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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

#371

Post by rtpg »

tgv wrote: post #17
rtpg wrote: post #6

[flagged]

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.

In one sense you’re of course right that correlations are all we have.

I think the most basic thing is correlating with wealth, or other aspects of a livid environment. “Urban life engenders both early smartphone acquisition and more mental issues (at least self reporting)” is one hypothesis. Another is “social network usage correlates to more mental issues, and having smartphones gives more access to this” (which is relevant! But should be checked. Is it the phone? Is it social networks?)

The point being that you are trying to establish a causal narrative, and right now there’s not much to chew on.

If we want to help children we should dig deeper to understand actual causes instead of simply reporting the horizontal lines we found.

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

#372

Post by jemmyw »

cauch wrote: post #279
cpsempek wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

While I agree with you on the scientific front, I agree with the author on the risk/action cost front. There's not much cost to preventing the use of phones during school hours, it seems to be a net benefit to education and teacher/student relations even if the hypothesis is wrong.

Banning platforms from allowing under 16s to have accounts is harder because kids will work around it very easily, but I would be happy to see it happen anyway, and made Facebook's problem to deal with.

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

#373

Post by makeitdouble »

naasking wrote: post #260
makeitdouble wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways. https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...

> The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways. The other poster noted data points that refute your claim, mainly because this is a global trend and you've pointed out a mostly US-centric condition. Another point to consider is that it's simply implausible that 10-12…

> The other poster

Responded there.

> it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.

I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc...And of course it's also more complex than just money going in and out. Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.

The economy is not just a line going up or down in someone's chart.

> They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.

Are we positing that nothing else changed in comparison ? Do we really want to compare the war time many decades ago and our current situation and say phones are the only thing that differs ?

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

#374

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#375

Post by caf »

marttt wrote: post #337
tough wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use. I think you got it backwards, the emergency case is just the -excuse- parents use. In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I? Real phones, with apps and games and shit. FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for…

> In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I? 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…

2nd grade, OK. Get back to me when you have a 7th grader who's complaining about being out of the loop because their social groups are mostly using group chats on phones to stay in touch.

I never thought I'd be telling my kid to go hang with their friends at the mall more, but here we are.

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

#377

Post by caf »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #99
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…

Gotta love the correlation is not causation crowd. Do they think Haidt and others haven't considered that? It's like the first thing that everyone considers. I personally think that HN dismisses these ideas because it would mean dire consequences for their high paying entrenched employers.

Yeah, pretty clear they didn't read as far as "4. Limitations" which anticipates and discusses this point.

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

#378

Post by Perenti »

I've thought about this a fair bit over the last decade. Full disclosure: I'm a smartphone minimalist. I use so little data on my phone I don't know how much I have, it was 100M per month but I think the telco increased it because it didn't fit their plans. I spend $9.99/mth for my phone service.

We evolved to live in the plains of Africa. We evolved to live is small bands of hunter-gatherers who occasionally got together to have huge parties.

Our senses have enough bandwidth to enjoy special mushrooms and to avoid predators. But smartphones can throw far more information at us than that. And for some reason I can't fathom, when your phone chirps or shakes you MUST check it NOW.

I believe that we should look deeper at how these things might affect young brains. Just as THC is mostly harmless for adults, but royally fucks up children's brain development.

Not being a psychologist/neuroscientist I have no idea how to test this hypothesis.

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

#379

Post by naasking »

makeitdouble wrote: post #373
naasking wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The global economy just tanked and advanced economies were barely recovering. I would see that as enough of a cause for children to feel a bleaker future and be impacted in direct and indeect ways. The other poster noted data points that refute your claim, mainly because this is a global trend and you've pointed out a mostly US-centric condition. Another point to consider is that it's simply implausible that 10-12…

> The other poster Responded there. > it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery. I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc...And of course it's also more complex than just money goin…

> I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc

Except this trend didn't happen at any previous downturn, so now you're special pleading that this economic downturn specifically is different somehow, based on... What exactly? And again, these mental health trends are international and cross-cultural and none of the other explanations can account for this. In fact, your suggestion that it's due to economic downturn is essentially refuted since even nations that didn't experience a downturn saw these mental health declines.

> Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.

What about adult anxiety about the Vietnam war, the nuclear threat of the cold war, the anxiety over terrorism that took out the twin towers. No meaningful blips seen with those momentous events.

You keep pointing to possible second and third order effects that maybe-somehow-sort-of indirectly filtered down to kids through mechanisms like "parental anxiety", instead of a direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day, and whose use we know has been algorithmically optimized to drive engagement, fear and anger, and whose second order effects are known to disrupt sleep, which is particularly important for teens going through puberty.

Like, don't you see how absurdly implausible your second and third order effects are by comparison? To say nothing of the fact that they don't even explain all of the data, which is not a problem for the social media hypothesis.

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

#380

Post by Perenti »

mordae wrote: post #271
sb057 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

Yes, but none of these require you to stare at a phone most of the time. Social media does, as it incessantly screams for your attention.

I don't know anyone other than me who uses their phone for as little as you list (I look at the sky for weather reports) though.

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