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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

#381

Post by Perenti »

adamwong246 wrote: post #147
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…

An important point: It's not the "smartphones"- Its the APPS, specifically the social media apps, but really this applies the vast majority of apps. Rather than selling value, most are attention-parasites which inevitably harm the user. They become skinner boxes designed to keep us engaged, by any means necessary. To me, it highlights a key point of FOSS, which is that we should not harm our users.

To be more precise, it's the model of engagement that bombards the eyes, ears and brain that's the problem. We need social media models that don't require 24/7 engagement.

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

#382

Post by aio2 »

wussboy wrote: post #137
IceHegel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a period of time from about 2011-2013 where it felt like many parents would complain about everyone being on their phone. Then they started using them too and stopped complaining.

> Then they started using them too and stopped complaining. This is not a good thing.

no shit

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

#383

Post by rcme »

cauch wrote: post #361
rcme wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or some "smartphone is a confounding effect of a deeper cause, obviously". But isn't this equally admitting smartphones are the issue? Like whatever deeper cause you're talking about existed before the smartphone. Like imagine you're a farmer and you grow crops that need a lot of water and climate change causes water to dry up in your area. What you're saying is basically "climate change didn't cause your crops to…

> But isn't this equally admitting smartphones are the issue? Not really: a confounding effect means that there is a cause X that leads to two things: using more smartphone, and depression. If you ban the smartphone, you don't stop the cause X, and you will still have depression. > "climate change didn't cause your crops to fail because you weren't growing drought resistant crops. Climate change is just a confounding…

I think you’re missing the point: any confounding factor you can think of would foster before smartphones. So it doesn’t make sense to call phones a confounding factor.

For instance, people are saying “people who get phones earlier may have less involved parents, and less involved parents lead to worse mental health outcomes.” Sure, this is possible, but there have always been poor parents, yet these changes to mental health have only started with adoption of the smartphone.

> if you are arguing that smartphones increase global depression, then you are saying that smartphones induced a change in lifestyle. If smartphone can do it swiftly, then other things can do it too.

Yes, that’s exactly my point! It theoretically could be something else, but what else has so drastically changed in the last 15 years. We see plenty of evidence of how dramatic smartphone adoption has been. What else has experienced such a fundamental in adoption?

And now we’re back to Occam’s razor. Sure, the mental health crisis could be caused by some unseen force that has profoundly impacted life yet has so far eluded observation, or it could be smartphones, whose profound impact on lifestyle is easily observable.

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

#385

Post by aio2 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #186

I'm not sure it even really matters if you give kids a smartphone or not. The schools give them chromebooks, which basically allows the same problematic social media access. Sure, they try to put filters in place, but kids are resourceful. I hear regularly from my daughter about the things she does on that chromebook in class that I don't really permit (except in small doses) at home.

Chromebooks are designed to make tho schoolwork easier for the schools. Assignments and other things are online, and that's all they care about.

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

#386

Post by aio2 »

ericmcer wrote: post #265
thomastjeffery wrote: post #225

This situation has been well known for years . It isn't news to any of us. So why aren't we learning more about the problem? Why are we just beating the same dead horse instead of investigating further? There is no way you could just convince the majority of children (or their parents) to just stop using mobile computers. Is there a more direct approach that could be taken? Most of the comments here can tell you from…

Your idea that if you give people space and resources they will explore and learn and do creative things is talked about in regards to many issues. I don't totally buy it. Smartphones and computers in general are a pretty strong example of the opposite. Sure OS's are more restrictive than in the past, but anyone who has a laptop and smartphone has access to programming tools and device sensors that would have been sc…

I partially do. I was given these tools with unlimited access and encouraged to explore and learn and was able to ask about anything.

I would say my case is different though, reading from these commonts.

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

#387

Post by naasking »

cauch wrote: post #359
naasking wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became globally more anxiogenic It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media. > the measu…

> It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media. It does not make sense: social media, and even more smartphones, can be used in a lot of different ways, and is strongly linked to social…

> If you are arguing that different societies will not become more anxiogenic at the same time, you cannot also argue that usage of the smartphone, due to a magical reason, turn out to be toxic exactly the same way at the same time for different societies.

Different societies will not undergo simultaneous changes without a reason.

Social media is a reason. Social media is algorithmically designed to drive engagement, often via negative emotions, to gather information about people. It is a great homogenizer, a systematic, unidirectional global pressure, which explains why different societies have undergone similar changes simultaneously with the advent of social media. Furthermore, it's well established by now that second order effects of social media and phone use is the disruption of sleep patterns, and sleep is particularly important to teens undergoing puberty. Haidt has pointed out all of this.

Now contrast to your suggestion: globalization, which has been going on for 50 years, suddenly led to mental health issues only 10 years ago for no discernable reason we can see, but not among people actually in the workforce and experiencing its direct effects, but in people who have never had a job, have very little understanding of foreign policy tariffs and trade, and it didn't affect disparate societies proportionally to the extent that they adopted globalization policies, but it affected them all about the same.

I honestly can't take you seriously if you think nebulous, indirect third order effects of globalization are more plausible than direct first and second order effects from a device kids have in their hands for 16 hours a day.

> But that's my point: he is switching to what is more convenient for his conclusion. The elements found in the "focus specifically on the Anglosphere" are NOT the same scale and the same details as in the other society.

No, that's not what he said or why he's focusing on it. The data is basically the same across other nations, and he's focusing on that specific subset because that's what he's consistently covered in his other articles. If you had read the other ones, as you claim, then you know he had other researchers gathering the same data from other nations across the globe which all showed the same trends, and they've been writing their own articles on those.

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

#388

Post by ajma »

I'm still trying to read it in depth but I skimmed and didn't see anything about controlling for wealth. I've heard many people talk about when a family isn't well off and both parents need to work, there's a trend to give them a device because it makes for a cheap babysitter. We also know poverty has a big connection with mental health in adults.

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

#389

Post by rcme »

cauch wrote: post #211
rcme wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question being used to derive this data is: > “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?” 6 year olds can't acquire smartphones on their own. So there is definitely an element of parental agency here.

Yep, the population that receive a smartphone early have fundamentally different parents than the population that receive a smartphone late. So the study is biased: they cannot conclude it's due to the smartphone and not the family environment, as both are different in the two samples.

But whatever is different about the parental groups surely existed before the introduction of smartphones, so even if the parental groups are different, you can still conclude that introducing smartphones caused worse mental health outcomes.

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

#390

Post by rtpg »

krageon wrote: post #25
rtpg wrote: post #6

[flagged]

There is sadly not even a mention of correlation in the title, and the post heavily implies (except for a single paragraph, which is very late in the article) this correlation implies causation. Which it doesn't, and that's imporant! For all we know, households that yield kids with worse mental health also happen to give them smartphones younger. Perhaps the parents are more disinterested, perhaps the parents have wo…

thank you for saying this so concisely. This perfectly describes my feelings, of disappointment at not digging deeper.
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