Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-report

by civeng • 3 years ago

427 376 3 years ago

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

sigzero• 3 years ago

I have zero doubt about that.

sammywater• 3 years ago

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

jprete• 3 years ago

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.

aynyc• 3 years ago

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

zeroonetwothree• 3 years ago

The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.

tivert2• 3 years ago

The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.

No, because the kids aren't the agents here: their parents are.

It's not even plausible for a kid to be able to independently acquire their own phone until they are a teenager, and even then a parent can put up many roadblocks to cripple its use (e.g. refuse to get it a cell plan).

spicymapotofu• 3 years ago

I think you misunderstand their idea. A child with worse coping can push their parents harder for a phone, and a child with better coping skills can hold out without a phone longer. This is the theory they're suggesting, I believe.

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

Or disconnected parents give their kids ipads and iphones the earliest and with the least oversight.

And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

rcme5• 3 years ago

Disconnected parents existed before iPhones, though. Why has mental health deteriorated so much since 2010?

rcme5• 3 years ago

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.

cauch12• 3 years ago

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.

DrThunder3• 3 years ago

Except the majority of kids have smart phones now and the rates of mental health issues have skyrocketed.

"What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? "

They don't need to resist it on their own. You just need decent parents that don't promote it at a young age. Yeah the kid may get out on their own and touch a few smart phones but if you don't addict them to it at a young age they'll be less interested in using it as a constant coping mechanism. Additionally, someone has to actually buy these devices for them. If they have to spend their own money on this stuff it's less likely they'll have them.

johnchristopher• 3 years ago

What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.

I think I know one and indeed they have a very strong mental fortitude. For starter she doesn't want a smartphone and is vocal about it. I am watching how the situation evolves.

cpsempek4• 3 years ago

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 contained to any geo. The author's entire point is that social media is the only explanation that that has been proposed. Moreover, it's not a far-fetched explanation. He very aware that correlation does not provide causation, and that it could be the other way around. However, no one (according to him) has offered up a theory which explains the data like the social media theory does.

rcme5• 3 years ago

This is only tangentially related to the main point of this piece, but it's a bit concerning that the average 18-24 yo of both genders has a mental health quotient somewhere between struggling, managing, and enduring, as opposed to succeeding and thriving.

caf3• 3 years ago

They address this in the "Limitations" section (don't put a lot of stock in the absolute values - look at relative differences within the sample):

One issue to keep in mind with the Sapien Labs dataset is that the participants in each country are not a random or representative sample of the people in that country. Such studies would be extremely expensive to run, and now that so few people agree to phone solicitations or even answer their phones, it is unclear how representative such surveys can be. Those who agree to be interviewed, or who are motivated by money to participate, are not representative of the broader population. For this Sapien Labs report, participants came to the site on their own, or from online advertisements paid for by Sapien Labs, for the purpose of getting a detailed report on their wellbeing. So, the means reported for any country should not be treated like direct measures of the true means. However, samples such as these are still very useful for examining differences within the sample, such as those between men and women, or between those who got a smartphone early and those who got one late. And the much larger size of the Sapien Labs dataset, compared to Gallup and other survey organizations, allows for many additional analyses.

DrThunder3• 3 years ago

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 them film everything they do and post it to social media. Oh, I'm meeting a friend I haven't seen in months, let me set up my phone in the driveway and film us hugging like it's an all natural reaction that we totally didn't film multiple times.

Freak_NL• 3 years ago

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.

tgv6• 3 years ago

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.

DrThunder3• 3 years ago

Yeah maybe.... but I'm noticing a lot more parents going this direction. You just have to get them into the same groups so they don't feel social pressure to be on smart devices all day.

Also, teaching them to not care so much about others perceptions is sort of a big part of this. A lot of these kids are being thrown a smart device and not given any parenting on coping with emotions.

I saw a student pepper spray their teacher for taking her smartphone the other day. It's a drug.

uberism• 3 years ago

Might be good to research kids that are the social outcast and see how that affects their mental health compared to a control group.

inconceivable2• 3 years ago

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.

alexb_4• 3 years ago

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.

yamtaddle4• 3 years ago

If you've got the money for it, some private schools have significantly different phone culture than the current US norm. Stricter rules, and parents that are OK with that (if they're not, they can leave; there's an admissions wait list anyway). A tendency among parents to give their kids phones much later, and to restrict their use more.

There are probably some public school districts like that, but I expect they'd be harder to shop for.

noisy_boy• 3 years ago

I don't think kids will be outcast just because they don't own a smartphone. Based on what I can see around my own circle, most kids have 2 or 3 "close" friends with rest being mostly varied degrees of acquaintances. Those friendships usually start one-on-one - maybe there will be some sly smiles and minor jibes/comments about the phone situation initially but then like everything else, people take it into the stride and both parties adjust to the "difficulties" pretty quickly and figure out workarounds within the limitation (or they don't and the friendship doesn't carry forward). Eventually the close circle forms where everyone has come to terms with the rough edges of everyone else. Like that one friend in the circle who doesn't have a smartphone.

Also, providing "low-intensity" options like dumbphones just for messages/calling and laptops with age/time-restriction etc helps significantly.

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

Weird is in the eye of the beholder and most people suck and are dumb, so good on you.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media

tgv6• 3 years ago

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.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

Just saying they identified the wrong thing that mattered

krunck• 3 years ago

Or the always-available escape from reality, preventing from from having to face the world and/or their issues.

yamtaddle4• 3 years ago

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.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

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.

weego• 3 years ago

Guns don't kill people bullets do

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

Bad analogies are bad analogies

eurekin• 3 years ago

I wonder, if it's possible to test the hypothesis that smartphone (or whatever internet connected device) allows one to learn more about the world without the filter

IceHegel3• 3 years ago

I think the huge majority of the risk is that an otherwise curious person destroys themselves in their teenage years, rather than have their curiosity limited.

jstarfish2• 3 years ago

Boredom leads to curiosity.

Smartphones ensure the user is never bored.

ape4• 3 years ago

Aren't there "parental controls" to limit access?

synergy20• 3 years ago

How early is too early? Also the phone can be set up for like one hour a day of usage too.

knallfrosch• 3 years ago

The earlier, the worse your kid's mental health. Decide for yourself (and your kid.)

owlbynight• 3 years ago

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 felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.

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? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.

timmytokyo• 3 years ago

I have my doubts that it's about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.

That wouldn't explain the sharp reductions in mental health among girls around 2012. Something definitely seemed to be going on between 2010 and 2014. Cell phone usage patterns could be a part of it, but I'd like to see error bars on these charts.

makeitdouble11• 3 years ago

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...

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

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

thomastjeffery4• 3 years ago

Maybe they would be an artist, like several people I know who did just that.

strict9• 3 years ago

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.

tgv6• 3 years ago

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?

scythe• 3 years ago

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"

naasking9• 3 years ago

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? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.

These trends are global. Not every country has seen declining quality of life, higher rent and debt, etc. Haidt and co. cover a lot of data across multiple articles. They note some positive uses of social media too, like what you describe re: finding good communities and positive messaging. It's the rest of it that's the problem.

23B17• 3 years ago

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.

Clubber• 3 years ago

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 more accounted for because they aren't afraid to tell people about it. It could be a lot of things at the same time.

IceHegel3• 3 years ago

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.

IceHegel3• 3 years ago

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.

naravara• 3 years ago

If anything parents are as bad or worse than the kids now.

I'm about 40 and am constantly having to remind my own parents to put the phone away and be more present with their grandkids when they come to visit.

PragmaticPulp2• 3 years ago

As a parent, I’m seeing a very clear division in parenting style among my peers.

Some parents allow screen time with moderation and caution because they know what excessive use leads to.

The other group sees nothing wrong and screens are everywhere all the time.

My friend circles are exclusively in the first group, from daycare to schools to friends. So much so that at first I thought everyone was like this.

Then I stepped outside of my bubble and watched some parents hand their kids phones and tablets like they were automatic babysitters. They saw it as normal. One person explained to me that it was a “tool” to help build his relationship with his child by making them “not upset” because they were happier with the phone. It blew my mind that he didn’t realize that he was cultivating an addiction.

wussboy2• 3 years ago

Then they started using them too and stopped complaining.

This is not a good thing.

