Am I reading this right? They basically are trying to measure sleep quality and whether or not they have depression based on some random questions? Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns. My wife (who gives piano lessons) recently had a student (13yo girl) that for over a year was sending naked photos of herself to an account on instagram that was supposed to be the secret "true fans only" account of Justin Bieber (or some other popular singer). Can't remember how her parents found out, but they took her to the police department to let them handle it (they did nothing). My wife told her she should be more careful. Her only response was "Yea.. but what if it was really Justin?".
I'm with you on that, but if 10 years from now, her emotional health is fine and she doesn't lose sleep over it, then long-term the damage to her may have been minimal?
I think the idea is that poor mental health outcomes would be a proxy for a large fraction of the wide range of issues phones could cause.
> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.
Was that ever researched? Or is it something that adults just find reasonable?
From my experience people are fairly good as adults, with dealing with memories of their own youth voluntary stupidity especially if it didn't result in damage to their bodies or didn't alter their life in significant manner.
This by no way excuses the behavior of a person that misled a kid into something like that, but I think one can abhor somebody doing something that has potential horrible consequences while at the same time observing that damage they managed to inflict in that case was actually minimal.
Of course not. But I have experience of being a kid and doing potentially life threatening and borderline criminal things because of my youthful stupidity that may have ended horribly.
I was never groomed but I managed to screw up my perception of romantic relationships all by myself with little help of same aged friends as I grew up.
Do you have the experience of being a kid who didn’t do those things and seeing how you turned out.
It’s good to survive and thrive. It’s another thing to say that traumatic events in childhood shouldn’t be avoided. And perpetrators of those crimes shouldn’t be punished.
Adults soliciting nudes from minors seems pretty bad to me. The fact that most victims don’t have dire outcomes doesn’t convince me that adults soliciting nudes from minors is ok.
I completely agree with you on all accounts. None of that is ok. And traumatic events should be avoided. I just ask about how founded is the automatic assumption that sending naked pictures to someone on the internet, possibly adult, is automatically traumatic for a kid who does that.
I do fundamentally agree with the logic -- we should be looking at harm. If I had send nude picks as a kid, and nothing came of it, it's probably not an issue. However:
- With growing compromises, anything sent on the internet today is likely to be found and linked back someday.
- We have no idea what risks will happen in 20 years.
- Even today, it can lead to stalky / groomy / etc. things
Those sorts of rare events won't be captured well in metrics. Usually, it's not that 100% of people are harmed, but that 1% suffers extreme harm.
So as much as I agree with the logic, I disagree with the conclusion.
(you're the other way around: your conclusion is right, but your logic is missing, and replaced by outrage)
while I understand your point, I have to believe that anyone hosting and showing naked underage pictures is very quickly going to decide not to so that particular threat really holds little water.
There’s ways to explore sexuality besides sending nudes to strangers and being tricked into transactional relationships that exploit their sexuality.
Everyone matures at different rates, but I think it’s pretty universal that no 13 year old is mature enough to consent to nude photos sent to strangers who are likely adults. Not to mention it’s criminal.
I mean I absolutely agree with the first point. The reaction of the adults in these circumstances almost certainly is worse than the damage caused in the first place.
What this means in the grand scheme of things though I'm not sure.
What is the alternative though? Trying to shelter kids from the internet with filters which are guaranteed to be either overbearing or easily bypassed? Deny them a phone which many of their peers will have (in all likelyhood the photos will just get taken on someone else's phone)? Try to treat them as intelligent young people and explain the realities.
Treating them as intelligent young people seems like the obvious answer, although those conversations are hard, especially at the young ages that kids can access adult content nowadays.
The "best" solution in my mind, is probably filtering internet access until they hit puberty, then have the talk. What goes in the talk, idk (probably what catfishing is, promoting neck-down nudes only, sex-positivity, and maybe one or two other things).
The sex-positivity feels like the most important part though, and what I was getting at originally. So many parents (including my own) only focus on what not to do, that kids don't know what to do. So many keep doing the same things in secret and just feel guilty about it.
Is there a future where it's the norm to promote safe sex amongst teens? Or are we too much of prudes to ever touch the topic?
I know this is meant to be a bit of a swipe at the police, but I mean... what can they do? You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them. A guy I play video games with used to be part of the FBI's cybercrime division and he always laments how difficult it is to go after people (he works in cybersecurity now). I hope to have kids one day, and I can't imagine how difficult it is to be a parent in the age of texting, Instagram, and Tiktok.
> You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them.
They could at least subpoena the social media company transmitting the nudes. If it’s across state lines then get the FBI involved. Daily photos means hundreds of counts of felony child porn, soliciting minors, etc etc.
Wait, this is the FBI. You mean they can't just knock on the door of the NSA, say "hey, use your XKEYSCORE to trace this creep", then parallel-construct an evidence chain with fictional provenance so they can nail him in court so hard all his lawyers can do is recommend taking a plea bargain?
