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.
> 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.
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.
> FFS most parents will shove up an iDevice to their toddlers so they can play angry birds or whatever instead of caring for them more actively.
This is such a 2010 way of thinking. Now they just hand their kids the YouTube app (signed into their parents' account) and let autoplay babysit their kid for hours a day.
I would guess that they are. One one hand, I agree with your point that putting one's kid in front of a TV connected to an NES console playing Metroid is the same sort of passive "caring" that is putting one's kid in front of a TV that's connected to a Chromecast playing Netflix or Youtube. On the other, I can also see (I believe per their point) that an NES doesn't have constant content updates or any sort of "feed" which instills a desire to constantly check for updates.
> In reality, it is about social pressure, not emergency use, all the other kids have phones, why can't I?
Straightforward, caring, non-judgemental talk might work: you shouldn't have it because your brain is at a too early developmental stage and you cannot cope with the addiction. This is how we explained it to our son. A relative had given him an old smartphone in 1st grade (I never appreciated that gift!), but we replaced it with a dumb phone in 2nd grade with zero problems. He was able to choose among a few models himself (picked a Nokia 105 [1]). He was absolutely okay with that.
It has a few silly demo games, but he doesn't play them much. When we go to grandma's for two days, he voluntarily leaves his phone at home, because "nobody will probably call me" (see: he realizes there's not much else he could do with the phone!). During the smartphone-year, in contrast, he had obvious trouble putting the smartphone away, even if he didn't really "do" anything in it; just scrolling around and launching grownups' old apps he couldn't understand. (I wonder if physical buttons cause less addiction than a touchscreen?)
In short, our kid is absolutely fine with the dumb phone. It really does work simply as a "tool", for calls and messages. Recently he even asked for a mechanical wrist watch because he doesn't seem to like carrying the phone in his pocket or backpack.
I'm close to 40 and a long-time hobbyist Linux nerd. I've intentionally never ever owned a smartphone (for some odd reason, reading mails etc on that laughably tiny screen seemed utterly stupid in 2003; even thinking about the endless possibilities (=bloat!) of later smartphones always made me feel overwhelmed, so I never wanted one). So I, too, only have a dumb phone -- and, same experience here: it really does work just as a "tool for making phone calls or sending messages". Nothing else. Living without smartphone apps is actually way easier than most people seem to imagine.
Another thing: I'm thinking that maybe (at least in our kid's public school in a Small East European Country) some kind of "anti tech addiction" meme is also making rounds amongst schoolchildren? If this is true, then maybe dumb phones are even somewhat, err, hip in some circles these days? At least elementary school children do seem to care about their mental well-being -- when you tell them about this with empathy, simple but honest cause-and-effect examples and without condemnation (I think this last bit is key: no judgements where judging is avoidable; show, don't tell!). It is also most interesting to get young children to really think about that they actually do have a brain up there, a brain that is an actual part of them, and that this brain always needs some care.
2nd grade, OK. Get back to me when you have a 7th grader who's complaining about being out of the loop because their social groups are mostly using group chats on phones to stay in touch.
I never thought I'd be telling my kid to go hang with their friends at the mall more, but here we are.
Ha, I wonder what's the societal tipping point for dumb phones to become the new normal?
"In sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group—or many group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice." [1]
Do we need 10% of population to stubbornly use dumb phones, and then, voila. :)
"Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10% of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of people who simply change their beliefs if their last two social interactions agreed with a new one." [ibid]
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.
This is the reasonable middle ground, I think. No outright refusal, nor blind acceptance.
Instead: separation of powers and reasonable barrier to entry. Dumbphone + stationary desktop PC would be much better for kids than a smartphone + tablet.
> 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.
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"
I would actually be completely in favor on a ban on smartphone usage until about 16 years of age; which is also the age of consent in the majority of US states. Kids under 16 can possess a flip phone. It would be better for their mental health, encourage a longer childhood, reduce all kinds of social pressure, prevent TikTok-style inappropriate content serving [1] and pedophiles grooming, etc.