Tokkemon2• 3 years ago

Yup, saw that exact reaction in my own parents.

raincole• 3 years ago

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

dudeofea• 3 years ago

I'm glad I'm on the "right" "side" of "history"

peteradio• 3 years ago

Are we certain punching ourselves in the face is causing the bruising? It's almost too obvious and therefore necessitates extra scrutiny.

23B17• 3 years ago

"I understand you think the water is wet and the sky is blue – but what does wet mean? What does blue mean?"

Great questions for interesting philosophical and academic debate.

Silly questions for deciding how to, say, raise kids.

maxehmookau• 3 years ago

It's not the cellphone itself that's the problem, it's the addictive content readily accessible therein.

Hard agree. My phone has revolutionised getting shit done. I have my calendar, maps for the entire planet, todo list, and so many other tools that make everyday, very average, life less of a chore.

But it also has dopamine dispensers like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram that are designed to absorb as much of my time as they possibly can and expose me to as much stuff to buy as possible.

Social media needs to be regulated like any other addictive substance. Just because we don't eat, smoke or snort it doesn't mean it's not just as dangerous.

makeitdouble11• 3 years ago

By that token, humans weren't meant to get medical procedures on chronical illnesses and live up to 100+ years.

What humans were meant to doesn't really help, and what long lasting impacts smart phone will have is pretty much up for debate.

My view on this is, we have natural defense + evolutionary mechanisms to deal with potential exctintion events. If you really want to look at the issue at such a basic level, tell me how the human race will be decimated via the arrival of smart phones.

23B17• 3 years ago

I think looking at things like the speed of evolution (through the lens of neuroscience or sociology) relative to the speed of industrialization and see some pretty clear markers as to what we're 'supposed' to be doing.

I'm not saying we're 'supposed' to be hunting wooly mammoths with flintknapped spears – since we did that for hundreds of thousands of years before the Information Age – but I'm fairly positive most of the science points to sedentary lifestyles (combined with the 'existential dread' that the media uses to make its bread) are not what we're 'supposed' to be doing if we want to be happy as individuals.

And I think widespread individual happiness probably contributes to a healthier society overall.

Not arguing for sticking our heads in the sand or doing away with computers – just making the point that moderation – even heavy moderation – is probably A Good Thing for kids and humans in general.

danielvaughn• 3 years ago

Just imagine being an adolescent with this technology. I feel lucky that I was in my 20's by the time smart phones were created, and I'd be extremely surprised if they weren't responsible for a decline in mental health for kids.

psychlops• 3 years ago

Did the kids respond to this survey on their smartphones? Does the brand of the smartphone matter?

alexb_4• 3 years ago

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.

jimmyjazz142• 3 years ago

It only took a couple of weeks going without a phone for me to see a marked improvement on my outlook on life and the world, so to me the correlations between phones and mental health are pretty clear.

PragmaticPulp2• 3 years ago

I’m curious: How much were you using your phone each day before you gave it up for a week? And for what?

I set a 30 minute screen time limit for social media apps on my phone because I thought I was using social media too much. Then to my surprise I almost never hit that limit. I can consume all of my social media within well under 30 minutes each day and keep up with friends, family, and even HN just fine. I’m honestly curious about what people are consuming so much of that it deteriorates their mental health.

tgv6• 3 years ago

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.

nh23423fefe• 3 years ago

Imagining you understand the motivations of diverse non-coordinating groups of people by labeling them addicts isn't persuasive or clarifying.

makeitdouble11• 3 years ago

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 contrast, we already understand the effects of Instagram on teenagers for instance, but nothing is actually happening on this front. So this whole debate on wether "smartphones" are to blame seems like a distraction from a more actionable "why isn't Instagram more regulated"

scanny• 3 years ago

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

mech7654• 3 years ago

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.

basisword• 3 years ago

> My main issue with these hot takes is that it doesn't help, as smartphone aren't going away.

They could go away. We regulate lots of harmful things that young people want access to. Most commonly alcohol and cigarettes. It could become illegal for anyone under 16 to be in possession of a smartphone (or anyone over x to give/sell a smartphone to anyone under x years). Social networks could be fined for every single person under x years that signs up.

naasking9• 3 years ago

So we're bound to hear hot takes that have no other substanciation than "it makes logical sense"

This is wrong. You can correlate onset of mental health issues with when the phone was issued, which Haidt and others have done to some extent. There is a clear indication that soon after the smart phone is introduced, mental health declines despite age.

My main issue with these hot takes is that it doesn't help, as smartphone aren't going away.

This is also wrong. Not only can they go away, they are going away to some extent. More people are opting for dumb phones.

Also, it entirely neglects the possibility of parental controls over what kids can do with phones.

chewbacha• 3 years ago

I'm not sure. I think if I rewrote your argument with "social media" instead of "smart phone" it would sound just as convincing.

jononomo• 3 years ago

Smart phones and social media are the same thing.

alexb_4• 3 years ago

Smart phones give complete access to social media at literally every single waking hour. They are practically one and the same.

balder1991• 3 years ago

But these things aren’t smartphones’ fault per se, if you remove toxic social media from the equation most of these problems go away.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

Toxic social media and similar forums like YouTube are what’s feeding the “AI” at the moment, it’s not going to happen for a while. Tech is becoming the new tobacco.

bratbag• 3 years ago

Do they?

You still have a little dopamine generator in every kids pocket, just waiting for another app that's not technically social media.

Conversely social media without constant access through mobiles would be far safer.

illiac7864• 3 years ago

I see kids aimlessly scrolling in Spotify, just because they like seeing all covers scrolling by... Hence, while social media are way worse, we should not underestimate a smartphone UI can be addictive in itself.

thatwasunusual• 3 years ago

I heard about the term "cognitive overload" a few years ago. Just google it if you want to; following the Wikipedia article about "Cognitive load" leads to two _very_ interesting articles:

* Social facilitation

* Drive theory

I think these two - in particular - describes in detail what you are describing. It's scary as hell, for sure; I have a 4-5 year old daughter myself, and I do _not_ want her to live with the expose of "what everything is about" before she is old enough to handle it.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 3 years ago

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.

kergonath3• 3 years ago

I think it’s a reflex because we care about this sort of devices. In the same way as gun enthusiasts are overall again any kind of gun control even in dangerous cases. “It cannot be dangerous because I like it”. We need some kind of cultural shift so that people who give their kids a smartphone are shunned like people who give their kids cigarettes or beers.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

I personally think that HN dismisses these ideas because it would mean dire consequences for their high paying entrenched employers.

I mean, the Sinclair quote about the difficulty of getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it is a cliche at this point, right? I suppose no one has ever paid me enough to turn off my conscience, but it seems like I'd have a much easier go of life if that was possible.

caf3• 3 years ago

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

afavour3• 3 years ago

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.

alexb_4• 3 years ago

Smartphones are what enable social media to ruin the lives of children.

You can access Wikipedia from your computer. You can call your parents from a flip phone. And hey, you can sometimes engage with social media from a computer. The problem is that smartphones give children access to social media in literally every single waking hour of their lives, making it a constant that they must be extremely aware of.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 3 years ago

Smartphones are a force multiplier for social media. Social media waiting for you on the family PC at home is a lot different than sitting in class with your phone buzzing in your pocket.

wussboy2• 3 years ago

Having access to e.g. Wikipedia is of enormous benefit to young people.

Unproven. I would argue it is enormously detrimental (reduces curiosity, reduces research ability, reduces perseverance, reduces skills required to determine truth, reduces social skills required to negotiate a position with others).

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

Smartphone = pushy social media in your pocket 24x7. In practice I suspect that amongst highschoolers the ratio of time spent between wikipedia and social media (and gaming as well) heavily favors the latter.

dcsommer• 3 years ago

Smartphones are not a prerequisite for access to educational resources online. Having an old school computer in a public part of the house is great for such things. Kids should just hang out and focus on each other when they're out and about. No need for a smartphone.

rcme5• 3 years ago

No, social media does.

This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Sure, smartphones are just a tool. But they're a tool used to access social media. Also, I'd argue it's not just social media causing this issue. AI filters that make you look more "beautiful" are commonplace now. Children see themselves through these filter and it may impact their self-esteem, e.g. "why do I look beautiful in the photo but not in real life"

escapedmoose• 3 years ago

But the form-factor of technology necessarily alters our relationship to it. Compared to a laptop or desktop PC, a smartphone is a constant presence, always in your kid’s pocket or backpack, easily snuck under a desk for a distraction from a boring lecture, easily used by friends or bullies to record you unnoticed.

