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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

#61

Post by tgv »

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've written this several times before. I'm one (or half a) generation older than you. I grew up with the Cold War, an oil crisis and an economic crisis. As if that wasn't enough, the Club of Rome had just published their report on The Limits to Growth, which was the first time ecology entered public awareness, and did so with a bit of a shock. We called ourselves "generation nothing" (a word play on generation X in Dutch), and in England, which had it worse, the youth had the slogan "no future". But no mental health crisis.

Staring at a small thingy all day instead of looking at the world, getting nervous when it buzzes (and it buzzes hundreds of times per day), being inactive because of the enormous amounts of time it consumes, and knowing that that's not ok, but also knowing that you can't escape it. Is it so hard to imagine that that is bad for your mental health?

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

#63

Post by photochemsyn »

The study itself notes that gender differences between boys and girls seem robust, with consistently worse outcomes for girls, and this points to social media use being the more fundamental problematic issue:

> "...differences in relation to mental health and digital media use have been reported by others, and may be due to activities carried out online (e.g. boys do more gaming, girls do more social media)..."

(pdf) https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Sapien-Lab...

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

#64

Post by ekianjo »

tgv wrote: post #29
ekianjo wrote: post #15

Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media

But at this moment, that continuous access is entirely enabled by smartphones. Giving children access to smartphones but not to social media (e.g. in a classroom) is not feasible.

Just saying they identified the wrong thing that mattered

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

#65

Post by jprete »

sammywater wrote: post #3

first smart phone (iphone): 2007 2023-2007 = 16 years Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me. Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns

I think Haidt’s overarching argument is that negative effects are caused by continuous social media access facilitated by the smartphone. It’s not the smartphone itself, but the ability to constantly check social media.

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

#66

Post by tgv »

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…

> Writing off all of this ..., makes no sense.

It does make sense when you think of it as an addiction. Many people fear giving up their phone. They think it's essential. They feel it. They live it.

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

#68

Post by aynyc »

sammywater wrote: post #3

first smart phone (iphone): 2007 2023-2007 = 16 years Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me. Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns

I doubt kids were getting smart phone when they were born. Assume they were given smart phone at 7, they would be adults now.

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

#69

Post by tgv »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #50
tgv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That's not the question, is it? You just jump to the conclusion that a child without a mobile phone becomes an outcast, and equate that to the classical outcast picture.

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

#70

Post by scythe »

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…

>Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing?

First, that doesn't explain the gender effect.

It doesn't explain why the crises of the early 2000s didn't cause a similar problem. In three-ish years we saw the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom bust, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War with no similar effects on teen mental health.

It should show a strong correlation between news — not social media — consumption and mental health which remains to be demonstrated.

>However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

"Everything was better when you were twelve"

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