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Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

abcnews.go.com

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#31
post #5

I don't know many children who are 13 today and don't have a smartphone - in fact it was quite a common thing even a decade ago - how do you even control for this

To me, "The Internet" and "The Internet without short-form videos" are two different things.

There was a very short span of time when the mobile bandwidth was good enough for browsing, messaging, and corporate email, but not really good enough (or prohibitively expensive) for streaming. Feels like that was the sweet spot.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#37
post #3

Soon: Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.

Eerie parallels to tobacco smoking just a few decades ago. It's a public health problem but those in charge of the bureaucracy at the highest levels choose to obsess over rare vaccine side effects and the use of tylenol during circumcission? It's a mad mad mad mad world (great film, which is overdue for a cyber age remake)

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#38

How’s this compare to computer/internet usage? I’ve been chronically online most years since age 7 but didn’t get a smartphone until 22 or so.

My anecdotal observations suggest it's pretty different. One thing is you can (and do, if you're a kid) carry it everywhere with you and stare at it all the time. I think the phone UI where each app takes over the whole screen also increases the impact of the worst sorts of apps (like TikTok).

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#39

Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat? "Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-... > "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"

the culprit is toxoplasma. A third or so of US citizens have it in their brains.

Re: Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

#40
post #23
post #3

Soon: Adults who have smartphones have worse mental heath outcomes: Study Whatever the safe level of smartphone usage is, most of us are above it.

I keep debating trying to go full-dumbphone, but I'm confident what would happen is that it would work great until I need a specific thing for whatever reason, and I'd have to buy an Android or iPhone, and then I'd be forced to carry around two devices and potentially have two separate cell phone plans. This seems like a pain in the ass. But I don't dispute that waking up in the morning to a bunch of things competing…

There are also options to split the difference - a dumb phone that can sync with your smartphone or watch like https://dumb.co/
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