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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

#91

Post by Jcowell »

scanny wrote: post #76
makeitdouble wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that argument can have no refutation, jor any clear verification. You wont find a control group that lives the same life as these kids but without a cell phone. You can't teleport these kids 50 years earlier etc. So we're bound to hear hot takes that have no other substanciation than "it makes logical sense" My main issue with these hot takes is that it doesn't help, as smartphone aren't going away. In contra…

Couldn't one just do a study in communities like the Amish, or perhaps overseas? That could be a decent stand-in group.

no since the you would have to take in other factors that would affect that if an Amish person or one living oversees. For data like this you would have to quite literally clone these people , take away when they got a cellphone to be absolutely certain that getting a phone at the young age is the reason.

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

#92

Post by makeitdouble »

scanny wrote: post #76
makeitdouble wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that argument can have no refutation, jor any clear verification. You wont find a control group that lives the same life as these kids but without a cell phone. You can't teleport these kids 50 years earlier etc. So we're bound to hear hot takes that have no other substanciation than "it makes logical sense" My main issue with these hot takes is that it doesn't help, as smartphone aren't going away. In contra…

Couldn't one just do a study in communities like the Amish, or perhaps overseas? That could be a decent stand-in group.

Amish have a whole different societal structure so it's too much variation. Same issue if you study Indians in a remote village for instance. That would make a poor control group to compare to teenage girls going to high school in Texas.

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

#93

Post by pavlov »

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 come several years later. The article here mentions that some parents want to hold it off until 8th grade!

The overall cultural difference is so great that this probably won't make for a valid experiment on mental health impact — but maybe there's something American parents will be able to learn from Finnish-style phone parenting practice eventually.

(Edit — a small observation from the Finnish kids. Their leading social media is WhatsApp Stories because everything else requires you to be 13+. A surprising data point in favor of Meta potentially capturing a chunk of the next generation.)

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

#94

Post by tgv »

spicymapotofu wrote: post #36
tgv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might not know that Haidt is a well-known p-hacker and has a record of strongly advising ideology under the guise of social psychology. I haven't trusted any claims of his since his modern peace thesis, and that's not his most outlandish one. Moral psychology appears to overlap 100% with culture war for discourse-killing effects, and Haidt is a giant in the field.

I've never heard of Haidt as a p-hacker. A friend of mine is an acquitance of his, which made me assume that Haidt was more in the Bayesian camp.

But it's good to view social sciences sceptically. Their theories don't offer much in terms of truth. It's best if they keep their theoretical judgement to themselves, and see where the research takes them. Psychological and sociological theories are not a good basis for policy.

The data don't lie, though. Now, there may be issues with the way it was gathered and whathaveyounot, but Haidt isn't exactly the first to observe a large increase in mental health issues. As a matter of fact, the papers have been mentioning it for years by now, as have the health organizations. The correlation from the article can almost not be denied. It's like climate change: you can try to find an alternative explanation (which will bring you into the exact same problems the psychological research you criticize is facing), but until then, we must be cautious.

The fact that you don't like messenger is simply not enough to ignore the message.

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

#95

Post by mech7654 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #72
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…

Because that argument can have no refutation, jor any clear verification. You wont find a control group that lives the same life as these kids but without a cell phone. You can't teleport these kids 50 years earlier etc. So we're bound to hear hot takes that have no other substanciation than "it makes logical sense" My main issue with these hot takes is that it doesn't help, as smartphone aren't going away. In contra…

If you look at social science as an entire discipline (separate from "hard science"- which sounds dismissive- "Hard science" is able to achieve better precision because its experimental subjects are easier to control! in those ways it is easier!), it is so fraught with confounding factors and difficulties applying controls that eventually you have to choose a lower standard of evidence than "perfectly rigorous". One standard of evidence, or maybe better stated as epistemological standard, is the precautionary principle. If cell phones are an unknown threat, but a "creepy" one, where there certainly seems to be enough evidence that one should treat them with caution- treat them with caution. Especially when you can tell that the benefits of certain behavior patterns don't outweigh the risks.

There are lots of areas of our lives where we lean on the precautionary principle WITHOUT needing bulletproof justification.

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

#96

Post by inconceivable »

alexb_ wrote: post #52
inconceivable wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is totally what a healthy and non-addictive thing does to children, right? Children being socially pressured into lying to their parents and hiding what they do is something that happens with drugs. The fact that it happens with smartphones as well should tell you something.

it happens with any socially normalized thing you attempt to withhold from a teenager.

lmao just go ahead and try, doesn't matter to me.

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

#98

Post by badkitty99 »

ekianjo wrote: post #71
yamtaddle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones are why social media is the way it is. It'd be a lot different, and a lot less-used, if you still had to go sit at a desk to use it.

Depression and mental health issues is directly coming from the software on mobile phones not the fact that you carry a computer in your pocket. They focus on the wrong variable. It would be hard to ban mobile phones. But less hard to curb down on social media.

[dead]

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

#99

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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.

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

#100

Post by afavour »

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…

> 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 parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial.

It's possible to use a smartphone without social media. It's possible to set up a child's smartphone in such a way that their access to social media is limited if not totally removed.

> There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread

IMO HN has always had a strong anti-censorship streak, usually for good reasons. But it starts to get a bit weird and fuzzy when kids are involved, as if protecting them from the harmful aspects of the internet is no different than big government censorship.

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