31–40 of 420 posts
I wonder, if it's possible to test the hypothesis that smartphone (or whatever internet connected device) allows one to learn more about the world without the filter
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disconnected parents existed before iPhones, though. Why has mental health deteriorated so much since 2010?
More access and easier access to the negative elements of society that prey on children with bad home lives. Prior to the internet, they had to find you on the streets and recruit you. Now they just need good SEO.
Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet. She might be a weird outcast but oh well, it's not worth the possible damage to her mental health. I think in few decades we'll look back at this generation of parents who just shoved smart devices in their kids hands with no filter akin to handing kids cigarettes. It turns them into sociopaths. I have some younger Gen Z cousins and it's just weird to watch th…
Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media
I'm not sure how you would control for this. I was born in 1981, not long after the Vietnam war ended, and my Dad was a veteran with PTSD who never went to a therapist. My home life sucked and I came out of it with pretty severe depression. I became addicted to computers as a means of escape, and thankfully -- luckily -- it turned into a lucrative career. However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole f…
That wouldn't explain the sharp reductions in mental health among girls around 2012. Something definitely seemed to be going on between 2010 and 2014. Cell phone usage patterns could be a part of it, but I'd like to see error bars on these charts.
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There is nothing else than correlations. How in heaven's name are you going to find a causal relationship? Giving children a placebo phone? > very very dishonest It isn't dishonest. You know what's dishonest? Calling it "5 minutes of Excel". Jonathan Haidt isn't in the business of selling substack. He's a professor at NYU.
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Or disconnected parents give their kids ipads and iphones the earliest and with the least oversight. And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
Disconnected parents existed before iPhones, though. Why has mental health deteriorated so much since 2010?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude. No, because the kids aren't the agents here: their parents are. It's not even plausible for a kid to be able to independently acquire their own phone until they are a teenager, and ev…
I think you misunderstand their idea. A child with worse coping can push their parents harder for a phone, and a child with better coping skills can hold out without a phone longer. This is the theory they're suggesting, I believe.
I think you're reading that into their comment when it's not there. They didn't mention nagging at all, and even if the kid nags, the parent still has all the agency.
If there's some correlation-not-causation criticism here, it's probably some along the lines of parents with the fortitude to say no to their kids will raise more mentally-healthy adults, and successful phone restrictions are correlated with that.
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.
That should be questioned too. We don't know what's causing it. It might be the parents consuming of polarizing / doomsday politics effecting their interaction with the kids. It could be parents forced to work more because of costs. It could be the after effects of Covid. It could be that therapy became normalized and kids were always this way, but it's much more accounted for because they aren't afraid to tell people about it. It could be a lot of things at the same time.
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.