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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

#271

Post by mordae »

sb057 wrote: post #141
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…

>>Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. >No, social media does. Social media (and other mindless media consumption) is perhaps the defining role for smartphones, especially for children.

Uh-uh.

Calls. SMS. Family (and friend) chats. Maps. Language translation. Camera. Shopping lists. Calendar. Weather reports. School email 2FA. Public transportation app. Possibly payments.

And then some educational / misc stuff on top like PlantNet.

All of that is there and convenient to use. Literally the only two problems are unmoderated antisocial platforms and gambling.

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

#272

Post by branon »

alexb_ wrote: post #113
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…

Smartphones are what enable social media to ruin the lives of children. You can access Wikipedia from your computer. You can call your parents from a flip phone. And hey, you can sometimes engage with social media from a computer. The problem is that smartphones give children access to social media in literally every single waking hour of their lives, making it a constant that they must be extremely aware of.

This is the reasonable middle ground, I think. No outright refusal, nor blind acceptance.

Instead: separation of powers and reasonable barrier to entry. Dumbphone + stationary desktop PC would be much better for kids than a smartphone + tablet.

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

#273

Post by DoreenMichele »

There are a lot of things going on in the world at the same time.

Family size has trended down in developed countries. This has a significant impact on social fabric.

My father was one of five kids. My mother was one of twelve. I was one of three and had an aunt with four children who lived nearby.

So I had many, many aunts, uncles and cousins. In contrast, me and my siblings all have only one or two kids apiece and it does not provide the same social fabric.

Women in particular are facing radically different roles in life and often have relatively few good role models for the kind of life they need to somehow create for themselves.

I find their tactic of talking about preponderance of the evidence versus beyond a shadow of a doubt annoying. It's a strong arm tactic trying to force their position on other people and I find that objectionable on the face of it.

Having said that, when they were adolescents my sons inherited an old phone of mine when I upgraded. It had one use: to let them go where they wanted at the mall and I could call them and say "Hey, I'm ready to go now" or whatever.

They might want to beef up their investigation into "Why girls?" rather than harp so much on "We should be allowed to cram our policies down your throats with merely the preponderance of the evidence. It's not like this is a criminal trial."

Yeah, buddy, you want to dictate to me how to raise my kids, you better have more compelling evidence than a criminal trial.

Provide better info and best practices, not a desperate plea to be allowed to "win" this argument with a less stringent standard of evidence. Geez.

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

#274

Post by makeitdouble »

rootusrootus wrote: post #176
pavlov wrote: post #93

After moving back to Finland from the US, I noticed that seemingly everybody gives their kid a SIM-equipped phone at age 7. That's the age when school starts (a year later than in most other countries), and a lot of children become fairly independent quickly, e.g. walking or biking to school on their own. It's just too convenient to be able to call and track the child by the phone. In America, the smartphone seems to…

> maybe there's something American parents will be able to learn from Finnish-style phone parenting practice eventually. Keep in mind that Finland's total population is comparable to a small US state. You are generalizing cultural differences spanning several thousand miles and 330 million people. At the risk of doing exactly the same thing the other direction, I'd like to mention that this seems to be a pretty commo…

Whether that hints at solutions to US issues is up for debate, but at least on the "are smartphone inherently problematic" question, it's a interesting comparison point IMHO.

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

#275

Post by lotsofpulp »

23B1 wrote: post #206
Tokkemon wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to totally miss the point.

How so?

Neither of your examples are inferring causation from correlation, they are just questions about how to define wet and blue.

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

#277

Post by yamtaddle »

jononomo wrote: post #81
chewbacha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. I think if I rewrote your argument with "social media" instead of "smart phone" it would sound just as convincing.

Smart phones and social media are the same thing.

There's a reason we didn't have a social media boom before smartphones.

The medium is the message.

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

#278

Post by 0xffff2 »

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.

Wild. Is this a US public school? Just wondering if I should file this away in the very large folder of "WTF are we doing with primary education in this country?"

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

#279

Post by cauch »

cpsempek wrote: post #241
cauch wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rebuttal would be: it is not impossible to attribute causality, and THIS IS THE PROBLEM. Right now, there are two identically possible situations (well, even more, but you get the jest): A) smartphone -> depression B) depression -> smartphone But the author does not do a good job in explaining why he choose A instead of B, except "it feels logical to me". It feels like a coin toss. (and sure, the author has some a…

I commented this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating because actually reading the author's arguments (granted, in other writings, not OP) will allow you to see he's considered this point and is will to accept that causation works the other way around. It's a fair point. But what explains the uptick in depression and mental health issues starting around 2012, disproportionately impacting pre-teen girls and not contain…

And these arguments have been heard, but they are still not convincing.

I don't know what is the reality, maybe indeed the smartphone is causing the problem. But the author is just jumping to the conclusion without proper scientifically caution.

There are a lot of other hypothesis that explain exactly the same observations, and that are not far-fetched (as you say, there is none _according to the author_, who then list all of these hypotheses in his rebutal). In his article, he goes through a lot of them but don't address them properly. For example, the more recent social anxiety about climate change is just "I don't think so".

Personally, if I have to bet, I think it is social media. But then, 1) I will not claim "it is social media", just "it may be social media", 2) it would be stupid of me to then isolate smartphone: if it is social media, then forbidding smartphone but not the laptops would be totally useless (and if the argument is turned into "no but the problem is the constant usage all the time, which you cannot do with a laptop", then, again, it's just pure conjecture: it may end up being true, but it is still scientifically incorrect to present these conclusions as scientific)

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

#280

Post by [deleted] »

kergonath wrote: post #255
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…

> 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!) This sounds like a “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. (Edit: I am not rcme, although I saw they posted along the same lines a couple of posts below.) We know that children crave validati…

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