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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

#41

Post by inconceivable »

DrThunder wrote: post #10

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…

> Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet.

i can tell you how this goes. when it becomes socially important to get one, she's going to do everything in her power to get one behind your back, turning her into an extremely skilled liar (since her entire life will revolve around this lie), a skill which she will use whenever an opportune moment comes up.

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

#42

Post by nancyhn »

owlbynight wrote: post #20

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…

But what if you had spent that time on Tumblr instead of learning about computers and playing games?

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

#43

Post by raincole »

23B1 wrote: post #24

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.

The "obvious" correlations are the ones that need to be questioned the most.

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

#45

Post by alexb_ »

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 being written off so immediately?

Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. Smartphones give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on. Smartphones give children a new avenue for social exclusion. Smartphones make every single child afraid that what they are doing is being recorded by someone else. Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.

Writing off all of this and boldly claiming that smartphones aren't the problem, it's all just coincedental correlation, makes no sense.

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

#48

Post by strict9 »

owlbynight wrote: post #20

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…

I am of the same generation as you with a slightly different story but also found computers as a means of escape.

But then it was more exploratory. Learning about computer internals and talking to others on a BBS is not in the same galaxy as the perfectly honed and ruthlessly efficient addiction networks employed by social media companies.

It can still be an escape today but the real world and online world are no longer distinct entities as it once was. We had the gift of being forgotten or failing without everyone knowing.

It was a lot harder to compare yourself to others with more means or other attributes that particularly for girls can lead to a downward spiral of anxiety and depression.

For some it can bring hope and something positive but the older I get the more I think the result is a net negative for kids.

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

#49

Post by IceHegel »

Clubber wrote: post #39
23B1 wrote: post #24

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.

>it's the addictive content readily accessible therein. 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 mor…

> We don’t know what’s causing it.

Speculatively, I’d say it’s social media for girls (instagram, tiktok, snapchat) and porn for boys.

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

#50

Post by Dudeman112 »

tgv wrote: post #22
Freak_NL wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She might be a weird outcast but oh well […] Which totally won't affect her mental health. Damned if you don't, damned if you do.

> Which totally won't affect her mental health. There's really no data on that. If anything, the data in the article suggest the opposite, although it may come from different groups with different patterns in social media usage.

>There's really no data on that

I find it extremely unlikely that there's no data on how being an outcast affects one's mental health

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