What are we paying those guys for, anyway? What are secret police even for, if not prosecuting people you can't legally gather evidence against?
Well they would if it was the daughter of someone in power. But right now they are too busy trying to convince mentally ill people to commit terrorist acts so they can stop them.
I mean if you're young enough to have done something stupid like this when given unsupervised access to the internet you know that there's nothing you can do to prevent it except try to impart some good internet hygiene that they probably won't listen to anyway because they're 13 and humans are fantastically bad at learning from other people's mistakes -- "nice cautionary tale but this is different."
Sheltering doesn't work because it just postpones the naivete; it's called experience because you have to experience it. Plus it just makes your kids hate you, not trust your advice, and worse not come to you for help.
Your job as a parent isn't to devise some system to make it impossible for your kids to do stupid things, yes even serious ones like this, your job is to try as best you can to help them understand and choose to not do stupid things and, when they do and need an adult, help them deal with the consequences.
I mean if anything what I did at that age was worse, I knew the guys I was talking to were way older and still exchanged spicy photos. Yeah yeah something something daddy issues but it's true. At that age we crave male attention and validation, especially from older men, like a dried out sponge and when we don't get it or enough from dad we find it other places and I'm so sure that's what happened here. I didn't know there was anything wrong with the photos I was sending, I was just following the attention and praise and knew they liked them.
Experience works in a learning process if, and only if, there is awareness of consequences, and the developing brain is capable of linking actions with consequences. If there is a long feedback cycle, it is doubtful an adolescent is going to put much thought into it — or care.
Free range parenting, by the way, don’t necessarily advocate letting a child wander off with zero awareness on the part of the parent. There are often environmental rail guards invisible to the child — neighbors that know the child and the parents, for example, or in the case of Japan, a culture and social order where this is pervasive.
My view is that parents curate environments, and change the possibility space in which catastrophic mistakes can be avoided. This isn’t a question of “sheltering” or “exposure”, but whether or not posting up naked under aged pictures of yourself on the internet is a catastrophic mistake.
I don't think I really disagree with you but I don't know of any options here where you can do that. Monitoring internet usage destroys trust, same with trying to make it not private with something like "no phone / laptop in your room." This is the age for discovering porn after all. You can't make a web filter for "sketchy guys on IG", and it's the same sort of thing IRL with GPS monitoring or just not letting them go places. Apples new nudity filter thing might be a not too invasive option but that's iMessage only.
Thirteen is about the age where you lose control of what they're doing all the time and there's no way to afford them the necessary independence to actually grow up that they can't do catastrophically stupid things with. Best you can do is prepare them, have a relationship with them so they tell you things and you can smell when the vibes are off, and hope they took some of the bigger lessons to heart.
Sorry, too young for my own, I'm talking about my own experience. There is nothing my parents could have done to make it physically impossible for me to make the mistakes I did outside of stripping me of my privacy and independence -- the noose I hung myself with was "had a phone" and "had access to Instagram." Well I guess that's not true either, I got my phone and door taken away plus a curfew and that didn't really do much due to the whole "having friends" thing. Parent's somehow never caught on that I took the sim card out before turning it over and just used my friend's old phone.
I feel like you're not gonna believe me but it's the truth. I stopped being a menace when my parents loosened their grip. To this day I still have no idea why they completely changed their approach, probably just apathy, but without this looming oppressive authority to fight against there was just I don't know -- no point. All the twisted satisfaction I got from pissing them off or getting away with stuff just got sucked out of the air. I mean I still did things my parents didn't approve of like going to Forest without telling them, and getting my nose pierced but like I was more responsible about it when it wasn't an act of defiance.
I’ve raised a tween who became a teen step child. I also grew up as a teen in the 90s. I was accessing porn via gopher and usenet when I was around 10. Netscape wasn’t even around back then. The dotcom boom did not really ramp up until after I graduated high school.
There are a lot of factors at play in all of this. For one, in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have the internet as you know it. I also enjoyed a lot more freedom, as many folks who grew up in that time will remember.
These days, as parents, we can get arrested for neglect because we want the child to be able to walk home from school with their friends school. The laws were put on the books due to fear of child trafficking — little do they know what kids are doing on the internet.
My wife and I now have a under-2 child and another on the way. I can tell you that for me, allowing the child independence forms a crucial part of the parenting, but independence for its own sake is not the whole thing. The key missing piece is somehow teaching the child to _voluntarily_ contribute something greater than themselves. There is freedom, yes, but also responsibility. One chosen by the person.
Without that “contribute something greater than yourself”, independence for its own sake is meaningless. So is forcing the person to take on a responsibility.