The world is not going to set on fire if kids under 16 can't have smart phones. Every generation before now grew up and lived without them. My parents grew up without them. At 16 you are significantly more mentally capable than a 12 year old at dealing with pressure, or a stranger who thinks you are pretty. Your impulse control is also stronger, which helps prevent a vicious addiction cycle.
"No child under 16 years of age shall possess any device with a screen smaller than 7", or any device with a screen under 11" which contains a LTE radio, unless the device's screen is no larger than 3" (edit:) and has a physical numeric keyboard without alphabetic characters."
There you go. Devices smaller than 7" (all smartphones) are banned. 7"-11" devices are permitted if there is no LTE radio (school tablets). Dumb phones almost always have screens 3" or less in size and are permitted, while anything to do with social media would be almost unusable at that size, let alone bashing out letter-by-letter on the solely numeric number pad.
And as for why smartphones specifically, smartphones are much, much harder to control impulsively. The average American checks their phone 96 times per day, and unlocks it over 150 times per day. How many times does the average American have trouble unlocking their laptop constantly per day? Laptop usage is far more deliberate and intentional than smartphone usage.
Because it would be unenforceable. What are you going to do? Unlock every child's phone for random inspection to see if they have sideloaded social media apps or not? What if they have a custom launcher that hides the apps?
Much easier and far, far more enforceable to say "under 16 + smartphone = seize and fine."
> This is like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.
C'mon. Guns are dumb. Smartphones are smart. It's entirely possible to set up a smartphone in a way that blocks access to certain apps, limits how many hours you can use an app in a day, etc etc.
The only way your parallel works is if guns had the ability to selectively target bad guys.
Possible yes. Practical for the average parent? No.
I’m a pretty sophisticated technology and mobile user. I’ve built out MDM and MAM solutions for significant deployments of smartphones - setting up limits on individual phones is complex, time consuming, and unreliable. The median user can probably implement a time limit on iOS, but I’d guess 40% of them don’t do it correctly the first time.
A gun is easy to secure. You either don’t have one, lock it, or lock the ammo and gun separately. Physical controls prevent accidental discharge and are easily understood by reasonably intelligent people.
The gun argument is a bad comparison because the rational people who use guns as a tool get drowned out in the noise of paranoids and people selling gun swag.
I don’t think “the solution” exists because the problem at its core is people and you can’t solve people. If blocking apps reduces the problem even a tiny bit it is just one more preventative tool to add to the tool box. Why limit your toolbox?
fwiw - I think we're largely on the same page on this specific issue.
Maybe a philosophical divergence though:
> Sure, smartphones aren't the problem _in themselves_.
It is time we start to accept that some technologies are vile, and yes, they are a problem _in themselves_.
The modernist mind (ie. the human mind as it exists today) cannot accept this because it seems like a fetishistic argument. Consider the evil monkey paw, that thing itself is evil. A modernist will refuse to accept such a reality. We have conditioned ourselves and each other that each inanimate thing is just an inert tool, applied in good or bad judgement. In a materialistic sense this is true. It is also completely trivial. Taking a step back, and surveying the totality of the environment, how some technologies just seem to be misapplied consistently, how some technologies leave a wake of destruction, how some technologies seem to cast an evil spell on everybody in its orbit.
This is the reality in which we find ourselves. The only way out is true. Smashing the idol is the only way to ban the evil spirit.
I'm convinced that barring kids who are exclusively homeschooled, every kid has a way to bypass these restrictions either by themselves or with a classmates help.
That’s true of nearly everything though. That lock on your front door? I can easily bypass it but yet you still have it. Anyone determined enough can do almost anything. But throw a wide enough net and at least you can prevent the casual and lazy offenders. Also I think prevention is an ongoing thing not a one and done thing. You shouldn’t say “oh I put a dns block on YouTube so now I don’t need to follow up on my kids” and I feel a lot of parents do just that.
