health or less incline to "shake it off", or ...

He covered this in prior articles too.

> What do you mean "cross-cultural"? Isn't the study showing that it's mainly a US problem?

No:

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...

You're ignoring a whole body of work across a decade, and this article also clearly says these reports are international but he's focusing specifically on the Anglosphere in this article. He literally links to all of the prior work discussing the trends and possible explanations, so like I said, I suggest reading them before claiming the situation is murky.

> And other experts, with similar credentials than Haidt, have been critical of the work.

And he's reviewed those as well: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/why-some-researchers-th...

The jury is not as far out as you think, only a few jurors are holding out but the direction of the verdict is quite clear now.

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