I’m not aiming for control of the internet for my child. I’m aiming for raising someone who can discover their own inner purpose and then can grow into someone capable of contributing that. The next generation will have to take care of the world long after my cold body is food for the worms.
I remember being 13-14. Probably always will, since I have a lot of good memories of that age. So, while I cannot relate to fear's for one's daughter or relate to how a young girl feels, I can safely say that sending nudes, dick pics, etc, was in full fledge at that age. I also cannot see how doing anything like that can ruin someone for the rest of their life. I don't understand the fears that people lament about the dangers of it. Where's the danger? Consequences? Sure, there is a fairly unlikely chance that the images will end up circulating into your adulthood. But dangers?
The situation you describe is rightfully terrible, but the conclusion you seem to be pointing at is, no one should have a phone until they're 18? or similar?
I don't think that's what you actually mean to say, so when we're talking about larger the group, this specific situation won't lead you to the same conclusion.
> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.
There aren't many ways to effectively study things at scale. This is 250 participants tracked over 5 years. That alone is hard enough, so I can appreciate wanting a much larger group.
In the end, I think that you're agreeing with the study - parents involvement and parenting matter.
> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.
Why are they not though? After all harm is not in what was done to you but how it impacted you. And bad quality of sleep and depression are signs that you've been wrecked.
I think the actual danger in well-being is around habit formation. Most millennials are old enough where you may be able to find a link between age acquired of mobile phones and current wellbeing based on screen time. At least where I live, young parents are absolutely glued to their phones and by proxy their kids are forming these habits at ages as early at two. I was a game boy kid and eventually developed bad habits of playing excess video games that I struggled with until I was 27. I can tell you first hand that playing games too much affected my grades, sleep, and social life as a teen.
I would seriously contest the pattern they found here. It does not match other statistics of mental health and increasing screentime.
Completely wrong metrics are being used in this study to measure "well being". I'm concerned about attention span, communication skills, critical thinking, social skills, etc. and I'm sure these are also the things most parents care about when restricting phone/screen time.
"Completely wrong" based on what? The conceptual definition of adolescent wellbeing is an area of robust debate involving a number of different interacting areas (e.g. physical, emotional, sociocultural, etc.)[1]. The markers of wellbeing that the study picked seem eminently reasonable as emblematic of several of these areas, although certainly not exhaustive.
> “One possible explanation for these results is that parents are doing a good job matching their decisions to give their kids phones to their child’s and family’s needs,” Robinson said. “These results should be seen as empowering parents to do what they think is right for their family.”
This was my immediate thought. Self-selection (and other forms of non-random selection) is the bane of psychology studies. One cannot draw as broad a conclusion from this study as the title would imply. It has the important qualification that these were children that the parents deemed ready.
It is still a nice study to see, and may be rightfully reassuring to parents.
Also, phone ownership is an imperfect measure of phone use; for spending multiple hours a day on social media, it's a good proxy, but for other things, less so. I have a (well one that I know of) child who was exposed to hardcore pornography in 2nd grade from the phone of an older student.
I agree. At a minimum it’s reassuring that if you feel it’s ok to give your kid a phone at 9 you’re probably not doing significantly more harm than if you waited 3 more years.
It may not be an ideal study (a few hundred kids, 5 years, whatever else people are identifying) but it’s far better than random anecdotes from people who have their own biases as to what age is good/bad.
The idea that "well-being" is a metric that can be measured in order to influence behaviours like this is utterly absurd.
I'm not religious, but I often feel like this is a huge hole in the modern landscape, there's no sense of whether anything can be good or bad outside of "outcomes". It's like, if it doesn't cause some sort of obvious malady, that's just fine then.
Quality surely exists as a concept regardless of how much philosophical warbling we could do on the subject.
Imagine the theoretical study that shows that "having/not having children by age 40 is not linked to female well-being". For the sake of argument let's say this is factual, that happiness, rates of mental illness, physical illness etc are the same in both childless and mothering groups.
So should someone who wants to have children ignore their desires because "science" told them that they'll be fine either way? Should someone who doesn't want to have children ignore their desires?
I'm ranting now, but I guess my point is that this isn't really actionable in any way.
But didn't another study conclude that giving kids mobile at early age makes their eyes don't grow well with their eye being short sighted easily?
I mean it makes sense. I used to run around outside and play sports through my vacations. Current generation for the majority are looking at screens and are indoors.
Isn't that an disadvantage for the kid and hence linked to their well being?
I think the strongest hints about what causes short sightedness in kids is that indoor lightning is not nearly as strong as necessary for correct eye development. So probably we now have LEDs we should probably address that first.
TIL about the LED thought. As a person who is infront of the computer for most of his day, only recently have I taken lighting extremely strict.
I am not sure if everyone will do the same. The whole reason behind dark themes and working at night and why they are also popular paints a good picture or hind on how serious people are about lighting. :/
White people don't like that the language is gendered, so instead of Latina (female) and Latino (male) they told everyone they should be using Latinx and it stuck.