The people your teenager are trying to fit in with check to see for an app icon, but not the friend request from the social media account and posting history?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I can totally see this happening, and have wondered whether it would make sense to get my kid a cellular enabled Apple Watch instead of smartphone or dumbphone. She could use it in emergencies, and she'd avoid the green-bubble stigma that dumphone/android users endure (at least in my geo area, where most of my peers have iDevices).
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.
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.
It's not though, completely removing social media from children is also a problem because it's become nearly impossible to socialize without it... kids almost universally have social media access, so to tell yours that they can't have it ostracizes them in a lot of ways. I'm worried that completely limiting access to it is worse.
I can relate to this with my own kids because I grew up with a kid who wasn't allowed to watch TV, his family didn't have one in the house. I saw this kid on my school bus daily, but I don't even remember his name because my friends and I were always talking about TV and video games and weren't emotionally competent enough to know how/why to include him. I'll forever remember him as "the kid without a TV."
They care. That's exactly why they are thinking about the problems that having a smart phone would have. You are just drawing the line differently to others.
There's a whole range of solutions. From no smartphone to letting them have a smart phone but lock it down. All have reasonable points and show strong involvement in their child's lives.
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.
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.
To be more precise, it's the model of engagement that bombards the eyes, ears and brain that's the problem. We need social media models that don't require 24/7 engagement.
> 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).
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But to that I ask - don't we all feel these same types of effects ourselves? Does anyone here feel happy about how much they look at their smartphone? And we're adults with fully developed brains - I cannot fathom the havoc it's wreaking on the adolescent (and younger) mind.
This is my explanation as well. I look around and I see lots of addicted adults. Everyone I've asked says they want to use their phone less but they don't. They can't. It's a bad habit. What chance do children have?
I think so. Adults can get addicted very easily. It’s compounded by the fact that we don’t generally think of the dopamine hits provided by social media as something that can be addictive, so we are not very careful.
But similarly as with alcohol and marijuana, the effects on a developing brain seem much more profound.
(Caveat: I am not a specialist, but the limited reading I did from the literature and my limited experience point to that direction.)
> 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.
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.
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.
Well she (the oldest) already expressed an interest in coding, so that was part of it. But the general idea is to make the compute device into a creative tool a that be how she gets her start using it, rather than have it initially be just a social media interface.
When I was growing up I played a ton of video games. I got started coding because I wanted to make video games. But as soon as I started coding, the video games suddenly became less interesting. I’m hoping a similar transition occurs with her, and that would be the indication she is mature enough to use the device as a tool to achieve things rather than a passive input channel for media.
In Germany you cannot drive until you demonstrate the ability to perform CPR. Are prospective automobile owners keenly interested in first aid or something?
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.
She has a Chromebook from school, and she uses my phone and tablet with permission and supervision. She just needs to demonstrate a certain level of capability and maturity to have her own device(s).
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.
Of course when I was a teen (or even younger) I went to a friend's place, practice, school, work, etc. without a constant electronic tether back to my parents.
I got my older kids apple watches set up in family/parent/whatever mode for this. They have cell modems (requirement for family setup, they're $5/mo each on my t-mobile plan), can send and receive texts, can send and receive phone calls.
If you don't want to use apple watches because of their ridiculously poor battery life (fair criticism; I have trouble remembering to charge mine regularly, so getting the kids to do so regularly isn't easy), you can find used/old iphones lying around for pretty cheap, and Apple Configurator lets you put a pretty tight policy on them. You can set it up so that the profile can’t be removed without a password. I think you can even set it up so it has wifi credentials preloaded and so that the user can’t add other wifi networks, and that you can preload contacts and prevent the user from calling/texting numbers that aren’t in the contacts (I don't think you can prevent them from answering calls / receiving texts from numbers not in their contacts, though).
I have an old iphone with such a profile that only has the Phone app, Messages app, and FaceTime. It doesn’t have the app store and as far as I know there’s no way to install or sideload apps.
This is what I did. She has an Apple Watch which she can use to call or message us. Battery life is an issue, but we’ve instilled the habit of charging overnight every night.
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"
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.