Besides that, parents can learn to restrict their kids’ phones from social media use, but that seems like a weak protection (which many kids learn to break) and an unnecessary burden when you could simply give your kid a “dumb phone” for emergency use.

mc32• 3 years ago

I’ll be a bit hyperbolic here but this is close to saying: “Dirty water isn’t the issue, the issue is the pathogens in the water”. I mean, yeah, but it’s hard to separate.

tootie• 3 years ago

Purely anecdotal, but my kids don't use social media at all and aren't interested. They were, however, both part of a years-long group text with a dozen of more classmates. I only peaked once or twice, but it was mostly mundane and at least once saw kids gang up on the side of social justice.

sb057• 3 years ago

>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.

adamwong246• 3 years ago

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.

c22• 3 years ago

My kids rock Punkt MP-02s. They pretty much just make calls and text (with t9!) but they can also be 4g hotspots if they need to connect a laptop. They still have access to social media and other garbage but it's not 24/7 and I do believe that makes a difference.

colinrand• 3 years ago

Having a teenager, I've seen the bullying and caustic behavior without social media. One classic example is for a group of friends to be on a iMessage thread together, and suddenly nobody posts to it anymore because they've created another thread and left you off.

jader201• 3 years ago

It's possible to use a smartphone without social media.

Unless you can block all of them, then I don't think so. And blocking them is a game of whack-a-mole, where every time you block one, they find another one.

And even if you manage to block them from engaging with social media, a lot of similar "damage" can still be done via read-only sites (e.g. Twitter and Reddit).

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.

You can't rely on technology to block social media. In addition to the whack-a-mole problem, most parental control integrations are buggy and hackable. My personal experience with Screen Time has been pretty bad. At best, it's very easy to work around, and at worst, it's completely broken.

I'm wondering if you may not have teens with phones, as you may have come to the same conclusion yourself otherwise.

boring_twenties2• 3 years ago

Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial.

Dumbphones satisfy this requirement just fine

gjsman-10004• 3 years ago

Should kids smoke?

Obviously not, it's bad for their health.

Is mental health less of a priority than physical health?

My case rests.

yamtaddle4• 3 years ago

I do think the Internet-connected pocketable camera deserves some of the blame.

kergonath3• 3 years ago

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!)

This sounds like a “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument. (Edit: I am not rcme, although I saw they posted along the same lines a couple of posts below.) We know that children crave validation and group belonging. They cannot avoid social media in general or anything that looks like one (from Tiktok to multi-player online games) if they have any kind of access to it.

It's possible to use a smartphone without social media.

It’s possible if you are mature enough to restrain yourself, or if your phone is completely locked down. The average adult does not look mature enough.

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.

Limitation does not change anything. The same issues will show up the second there is anything that can be used to exchange messages. Hell, people used to do it in Pokémon Go with their pokémons’ nicknames.

On top of that, you assume that the average parent is competent enough to do it, and that the average child is incompetent enough to not get the password or work around the lock. Both assumptions seem very flawed to me. Again, the pull is huge. I’ve done much more complicated than avoiding parental controls at that age with a much lower motivation.

hindsightbias• 3 years ago

What's a computer? -- 2017

lisasays• 3 years ago

No, social media does.

It's smartphones + social media then. The main point is, before phones, SM didn't have nearly the reach and toxicity that it has now.

Don't be so snarky.

ihadatinyturtle• 3 years ago

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.

I would argue that it's very hard to limit access to the web versions of social media outlets.

I would also first broaden our terms a little, as it's not just social media that's so harmful, it's the wider attention economy. If we include that, it is practically impossible to own a smartphone without misusing it to your personal detriment.

DiggyJohnson• 3 years ago

I take your point, but would like to ask about:

Having the means to easily call your parents if you end up in an emergency situation is beneficial.

In a true emergency, yes this is of course beneficial.

But in general, I'd bet the ability for a parent to always be in touch with their child is not as obviously beneficial. I know first-hand about the types of parents that are always calling or texting to check-in with their kids - it can stress the kid out (let alone the parents), and I imagine that never being disconnected from the parents can be a bad thing for the child.

m463• 3 years ago

It's possible to use a smartphone without social media

kids find a way, and some solutions aren't solutions.

Sort of like in school where they took off all the bathroom doors. "problem solved!"

Aerbil3133• 3 years ago

a smartphone is just a tool, same as a laptop or a desktop computer is

I can no longer believe any modern technology is just a neutral tool. They are neutral if you think about them in isolation, but not when they're used commonly. See https://archive.org/download/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Tec...

908B64B1972• 3 years ago

But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation

You can also get causation and correlation reversed. Think about it: "The longer a teen uses (per day) smartphone the more he/she is depressed" could also be "The more depressed teens tend to have more smartphone use per day because they are depressed".

rowanG077• 3 years ago

This would imply depressed kids get smartphones earlier. Which is a pretty large unexplained leap.

psychomugs• 3 years ago

bully each other at a scale

A phrase I didn't know I needed to learn.

lukeasrodgers• 3 years ago

From folks making the correlation vs causation argument here, I would like to hear their rebuttal to the points the author already laid out in this article https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill..., especially the section on quasi experiments.

Do we just think that because it is probably impossible to conduct pure double-blind RCTs in human populations, it is therefore impossible to reasonably attribute causality to anything on a social scale, and our efforts to understand and maybe even shape social outcomes are thus inherently pointless?

cauch12• 3 years ago

My rebuttal would be: it is not impossible to attribute causality, and THIS IS THE PROBLEM.

Right now, there are two identically possible situations (well, even more, but you get the jest):

A) smartphone -> depression

B) depression -> smartphone

But the author does not do a good job in explaining why he choose A instead of B, except "it feels logical to me".

It feels like a coin toss. (and sure, the author has some arguments, but they are arguably disputable, more than in other cases where the idea that there is causality ends up being adopted as a consensus)

It does not mean it is impossible to reasonably attribute causality. It just means that the author does a bad job at the "reasonably" part.

greenhearth• 3 years ago

What about the physiological effects, such as dopamine addiction and the consequential withdrawals, which are probably the main cause of the depression?

wanderingbit• 3 years ago

To those who dismiss with "correlation is not causation", you should share with them Haidt's in-depth article showing multiple experimental studies regarding social media and mental health, and how more social media use causes lower mental health:

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

Key paragraph is:

"In sum, we found six quasi-experiments that looked at real-world outcomes in real-world settings when the arrival of Facebook or high-speed internet created large and sudden emergent network effects. All six found that when social life moves rapidly online, mental health declines, especially for girls. Not one study failed to find a harmful effect."

That being said, I think relying on a preponderance of evidence is acceptable in this case where the current status quo (particularly for teenage girls) is worrying for the vast majority of people in your community.

There isn't a good excuse to wait. There's no strong evidence that technology can "get us out of this".

artursapek• 3 years ago

anyone denying this is just coping with their bad parenting decisions lmao, it's obvious that smartphones are bad for mental health.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other.

It simply changed the methods. Bullying tended to be extremely physical until the "zero tolerance" crap in the 90s (that had the "side effect" that victims were also punished if they resisted).

In any case, the problem of bullying could be solved by schools having actually approachable and trained staff to serve as a contact point for students being bullied.

Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.

That was the case before smartphones as well. Stuff like "Jackass" and its culture didn't come out of nothing - adolescents across millennia did and do extremely dumb shit to impress their peers, which is also the cause of societies evolving distinct legal frameworks that differ between adolescents and adults in courts. Again, smartphones just changed the method (and, a bit, the audience potential).

thomastjeffery4• 3 years ago

The point is not to stop criticizing smartphones.

The point is to be direct with that criticism.

How else can we possibly change anything?

decremental• 3 years ago

It's important to remember that a ton of people on here are victims of the things they defend. It's like Stockholm syndrome. Drugs, hardcore porn, you name it. They grew up with it, they've been conditioned to feel defensive when there is pushback against it, and to come to the conclusion that they themselves are victims would require facing some harsh emotions that many people would rather just not experience.

trgn2• 3 years ago

Today's equivalent of my parents beat me, but I turned out OK!

adastra226• 3 years ago

My kids don’t have phones. They are the only ones among their peers who don’t have a phone. I told them they can get one when they write an app and get it listed on the App Store, not before.

