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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
>No, social media does.
Social media (and other mindless media consumption) is perhaps the defining role for smartphones, especially for children.
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.
Dumbphones satisfy this requirement just fine
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).
Obviously not, it's bad for their health.
Is mental health less of a priority than physical health?
My case rests.
> 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.
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.
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...
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!"
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.
Arguably child abuse. It will be seen as giving a 3 yr old a cigarette or a beer.
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.
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.
Why are you insisting that they publish an app on the app store, are they keenly interested in software development or something?
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.
My interest in technology was garnered from getting a device then wanting to do more with it.
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.
And which AppStore? Apple, Google, Sourceforge?
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"
There are lots of areas of our lives where we lean on the precautionary principle WITHOUT needing bulletproof justification.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So I have this semiconscious reaction. The logical refutations appear in dozens, without even having to think about it. Automatic reality editing.
From the original article. I wonder if this variable is controlled, how much of the correlation will be gone.
* 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.
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".
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.
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?
The idea that doomscrolling can't be learned later (post teens) is kinda silly.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
A phrase I didn't know I needed to learn.
The point is to be direct with that criticism.
How else can we possibly change anything?
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".
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.
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.
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.
This is not a good thing.
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.
Great questions for interesting philosophical and academic debate.
Silly questions for deciding how to, say, raise kids.
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.
Speculatively, I’d say it’s social media for girls (instagram, tiktok, snapchat) and porn for boys.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...
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"
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Got a kid, give them Motorola.
Job done.
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/
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.
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.
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.
> "...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...
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.
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.
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.
I'm not a parent, but this seems an awfully important issue to get right when it comes to children.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> “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.
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.
And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
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).
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.
"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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It'd be a lot different, and a lot less-used, if you still had to go sit at a desk to use it.
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.
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.
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
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
It's not only kids. It's everyone.
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.
I showed this to my teenaged daughter and while she was irritated, she reluctantly agreed that it made sense.
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.
If parents only allowed “smart” features of the smartphone to be used…
Smartphones simply mean that kids have near constant access to it all.
And it's just as bad for adults.
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.
Also, providing "low-intensity" options like dumbphones just for messages/calling and laptops with age/time-restriction etc helps significantly.
There are probably some public school districts like that, but I expect they'd be harder to shop for.
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.
Which totally won't affect her mental health.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do.
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.
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.
Life was better before smartphones. I wish they'd never been invented.
