Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

The issue is that early ownership of a phone correlating to worse mental health may be a proxy for something else. If you are raising children and trying to make good parenting decisions and someone says "smartphones are the work of the devil and your child will be mentally healthier without them" they need to actually be correct, not guessing to enhance their career or something.

If it's not true, then parents who might have safety reasons for providing a phone who then opt to not provide a phone "because phones are bad for kids" may be harming their kids.

It's a blanket statement without nuance. It doesn't tell me if there are situations where it's okay and, if so, what they are. This usually means a person isn't really that knowledgeable about a topic.

People tend towards confirmation bias. It's a rare individual who says "What would affirmatively disprove my hypothesis? Does that thing exist?"

Without that, it's usually not a solid hypothesis. It's usually one full of holes.

Isn’t this a red herring? Do you need to provide a smart phone or just a phone? If it’s a smart phone do you need to enable unfettered access or just the safety related apps you need?

On a desktop PC, I can install whatever Linux distro I want. That can give me much greater access to a serious development environment than even Windows could dream of. Android feels like a toy in comparison, and iOS is like one of those fake laptops they sell to toddlers.

Even when my Android phone has an unlockable bootloader, it's still unlikely that I will be able to run a desktop-equivalent Linux distro on it. Chances are, I'm left with a less-restrictive flavor of Android. That's the best case scenario, and it's absolutely worse than the average case I grew up with.

It's not entirely about resistance, either. People follow their interests within a reasonable amount of effort. At the end of the day, they balance the two.

What opportunities to mobile computing users have to follow what interests? Social media provides the least resistance by several orders of magnitude.

We can and should change this landscape. We should be minimizing the opportunity cost of creative computing, instead of trying to convince billions of people to throw the entire thing out the window.

Straightforward, caring, non-judgemental talk might work: you shouldn't have it because your brain is at a too early developmental stage and you cannot cope with the addiction. This is how we explained it to our son. A relative had given him an old smartphone in 1st grade (I never appreciated that gift!), but we replaced it with a dumb phone in 2nd grade with zero problems. He was able to choose among a few models himself (picked a Nokia 105 [1]). He was absolutely okay with that.

It has a few silly demo games, but he doesn't play them much. When we go to grandma's for two days, he voluntarily leaves his phone at home, because "nobody will probably call me" (see: he realizes there's not much else he could do with the phone!). During the smartphone-year, in contrast, he had obvious trouble putting the smartphone away, even if he didn't really "do" anything in it; just scrolling around and launching grownups' old apps he couldn't understand. (I wonder if physical buttons cause less addiction than a touchscreen?)

In short, our kid is absolutely fine with the dumb phone. It really does work simply as a "tool", for calls and messages. Recently he even asked for a mechanical wrist watch because he doesn't seem to like carrying the phone in his pocket or backpack.

I'm close to 40 and a long-time hobbyist Linux nerd. I've intentionally never ever owned a smartphone (for some odd reason, reading mails etc on that laughably tiny screen seemed utterly stupid in 2003; even thinking about the endless possibilities (=bloat!) of later smartphones always made me feel overwhelmed, so I never wanted one). So I, too, only have a dumb phone -- and, same experience here: it really does work just as a "tool for making phone calls or sending messages". Nothing else. Living without smartphone apps is actually way easier than most people seem to imagine.

Another thing: I'm thinking that maybe (at least in our kid's public school in a Small East European Country) some kind of "anti tech addiction" meme is also making rounds amongst schoolchildren? If this is true, then maybe dumb phones are even somewhat, err, hip in some circles these days? At least elementary school children do seem to care about their mental well-being -- when you tell them about this with empathy, simple but honest cause-and-effect examples and without condemnation (I think this last bit is key: no judgements where judging is avoidable; show, don't tell!). It is also most interesting to get young children to really think about that they actually do have a brain up there, a brain that is an actual part of them, and that this brain always needs some care.

1: https://res.cloudinary.com/telia-pim/image/upload/v163282637...