Most people I tell this to are impressed. The only time I got crucified was the last time I mentioned it on HN. This seems to be a particular bone to pick that HN users have.

doublerabbit• 3 years ago

How are they suppose to write an app when they have no phone?

And which AppStore? Apple, Google, Sourceforge?

nvrmnd• 3 years ago

My oldest got a phone this year, the real issue is that we need to communicate with her when she goes to a friend's place, soccer practice, and so on. Primarily for safety reasons.

I imagine for most people their children will reach an age where they are more autonomous and require a phone for safety well before the kiddos are writing iOS applications.

parthianshotgun• 3 years ago

Why an app? Doesn't seem terribly related, it's not like writing an app signals any sort of maturity. Maybe having them read Kant might be better, or...maybe just don't give them an out, be firm in the totality of the ban, lean into it without illusions.

arandomhuman• 3 years ago

I feel like this is a bit unusual: "I told them they can get one when they write an app"

Why are you insisting that they publish an app on the app store, are they keenly interested in software development or something?

MSFT_Edging• 3 years ago

How would they have any kind of interest in making an app without an interest garnered by using the device?

My interest in technology was garnered from getting a device then wanting to do more with it.

ashton314• 3 years ago

I won't quibble about the bar of "write an app"—presumably that's something you'd be able to help them with.

I really like the idea of helping kids see computers/phones as tools for creation and exploration, rather than entertainment boxes. I personally feel like the danger for most kids with computers/smart phones/etc. is the addictive entertainment aspect, not as a thing in and of itself.

casey2• 3 years ago

The thread and article isn't about smartphones being harmful, it's about a very small study showing slight correlation between MHQ(something that approximately 2 people itt could define) (and a few categories that "don't align with DSM-5") and the age at which 18-24 year-old females got their first "smartphone or tablet" and even less correlation among 18-24 year-old males.

It can't be the million other things wrong with society it has to be the new thing, let's all extrapolate wildly from a random study and get hyped up on fear of the new thing so we can keep ignoring real problems. Through in some random easily debunked claims about every (literally every) child.

You make no sense.

swayvil3• 3 years ago

Nobody wants to be a lemming heading for the cliff. Nobody wants to be a stoneage troglodyte drinking from a lead cup.

So I have this semiconscious reaction. The logical refutations appear in dozens, without even having to think about it. Automatic reality editing.

vlovich123• 3 years ago

When I was growing up I was told all sorts of shit like this just about whatever was new tech at the time (e.g. TV rots your brain, Wikipedia is not a reliable source, you're going to get molested if you're not careful on chat rooms). "It feels good" is particularly dangerous for things like this because humans are terrible at making conclusions like this at scale.

It could also be that people in bad situations develop phone addictions and otherwise would be doing drugs. So from that perspective are smartphones causing bad mental health or are kids not being taught good coping strategies & would otherwise be displaying other negative symptoms? Is it possible that the vast majority of people don't do a good job regulating their kids' smartphone use & are the same people who use the TV/iPad/smartphone as a babysitter to quiet the kid whenever they get fussy and then those kids are the ones who develop problems with smartphones? This is extremely complex & hot takes lead to reactionary changes that don't move us forward as a society.

hydrok94• 3 years ago

I'll add this. Smartphones give children instant access to instant stimulation, and it gives children access to an escapist fantasy world. Both of those things, if used to self-medicate, will cause mental health issues.

atourgates• 3 years ago

I'd disagree with the "instant access to an escapist fantasy world" bit being the core issue.

Kids have had access to escapist fantasy worlds ever since the invention of the paperback, and I don't think "being able to distract yourself with books" will lead to mental health issues.

giantg2• 3 years ago

"give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on."

It's not just them seeing it, but everyone else too. I think with the advances in media, everyone is comparing themselves and others to these higher benchmarks. Expectations seem to be incredibly skewed these days. It feels like people expect me to be some expert dev wizard who is rich, witty, has abs, and an 8" done. Sorry, we don't live in a movie...

mordae6• 3 years ago

You are right.

We are definitely missing a positive, encouraging, cooperative culture.

Which is kinda as intended, isn't it? They sure told us in school to make sure we market ourselves well to our future employers. Stressing the need for "healthy" competition.

Spooky232• 3 years ago

I think the audience skews male and single on HN. I have and regularly interact with kids 6-17 right now, as a parent, close uncle and baseball coach.

The effect of phones and tablets in little kids is very obvious - I’ve see kids as young as 3 compulsively watching rubberized tablets under bleachers, in cars, etc.

The younger kids get the shittiest devices - the cheap Amazon tablets. That device is a Skinner box that reinforces poor behavior - act up and you get rewarded with some garbage content.

As they get older, the issues change. My 11 year old just got an iPhone SE, mostly because of some circumstances that make it difficult for him when mom and dad are away. He’s a good kid and responsible, but he’s expressed FOMO/anxiety re missing messages from friends, etc.

That gets worse into the self-esteem issues as they get older.

It’s clearly a difficult tool for children to use effectively without causing harm. It’s also unfortunate as the public infrastructure that I had as a child of the 80s. (Walkable neighborhoods, public phones, etc) don’t exist.

nancyhn4• 3 years ago

I’ve see kids as young as 3 compulsively watching rubberized tablets under bleachers, in cars, etc.

Arguably child abuse. It will be seen as giving a 3 yr old a cigarette or a beer.

fatneckbeard• 3 years ago

HN prob full of people who make their living off smartphones

reminds me of Oil / coil industry people who dont want to talk abt climate change

never easy to come to terms with your life work has to change or stop.

mordae6• 3 years ago

Sorry, never made living from smart phones. Still don't think it's a good idea to ban them for kids.

Instead of actually making the world a fun place to live in, someone calls for renaming git master branch to main, sorry, to ban phones. It's just posing.

Never easy to come to terms with your life's work is actually making lives of other people miserable by exploiting them for a rich guy's third yacht. And that you should just say no.

slt2021• 3 years ago

drug dealers always say: never get high on your own supply

illiac7864• 3 years ago

That is a bit far fetched and a lot of trolling no?

alanchen• 3 years ago

We must also always consider that there could be “third variables” that cause both of the first two variables to rise. In this case, one plausible confounding third variable is permissive parenting. Perhaps permissive parents (in each country) simultaneously do two things: they give their kids smartphones at very young ages, and they also give them few boundaries and little structure, which then interferes with development and produces struggling young adults.

From the original article. I wonder if this variable is controlled, how much of the correlation will be gone.

bbarn• 3 years ago

There is also a negative parenting component that smartphones and tablets enable, which is they can be used to occupy a child without effort. The causation here is probably a mix of a lot of things but generally that society has rapidly changed without a lot of controls in place, smartphones being one that can't be ignored. The internet period is a big one. 25 years ago to call home from abroad was a 30-40$ phone call we did on a special occasion. Now we have instant access to anyone from anywhere.

treeman794• 3 years ago

Raised a teenage daughter to adulthood, have another teenage daughter another upcoming.

Social media was an absolute nightmare for my oldest nightmare.

Every single time she had access, she got moody, rude and withdrawn. We will take it away for a month or more and she would quickly revert back to her happy easy-going self.

Within a week or so I’m getting access back should revert to miserable all the time.

Every single time she completely denies that it has any affect on her and that we were being stupid.

Went on for years. At about 23 she started telling us that she thinks the phone is making her depressed. So on her own she deleted most social and mostly stays off the rest. She’s doing dramatically better now.

With her younger sister hit 13 and got a phone, started complaining to her that she’s not allowed to have any social media. Our oldest told her to stay off social media. That it was a bad idea.

So middle child is often pissed at us about that. But is doing very well in life.

99_00• 3 years ago

it makes logical sense why there would be correlation

The fact that this is "obvious" to well informed parents who take their kids mental health seriously makes it more likely that this is correlation and not causation.

At risk kids will be given smartphones.

Not at risk kids will not.

I suspect that there are elements of correlation and causation involved. I don't think it's a simple relationship.

meragrin_• 3 years ago

Smartphones give children the ability to bully each other at a scale unlike any other.

People problem.