I've seen a number of Hispanic people get irritated that people are trying to take away from their culture and language, and others that say they don't care.
Ironically, it's a kind of (figurative) colonialism where a ruling class is imposing their culture and quasi-religious virtue structure on other languages and cultures.
Which is really dumb. I’m learning Spanish now and everything is gendered in Spanish.
And this is not meant to be a political rant - no one could ever call me right wing - but a major reason that Democrats are starting to lose the Hispanic vote is because they are seen as to pandering with crap like this. For context, I’m a minority.
It's an English term for Latinos that non-Latinos in the U.S. use to signal inclusiveness (usually gender inclusiveness these days, but its history includes some LGBT inclusiveness as well). You see it a lot in corporate emails about awareness and sometimes in colleges and academia. It's mildly disliked by several parts of the political spectrum for a surprisingly diverse number of reasons, but it's generally well meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx.
Yes just like I as a Black person have to grit my teeth about all of the DI&E initiatives where we change branches from “master” to “main” and don’t use the term “KMS Master Key” because it’s “offensive” when I’m not aware of anyone of any color giving it a second thought.
From Wikipedia:
>Latinx is a neologism in American English which is used to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The gender-neutral ⟨-x⟩ suffix replaces the ⟨-o/-a⟩ ending of Latino and Latina that are typical of grammatical gender in Spanish. Its plural is Latinxs.
I dunno. We gave our kids phones at an early age, but at the same time we gave them freedom and let their curiosity drive them to adventure and independence. Which was a lot safer because they had phones.
But then what we did is see phones as a means of 2 way connectivity between us and our kids - not something to just pacify them.
This study is useless as it leaves out the most important metric: how much did kids use phones. Being children in low-income latin families does suggest they can't afford to consume much online content as compared to kids from even middle-class families.
Its as stupid as the famously flawed "Danish Cohort" cellphone/cancer study that used subscription duration as a surrogate for actual phone use. And at a time when phones and talk-time was very expensive.
One of my concerns (not more important than the other ones in the comments, just an additional one) is the dopamine hit.
I feel that reading a book and enjoying reading books is very important. And I also understand that, for a child, once they get that dopamine from mobile phones, almost any non-comic book will be boring.
I feel there's only a realistic progression path, first books, then phones.
It just doesn't work the other way around.
> The research team followed a group of low-income Latino children in Northern California as part of a larger project aimed to prevent childhood obesity.
Presumably we shouldn't draw too many conclusions until a broader study is done. Latino probably doesn't matter but low income and limited geography do.
in my judgement, the quality of this information (methodology, population size, etc.) is not even close to good enough to rely on when making decisions about the well-being of my children. 250 kids, 5 years, study ends when they were 11-15 ... nope, nope, nope.
reminds me of the scene in the most recent yellowstone episode, the scientist stridently insisting destroying 7000 acres of sage brush couldn't possibly hurt sage grouse.
Yeah, probably not a very strong research but we don't have much of research like that yet.
But there's really no reason, in absence of research, to expect that phones will be exceptionally damaging to kids that survived just fine such technological banes as books, radio and tv. Last two not only captivating their attention for hours but borderline immobilizing them in one physical spot.
To answer this question I clicked on the link, clicked on the word "study" and did a two-fingered swipe which, through the magic of inertial scrolling, took me to the bottom of the paper.
That took less time and effort than it took to type "that's an important question".
>This research was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number U01HL103629, and the Stanford Data Science Scholarship, Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute and the Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University. The content expressed in this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Government. We thank the Stanford GOALS research staff, including health educators, coaches, data collectors, community advisors, community partner organizations; and the children and families who participated in the Stanford GOALS trial. The data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented here are publicly accessible, as are the materials necessary to attempt to replicate the findings. Data, code, and materials are available from the first author upon reasonable request. Analyses were pre-registered and are available at the following URL: https://osf.io/hukfd.
This study is a surprise in the Child Development area, because it's against every evidence we see today.
It also tests for the wrong "symptoms" like depression, since the actual major factor here is the how their brain developed in terms of moral, sociality, POV's and a lot more.
They're checking grades but grades don't say anything about how they studied for the test. Did they have to sacrifice because of bad behavior to the test (not studying in time, losing friends activities, etc)? Did they cheat? Or were they lucky? Grades don't say any meaningful thing about the brain, it's a wrong "symptom" to check for grades.
Stanford, heart of Silicon Valley. The investigators live next door to Apple and Google employees, and 3 of the 4 funding sources were internal. Sus.
The investigators, hooked to polygraphs, will swear with complete sincerity that they designed this rigorously for all the right reasons. The selection occurred with the admissions and faculty interview processes. It’s like a political party choosing candidates.