Smartphones give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on.

People problem.

Smartphones give children a new avenue for social exclusion.

People problem.

Smartphones make every single child afraid that what they are doing is being recorded by someone else.

People problem.

Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.

People problem.

Smartphones aren't the problem. They are just things. They don't make people do things. They just enable people to do things in a different medium.

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

It makes perfect sense when you realize the smartphone is nothing more than a tool and the people are the problem. If you take away all the assholes, are smartphones going to have the same effect?

nathan_compton• 3 years ago

By this logic you'd be fine if we gave every person on earth a nuclear bomb? It doesn't take a genius to understand that various pieces of technology might either change the incentive structure of society in such a way as to produce more of certain behaviors and less of others or might enable the assholes you refer to to do more harm than they used to do and in either case undesirable outcomes might increase.

Unless you believe that the common good doesn't exist or that human's don't have any business trying to construct their society in such a way as to seek some form of it, you have to take the social effects of technology into account when making policy. Just asserting that all things ultimately come down to individual decisions is really weird. Like even if you believe it in some libertarian free market fantasy framework, the vast majority of people think differently and your comment provides no justification whatsoever for why "ultimately people are responsible" is a useful way to think about these problems.

Sivart13• 3 years ago

What's easier to change, human nature or technology?

CrampusDestrus• 3 years ago

Your comment completely lacks understanding about human behavior. It's like saying that a heroin addict should just learn to ignore the ready opium-filled syringe on his bedside table.

No, humans don't work like this. You gotta throw the whole thing in the garbage or lock it down so much (basically possible with current platforms) to never encounter those addicting uses.

Aerbil3133• 3 years ago

All those people problems are enabled by smartphones. Now which of those two can you do: Ban smartphones (or most of their functionality) or tell people to please not be <everything above>?

CatWChainsaw4• 3 years ago

"Drugs aren't the problem. They are just things. They don't make people do things."

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

What can parents do about it? Cut their kids off? Will they be better off if they reach adulthood without being immersed in the tech culture of their day? They might be at first, but they might struggle as adults to thrive in the brave new world we’re creating with tech where “software is eating the world”

mixmastamyk3• 3 years ago

I never used the internet until my mid-twenties and learned to write socket code a few months later. Lots of old folks that never used a computer when younger are addicted to facebook today.

The idea that doomscrolling can't be learned later (post teens) is kinda silly.

iamgopal• 3 years ago

Smartphones does all that if you don’t teach children properly all this results. We need to proactive at the same time we give them smartphones.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

I sort of agree, the instant satisfaction of base human desires a smartphone offers, particularly if wide open to psychosocially optimized personalized social media and related applications, is dangerous at any age but especially for people who haven’t built the social experience and resilience necessary - both young and old.

Additionally the form factor makes it ever present and open for use / abuse.

For my child, she has an iPad mini that’s heavily parental controlled. She has no access to social media, and only a few games - Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Terraria. She has drawing programs, education programs from her school (RazKids, etc), and a locked down messenger with only her family members in contacts. It has her kindle, which she has a epaper version of as well. She does have access to safari, but as of yet she just uses it for Wikipedia and stuff. I watch her use and will tailor access as appropriate.

Further we talk to her about the ills and the causes of the ills from social media and addiction optimized user experiences in these devices. The device isn’t the problem, it’s the “impressions, conversions, and stickiness at all costs” mentality that drives so much revenue, and thus so much UX.

I was raised on NES and c64 games, and I gained an awful lot out of it. I don’t agree that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with computers presenting content vs the real world. But I do know there is something wrong with the relationship between users of modern internet media and the companies extracting maximal value from shaping our behavior. That impact increases as you become younger / less sophisticated.

sangnoir• 3 years ago

Yes, correlation does not equal causation. But when it makes logical sense why

Confounding factor: think about the type of parents who choose not to give their children smartphones. Are they more or less likely to be engaged in other aspects of the childs life that promotes good outcomes compared to the average? How about other things like diet, hobbies, income, waking hours spent in the home? Could those potentially affect mental health in adulthood?

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

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".

The issue is that early ownership of a phone correlating to worse mental health may be a proxy for something else. If you are raising children and trying to make good parenting decisions and someone says "smartphones are the work of the devil and your child will be mentally healthier without them" they need to actually be correct, not guessing to enhance their career or something.

If it's not true, then parents who might have safety reasons for providing a phone who then opt to not provide a phone "because phones are bad for kids" may be harming their kids.

It's a blanket statement without nuance. It doesn't tell me if there are situations where it's okay and, if so, what they are. This usually means a person isn't really that knowledgeable about a topic.

People tend towards confirmation bias. It's a rare individual who says "What would affirmatively disprove my hypothesis? Does that thing exist?"

Without that, it's usually not a solid hypothesis. It's usually one full of holes.

thethimble• 3 years ago

safety reasons for providing a phone

Isn’t this a red herring? Do you need to provide a smart phone or just a phone? If it’s a smart phone do you need to enable unfettered access or just the safety related apps you need?

racl101• 3 years ago

I know this is just anecdotal info but I know of a couple of families with boy and daughter around the same age. One family lets the kids use smartphones and iPads and the other only iPads and only for school.

The former family's kids are constantly in a negative and neurotic mode. Always comparing themselves to other students and complaining about what they don't have.

The latter family's kids are waaaay more properly adjusted and it's not even close. They don't spend a lot of time comparing themselves to other people nor on coveting for stuff they saw on YouTube.

There's just no way that all that external stimuli cannot have a negative effect on one's child.

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

It's way worse still. Even if none of the problems you describe materialize for a young individual, still smartphones are bad for development.

They directly come at the expense of socialization, physical activity, discovery and experimentation, group play, facing (manageable) dangers and setbacks, making your own mistakes and learning from them, etc.

To have actual experiences. Good and bad ones. What an absolute dead-end culture it must be to have no experiences.

brightball• 3 years ago

People boldly write off everything these days. It's just the way of the world at this point and it's very pedantic.

Some things are very hard to prove or disprove. Some things people have argued very hard against and are simply unwilling to hear contrary information.

Even when there is a study, people will find fault with the study. In many cases, warranted fault. In others, not so much.

People simply decide what to trust and what not to trust. If I see a guy in a blue shirt walking down the street, stop and talk to him for a minute and then go on my way there's no way that I can prove that to you. The distrustful skeptic can always find a reason that they don't want to believe it.

nr2x• 3 years ago

The findings conform to my existing suspicions and biases, but it’s not peer reviewed and is a single data point. Unfortunately I can’t put much stock in it scientifically.

ouid• 3 years ago

they say that celebrities stop maturing at the age they become famous.

Having too large a group of people know you is terrible for your ability to reinvent yourself as needed. You can't change who you are or even change your mind if your previous identity is recorded and attached to you. People need to be forgotten, and this is especially true of children.

kyleyeats• 3 years ago

Phones make the bad situations worse. If your parents are bullies, it's worse to have a phone. If your peers are bullies, it's worse to have a phone.

If a kid is in one of these situations, it's a little ridiculous to consider the phone the problem. It's like identifying belts as a big harm to kids last century because you don't want to deal with the actual problem of people hitting their kids with belts.

rootusrootus3• 3 years ago

I think this is an important point. I see it with my own kids. I'd have no problem giving my 10 year old son a smartphone. My 12 year old daughter, on the other hand ... the thought terrifies me. I already know very much how they interact socially, both in person and online, and it's not the phone that worries me. It amplifies already existing issues.

weatherlight• 3 years ago

is it smart phones or specific applications on smart phones, i.e social media?

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

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...

quacked• 3 years ago

Anecdotally, I remember that the kids who got smartphones the earliest were already "bad kids". Their parents let them watch explicit movies and TV shows, party unsupervised, and slack off with their grades. (This goes for low- and high-income students both).

I think smartphones do accelerate poor mental health. If I'd been given a smartphone earlier than I was (as a sophomore in college), I definitely would have seen a deterioration in my own self-esteem. However, I also think that permissive parenting that fails to set moral and behavioral boundaries early on in life is a confounding factor in terms of why giving smartphones early leads to worse outcomes.

Eumenes2• 3 years ago

DUH. The tech/software industry is literally destroying humanity, and will rot the mind of the current generation of children. Most kids wanna be youtubers or influencers. I'm quite frankly embarrassed to be part of it. I cringe when someone asks me what I do. I'd have more pride in digging holes at this point.

We were promised space travel to mars and flying cars, but instead we got hate filled and vain social media, political corruption and manipulation, and so, so much more.

Once shit like Neuralink becomes mainstream, we're going to see a whole ton of people just clock TF out.

nashashmi• 3 years ago

Every child needs guardrails before they are given extra, extra features. This article seems to stress that point. The title is just hype.

Lots of people are commenting here without reading the article.

Edit: the main line here is

We cannot be certain that the correlations shown in the data are evidence of causality

pavlov2• 3 years ago

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.)

watwut• 3 years ago

I think that freedom at age of 7 might be difference on itself. It means that kids so actually can socialize on their own terms. Whereas if you drive kids to school and home, their only freedom is on the phone.

urthor• 3 years ago

Bring back the flip phone.

Got a kid, give them Motorola.

Job done.

rootusrootus3• 3 years ago

maybe there's something American parents will be able to learn from Finnish-style phone parenting practice eventually.

Keep in mind that Finland's total population is comparable to a small US state. You are generalizing cultural differences spanning several thousand miles and 330 million people. At the risk of doing exactly the same thing the other direction, I'd like to mention that this seems to be a pretty common European mistake.

makeitdouble11• 3 years ago

Whether that hints at solutions to US issues is up for debate, but at least on the "are smartphone inherently problematic" question, it's a interesting comparison point IMHO.

pavlov2• 3 years ago

I’ve never really understood this argument. The American states are not homogenous either, and Finland would be a mid-size state (its population is somewhere between South Carolina and Minnesota).

Not everything that works in Minnesota would work in another state. Not everything that works in Finland would work in Minnesota. But surely neither is a categorical impossibility.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Be careful about applying the strongest skepticism to studies with conclusions you disagree with.

canyonero2• 3 years ago

Giving children and teens unfettered access to social media and the internet seems to be more of a problem to me than any particular piece of hardware. The cell phone I had access to as a teen was a flip phone from Virgin Mobile that ran on "minutes". There was no web browser, no apps. I used it for texting and calling.

It's up to parents to control access to the content (unfortunately, the tools and hardware that exist for this sucks, which is unfortunate). So if you're dropping an unlocked iphone into your kids lap and walking away, well then maybe you're putting them at risk and neglecting them (which might be further causing mental health issues.)

My daughter is young now, but I will eventually run into this as she gets older. I've thought about this issue and I plan to lock down the content (either via software or targeted hardware) until she's an adult.

civeng5• 3 years ago

Check out the thelightphone dot com, they have already done an incredible job doing that for you.

canyonero2• 3 years ago

Oh cool. This is definitely something I'd consider if it's still around by the time she reaches an appropriate age. Thanks for sharing!

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

Someone tell the local high school here please, they definitely won't listen to me and require that every student have a smartphone.

0xffff22• 3 years ago

How? Do they issue the kids phones? Assuming not because that seems implausibly expensive, what happens if you just don't give your kid a phone?

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

Then they won't be able to follow the courses because all of the data required for homework/tests etc is only available in some stupid app. And no, they don't issue the phones (obviously...). Though they probably should since it is their requirement.

moolcool• 3 years ago

Do they allow tablets instead?

jacquesm7• 3 years ago

That's a very good question. I will look into that. Still, all that social media junk also works on a tablet.

b800h• 3 years ago

I'm inclined to agree with the obvious conclusions, but there's an obvious hidden variable of good parents not giving their children phones, hence those children have a bunch of other good influences.

thenerdhead• 3 years ago

I have no problem admitting this as an adult that I was addicted to the internet. My free and near unlimited access as a kid to the early internet, addicting online video games, and newfound smartphones apps like social media definitely led to mental health challenges in my late 20s and early 30s that were hard to overcome.

I even wrote a 200+ page book on this whole topic where I had "Enough" and wanted less in my life now that I'm a parent of two young kids.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9NZ1T8C

(If anyone else is struggling and wants a free copy, send me an email and I'd gladly send you one)

Also more thoughts on this: https://jondouglas.dev/entertained-from-disappointment/

civeng5• 3 years ago

OP here. Parent of 3, ages 12, 15 and 18 navigating this issue irl. Although I believe good parents aren't super rigid on any issue, I feel pretty strongly on this one. It's the parents responsibility and it's hard since it requires your good example. No phone, age 0 to 10-12, to the Lightphone (absolutely love this product) age 13 to 16-18, to a smart phone. I believe the progression is pushed off as long as possible and allows for a manageable transition to responsible use of a necessary evil. To restrictive and your kid goes off the rails at 18 or earlier. Too permissive...pretty obvious what happens.

MichaelNolan• 3 years ago

Lightphone (absolutely love this product)

What made you pick the Lightphone over a cheap dumb phone. Looking at their product page, the only obvious difference that stood out was the e-ink display.

civeng5• 3 years ago

Great question, and perhaps there is something better out there now since the popularity is rising. We researched thoroughly 3 years ago and at that time they had the best mix of features that fit our needs. Many dumb phones still have cameras and access to games which are both a non starter for our kids. Lightphones have no direct access to internet, but have calendaring which syncs to google, music, podcasts, and turn by turn directions. They are also hard to type on which we view as a feature that makes your time texting "count". We believe the e-ink display reduces the "pull" of the screen to our kids eyeballs.

There is also an element of the design and uniqueness of a ligthphone that starts conversations when people see it. Our son actually brags about his lightphone to peers and other adults, it is not an embarrasment which we believe is an intagible benefit.

obtusifolia• 3 years ago

I'd love to hear more on how this has been working out for you and your kids. Do they seem to grasp why you have these rules in place? Was there any pushback from their side? Did they ever complain about being left out of social circles because of these rules?

I'm not a parent, but this seems an awfully important issue to get right when it comes to children.

za3faran2• 3 years ago

Not OP, but I'll chime in. For us, Islam plays a central role in how we conduct our lives and affairs. While our children are younger than OP's, they already grasp why we do certain things, and why we don't necessarily follow what everyone else does, even though it may appear to be fun at first glance. And if everyone else is jumping off of a bridge, if doesn't make sense for us to follow blindly does it?

We also amend with family and community interaction as much as we can, as well as constantly engaging with them and teaching them that they can trust us in anything that is on their mind. Bringing up how we were raised seems to also aid (e.g. we show them kids shows that we grew up with, we mention that we didn't have cell phones as children, talk about our parents and grandparents times, etc.). I see some parents leaving their kids to watch whatever they want on youtube, and it's quite astonishing what garbage they watch. We pick and choose what shows and programs they're allowed to watch, again, mainly relying on shows we have already seen as children and which instill good values. Thankfully many of them can be found online. And modern incarnations of certain shows are treated as suspicious until proven innocent after what we're seeing them do.

Of course having peers of similar values is also very important, which is why school choice plays a big role, and public school is off the table (though I know not everyone can do the same, but it does not change the fact that it is a huge factor).

civeng5• 3 years ago

100% they get it because we talk about it all the time, however it doesnt mean they agree but I would say they understand. There is pushback as age increases and social pressure DOES increase as well, this is why we think the transition is key. Our 15 y old son just drew up a contract in order to get a smart phone with things like a list of apps he would install, acknowledgement that we "own" his device, agreement that it will not be in his room. We will try to strike a balance between trust and micromanging, hopefully closer to the trust side of the spectrum! We expect him to fail a few times and thats ok, its all part of learning to use it responsibly by the time he turns 18.

This is a much larger issue than just a phone. Awareness of the great damage that can be caused by social media of all forms is just the first step.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

How much of that is correlation vs causation?

I don't see anything in that article mentioning obvious causes for worse mental health:

- employment perspectives - even my generation that graduated right in the financial crisis knew we were in for rough, low-pay and crap job years, kids graduating these days have even worse perspectives

- the looming climate crisis - everyone paying attention in a school that teaches fact-based education knows humanity is in for a rough ride with climate change threatening to make wide swaths of the world basically unable to support human life during their expected life time

- politics actually regressing worldwide - with open marches of actual Nazis raising their arm to the well-known salute, dictators and authoritarians worldwide getting and staying in power, politicians hell-bent on erasing all social progress of the last decades, and no one doing anything about that, it paints a pretty depressing view.

The earlier kids get smartphones, the earlier they see that the promise of "work hard, have a good life", "everyone can start a dishwasher and die a millionaire" and "your future will be better than your parents'" is bullshit. Facts don't lie, facts are not political, and children and adolescents are not dumb. They know they are being lied to, and they see that lies have absolutely zero consequences.

jstarfish2• 3 years ago

employment perspectives - even my generation that graduated right in the financial crisis knew we were in for rough, low-pay and crap job years, kids graduating these days have even worse perspectives

This is such bullshit.

Everybody's first job is shit. My first job paid $5 an hour; In-N-Out is paying over 3x that to start. Truly a Dickensian tale of woe.

Then we had to rack up 5 figures in tuition debt to get a shot at that six-figure income. Companies are now relaxing degree requirements.

Housing is expensive, yes. The idea of having roommates to split the bills is unfathomable though.

If anything, the kids get disillusioned by the prospect of work itself. Why bother when some annoying loudmouth is showing off his mansions and exotic cars he bought with money he earned being annoying on YouTube? Anything short of being a professional influencer is unacceptable.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

This is such bullshit. Everybody's first job is shit.

I'm not talking about starter jobs flipping burgers and the likes. I'm talking about lifetime earning perspectives and permanently dampened careers, which has been proven to be significantly lower for those graduating in an economic downturn [1]. And hell, it's basic math. If you get 5% raises each year, and you start from 20k, you'll be at a markedly lower end after 20 years than if you entered at 30k.

Housing is expensive, yes. The idea of having roommates to split the bills is unfathomable though.

Having to have roommates to make rent while working full time is a sign of a failed housing market. It used to be the case in the 90s that a man by the age of 25-30 could own a house, a car for himself, a car for their spouse, said spouse not working, and two kids on a single middle-class income. This hasn't been possible for the last twenty years.

If anything, the kids get disillusioned by the prospect of work itself. Why bother when some annoying loudmouth is showing off his mansions and exotic cars he bought with money he earned being annoying on YouTube? Anything short of being a professional influencer is unacceptable.

Prominent idiots flashing their wealth in an annoying way has been a thing long before influencers.

Young people just don't want to work anymore for shit wages in 60+ hour bullshit jobs while the profit stays at the employer. Offer them actually attractive work conditions (instead of fruit baskets) and meaningful work and they will come and work.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...

gerbilly• 3 years ago

Unpopular opinion:

Life was better before smartphones. I wish they'd never been invented.

imran-iq• 3 years ago

How many police brutality cases would we have never known about if not for smartphones?

uptownfunk2• 3 years ago

As much as social media companies like to preach about how they are trying to bring the world together, they are under a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profits by any legal means necessary (including telling the world that their products are good for them to gain users, kind of like what smoking did back in the day).

Remember, your usage and engagement is what drives their ad revenues, it drives their product metrics which get reported out at quarterly earnings calls for shareholders.

The only incentive they have is to make the product just legal enough to avoid scrutiny and to maximize profits as much as possible.

Given this situation (much like we have legislation for smoking advertising, a type of proto-social media, and we have the FDA for pharma) social media absolutely needs to be regulated. It is another form of junk food for the brains and it is visibly damaging our society and our future generations.

CatWChainsaw4• 3 years ago

"Don't be evil" was never the company ethos, only a smokescreen.

uptownfunk2• 3 years ago

Yes exactly, they all have their smokescreen. It is all run by executives who want their bonus at any cost.

marcodiego• 3 years ago

When I was a teenager, my mother, family and friends tried to lure into using a cellphone. They said that it would help them to contact me whenever they wanted and that it would help me to go out with them and have a good time and some fun.

I knew my helicopter mother well enough and knew that the only functions a cell phone would get was to call me to tell me it was time to go home, ask where I was, what I was doing, who I was with... I then, consciously, refused to get one.

That probably saved my younger self from getting addicted to smartphone and social networks. Smartphones are addicting to a young audience because they work like drugs: the more you use it, the more you need it. If you make something less attractive it will probably be less addictive.

I'm not a parent and not planning to become one anytime soon, but maybe a way to get teenagers not wanting a smartphone is to make it not a instrument of dopamine rush but a bringer of sadness that at any moment you may receive a call from your parent telling you it is time to go home or asking inconvenient questions.

Tade0• 3 years ago

but maybe a way to get teenagers not wanting a smartphone is to make it not a instrument of dopamine rush but a bringer of sadness

One doesn't exclude the other.

I was mortified seeing my relatives demonstrate how they track their children's every movement in real time as well as limit their phone usage.

All without much effect because they themselves are glued to their devices.

It's really a question of setting an example and I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason all those children received phones so early was to make them stop demanding attention so that their parents could look at screens.

jefc1111• 3 years ago

My sub 10 years old kid has a smartphone, but it has no sim card and runs a Google child account, so nothing can be installed without me approving, and it only knows about the home wi-fi. We also control how much it is used and it is not left in the bedroom at night. Previously it was actually locked into kiosk mode with Spotify Kids being the only accessible app. Great way to use an old phone. It even has a broken screen but we've now had 3 years extra use (Galaxy S7).

rootusrootus3• 3 years ago

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.

aio24• 3 years ago

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

xwdv• 3 years ago

As an adult I recognize now I was hopelessly addicted to computers as a child, and I wasn’t just playing games and talking to friends on AIM or ICQ, I was figuring out how things worked, experimenting with viruses, trying to understand HTML source code, even trying to make my own games.

As a result, I didn’t really develop like a normal child. I developed little to no empathy, and a worldview where I considered almost everyone around me some kind of moron. My estimation of a person’s worth became directly correlated to how much they knew about technology. Most computer laws were written by idiots and had no good reason to exist, etc…

The difference between me and these social media addicted kids today is that my addiction never led me spiralling into a mentally unhealthy depression – it led me head first into an extremely lucrative career that made me incredible amounts of money and reaffirmed my beliefs in myself and the world.

For most of these kids today though, social media will never lead them to fame and riches, they will never look in the mirror and see themselves look better than what they see in filtered photos of their life. They will spend all their life chasing some ideal that can never be reached, and by the time they realize that, they will look back on all the shallow wasted years of their life and become depressed, they will have no choice but to resign themselves to a shittier life than they imagined.

ok_dad• 3 years ago

It's the social media, like everyone here is saying, however the missing point around here is that it's hard to be happy and have great mental health when you have to struggle and hustle everyday to earn enough to live. Not to mention in America if you lose a job you lose health insurance. To me it's pretty clear that the real problem is the world sliding into a new "gilded age" and everyone can see it in real-time because of social media, and we're all fucking depressed about it. I've been using computers quite significantly since I was about 8 in the Prodigy-then-AOL era; probably several hours a day or more and at least as much as I look at my phone today. I wasn't really depressed until things started to become clear that I had a lesser future than my parents had, and I learned that primarily from social media. Shutting down social media would just mask the problem somewhat, not eliminate it, in my view.

hoosieree• 3 years ago

Ted Chiang has an essay that also compares our current era to the gilded age:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...

It's ostensibly about AI but the deeper issue is concentration of wealth and power. Banning one harmful social media company (e.g. TikTok) does nothing to change the incentive structure. As long as harmful social media remains profitable, it will continue.

maxdoop• 3 years ago

So many comments here are of the belief that "it's not the phones, it's the doom of the real world! Climate change, inflation, recession -- this is all bad for mental health of our kids."

And I just want to ask if any of these people every met any real child.

Imagine you are 14. You hear the climate isn't doing too hot, but then you pull out your phone and see your classmate getting tons of attention for some post he made on social media. Meanwhile, your own post has barely any likes.

Which is going to bother you more? Climate change, or the social media sadness?

makeitdouble11• 3 years ago

Teenagers actually ask their parents what it means for them that whole countries don't give a shit about the future of the planet.

Of course they care about their social circle and how they're seen in the world. But people tend to forget that it's also the age where they try really hard to understand the world in general, what kind of like awaits them, what it means to grow up, etc.

As a society we constantly ask teenagers to think about the future, and most of them actually think pretty hard about what it means for them to become adults and what world they'll live in.

hardware2win• 3 years ago

I dont believe that it isnt tiny %

thomastjeffery4• 3 years ago

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 experience: a computer is no more or less than a tool. It is what you do with it that matters.

Most of us here are critical of commonly proposed solutions to this problem, because they are so broad that they would disallow the beneficial activities that any motivated person can pursue with this tool.

If my parents had arbitrarily limited the time I was allowed to use a computer, I would not have learned even a tiny percentage of what I did.

If my parents had obsessively watched over my shoulder or limited my DNS access to exclude sites like Reddit, then I would have gotten repeatedly stuck early on, and probably given up on the very exploration that made computing a healthy part of my life.

We aren't talking about real computers, though. This is the brave new world of "smart phones". 30% of that market are Apple's walled-garden pretends-it-isn't-a-computer bricks. An unknown but significant percentage of Android bricks have permanently locked bootloaders. Even if a child is motivated to explore the subtleties of computing, chances are their device won't allow them to.

What if we put more effort into positive change? What if instead of trying to restrict a child's behavior, we did the opposite? What kind of opportunities are missed by the average child-available computing device? What opportunities should be made more approachable to an uneducated explorer? When I think about this problem from this perspective, I am overwhelmed with potential solutions. I would rather start trying those out than keep whining about the same old unsolvable problem domain.

ericmcer• 3 years ago

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 sci-fi 20 years ago. The reality is the average person when enabled will flow down the path of least resistance, and consume whatever requires the least effort. An endless scroll of meme videos and pictures of friends is going to beat out learning a challenging new skill for 99% of kids, and most adults as well unless they are consciously avoiding it.

thomastjeffery4• 3 years ago

Have you ever tried to create anything with a smartphone? That path has an incredible amount of resistance. More importantly, the arbitrary hurdles cannot be moved.

On a desktop PC, I can install whatever Linux distro I want. That can give me much greater access to a serious development environment than even Windows could dream of. Android feels like a toy in comparison, and iOS is like one of those fake laptops they sell to toddlers.

Even when my Android phone has an unlockable bootloader, it's still unlikely that I will be able to run a desktop-equivalent Linux distro on it. Chances are, I'm left with a less-restrictive flavor of Android. That's the best case scenario, and it's absolutely worse than the average case I grew up with.

It's not entirely about resistance, either. People follow their interests within a reasonable amount of effort. At the end of the day, they balance the two.

What opportunities to mobile computing users have to follow what interests? Social media provides the least resistance by several orders of magnitude.

We can and should change this landscape. We should be minimizing the opportunity cost of creative computing, instead of trying to convince billions of people to throw the entire thing out the window.

aio24• 3 years ago

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.

abirch• 3 years ago

What I would like to see is the YEAR the person got the smart phone (as opposed to age). It'd be interesting to see if there's a correlation of more recent people getting smartphones and how difficult life is becoming (large student debt, stagnant wages, hard to buy a house, etc.)

I'm absolutely trying to avoid social media at all cost, but I want to see if the age of the first phone is an artifact of the current stresses of our youngest generations.

philsnow2• 3 years ago

Wait Until 8th asks parents to sign a pledge, when their children are in elementary school, that they will wait until 8th grade to give them a smartphone. The pledge only takes effect once ten families in that child’s grade have signed the pledge so that the child will have a community of peers and will not feel so isolated before 8th grade.
We think this is a great idea, we just suggest that the pledge should be: Wait Until 9th. Or Wait Until High School. Children are usually 12 or 13 at the start of 8th grade; that is still within the period of early puberty.

I'm going to contact the Wait Until 8th people and ask them if they'd consider adding a "I'm willing to wait until <grade> before giving my kids a phone" field. Maybe there are enough people in a given community who would be glad to wait until 12th grade, but just "wait until 8th" doesn't let them discover each other.

Plus, if 8th graders have smartphones, that means that smartphones will be everywhere in middle schools, increasing the desire of 7th graders to get them.

A while back I was considering a school system for my kids where the grades are split up into a K-5th campus and a 6th-12th campus, but they didn't have any policy about cell phone usage at either campus. I guessed that every 6th grader was going to feel pressure to have a cell phone by Christmas of their first year on the upper campus, and this was my top issue with this school system.

They're now in a school where students have to turn in phones into a phone bucket in the office before the school day starts, and have to pick them up after school. I've seen the bucket in the middle of the day and there's only like 6 phones in there, so (it seems) there's very low rates of phone ownership for kids at the school.

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

There are a lot of things going on in the world at the same time.

Family size has trended down in developed countries. This has a significant impact on social fabric.

My father was one of five kids. My mother was one of twelve. I was one of three and had an aunt with four children who lived nearby.

So I had many, many aunts, uncles and cousins. In contrast, me and my siblings all have only one or two kids apiece and it does not provide the same social fabric.

Women in particular are facing radically different roles in life and often have relatively few good role models for the kind of life they need to somehow create for themselves.

I find their tactic of talking about preponderance of the evidence versus beyond a shadow of a doubt annoying. It's a strong arm tactic trying to force their position on other people and I find that objectionable on the face of it.

Having said that, when they were adolescents my sons inherited an old phone of mine when I upgraded. It had one use: to let them go where they wanted at the mall and I could call them and say "Hey, I'm ready to go now" or whatever.

They might want to beef up their investigation into "Why girls?" rather than harp so much on "We should be allowed to cram our policies down your throats with merely the preponderance of the evidence. It's not like this is a criminal trial."

Yeah, buddy, you want to dictate to me how to raise my kids, you better have more compelling evidence than a criminal trial.

Provide better info and best practices, not a desperate plea to be allowed to "win" this argument with a less stringent standard of evidence. Geez.

JustSomeNobody• 3 years ago

It's not smartphones. It's Facebook, twitter, reddit, HN, etc. Yes, even HN.

Smartphones simply mean that kids have near constant access to it all.

And it's just as bad for adults.

djcooley• 3 years ago

From my experience on this, the single biggest determining factor on one's opinion is whether you have kids (I have elementary-age kids). We have to work like mad to limit screens, but it is an uphill battle. Their schools use them, their music teachers use them, their after-school tutoring (Kumon) uses them, and so on.

I have a vivid memory of my son's 6th birthday. At his school, kids would sit in a circle and get to ask questions to the birthday kid. One of the questions he got was: "Who is your favorite Youtuber?" His heart sank when he said he wasn't allowed to watch it, and the other kids were kind of shocked.

influxmoment• 3 years ago

When I was a kid I knew people addicted to reading as an escape. Unhealthy escapism. Just saying it's not always the method of escape that's the source of the problem

za3faran2• 3 years ago

I attended a very informative lecture by Dr. Leonard Sax a number of years ago, when it was at the cusp of the social media explosion we see today, and he brought up studies that showed similar dangerous effects on young boys and girls, especially girls, and then he went on to discuss why that was. It's clear that social media is extremely toxic, I felt a big quality of life improvement when I abandoned FB, and I don't use instagram or tictoc or what have you.

bvsrinivasan• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if someone has already posted this here, but Cal Newport had a nice presentation summarizing what we know about the effects of social media usage on children.

https://youtu.be/VN5lrKMeAOs

I showed this to my teenaged daughter and while she was irritated, she reluctantly agreed that it made sense.

civeng5• 3 years ago

Our family is a huge fan of Cal Newport with respect to these matters, he is an inspiration and part of the solution!

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

This doesn't feel like any news to me, I thought this was well known?

bdangubic• 3 years ago

Main issue here is that parents are allowing kids to use “phone” feature and not as much “smart” features. This is all on parents.

If parents only allowed “smart” features of the smartphone to be used…

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

Only now do I realize what absolute paradise my 80s childhood was.

Zero supervision, I could go wherever I want.

No need to organize anything, go to any playground and there's armies of friends (and foes). No way to communicate other than to simply show up.

No wealth to flex, less tech and toys. Far more physical play where you make your world and adventures by making it up.

A socially coherent authority where parents, neighborhoods, teachers where not at odds with each other, instead they aligned to correct your shitty behavior, which is good and needed.

Nothing about it is recorded. Nothing. Like it didn't happen.

Not a care in the world about larger issues in life. We didn't know about anything, or care about anything. Mental health? Never heard of it, what's that?

mbrochh• 3 years ago

I can only urge everyone to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma4VZ7rxGOw

It's not only kids. It's everyone.

Perenti3• 3 years ago

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.

ajma• 3 years ago

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.

Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

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