Thing is, we already applied precautionnary principles in a very organic fashion: hight end phones have always been expensive, and very few kids got access to phones able to access messages, email, then social networks.
Be it Blackberry or Vodafone/docomo phones it took years before regular teenage kids could buy them in significant numbers. Same for the iPhone, it's not like millions of teens got their hand instantaneously on a 3G the minute it went out.
By the time it became widspread enough, we already had devices in the wild for a decade or so (for reference imode launched in 1999).
We might want to revise how smartphones are regulated and/or social media policies, but IMHO we're far away from the simple "we don't know let's be cautious" phase, and there is a burden of proof on what exactly needs to be regulated to what expected effect.
If it's a precautionary principle, it should be called so. One should say "We don't know if smartphone is the cause, but by precaution, ...", which is clearly not the conclusion provided here.
You cannot say: I don't know if X is harmful, but by precautionary principle, X should be kept an eye on, so I can say unscientific conclusions such as "X is harmful" and everyone who complain that it is scientifically poor are incorrect.
Also, there is also a risk i precautionary principle: hiding the real cause while hurting the "good usage".
> 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.
no since the you would have to take in other factors that would affect that if an Amish person or one living oversees. For data like this you would have to quite literally clone these people , take away when they got a cellphone to be absolutely certain that getting a phone at the young age is the reason.
Amish have a whole different societal structure so it's too much variation. Same issue if you study Indians in a remote village for instance. That would make a poor control group to compare to teenage girls going to high school in Texas.
>> 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.
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?
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.
> Right now, there are two identically possible situations (well, even more, but you get the jest):
This is misleading. They are not "identically possible", which I assume to mean that you think they are "equally plausible". There is more evidence for smartphones and social media causing issues, because we don't see those declines until after the smartphone is introduced, regardless of age.
Furthermore, other factors causing both depression and social media use would have to be cross-cultural because the issue is global. Other than social media, what factors do you know of are cross-cultural? Guess what, they eliminated most of them in prior articles.
Haidt and co have published multiple articles going over the data and the possibilities, so I recommend reading them all before claiming the situation is so murky.
("identically possible" as: as legitimately grounded. But of course, if you are convinced that people who are not convinced by your argument can only be dishonest, of course, for you, they are not identically possible)
> because we don't see those declines until after the smartphone is introduced, regardless of age.
Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became globally more anxiogenic, the measurement of the decline may be biased as people are nowadays more incline to be honest with their mental health or less incline to "shake it off", or ...
> Furthermore, other factors causing both depression and social media use would have to be cross-cultural because the issue is global. Other than social media, what factors do you know of are cross-cultural? Guess what, they eliminated most of them in prior articles.
What do you mean "cross-cultural"? Isn't the study showing that it's mainly a US problem? And how can you have a cross-cultural effect when the usage of the smartphone amongst young people is so linked to cultural trends that are very different from country to country? I have the impression the argumentation jumps from one to the others according to what benefits the authors: if it happens at two places, they say "see, it proves there is no other sources", if it does not happen in other places, they say "sure, but it's just because the smartphone usage is socially different in these countries".
> Haidt and co have published multiple articles going over the data and the possibilities, so I recommend reading them all before claiming the situation is so murky.
And other experts, with similar credentials than Haidt, have been critical of the work.
My position is that we should not jump to the conclusion: the jury is still out. Your conclusion seems to be "I choose to trust Haidt and to distrust equivalent scientists, just because Haidt's explanation seems more obvious to me".
> Again, there are a lot of identically possible explanation: the whole society has changed and became globally more anxiogenic
It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media.
> the measurement of the decline may be biased as people are nowadays more incline to be honest with their mental health or less incline to "shake it off", or ...
He covered this in prior articles too.
> What do you mean "cross-cultural"? Isn't the study showing that it's mainly a US problem?
You're ignoring a whole body of work across a decade, and this article also clearly says these reports are international but he's focusing specifically on the Anglosphere in this article. He literally links to all of the prior work discussing the trends and possible explanations, so like I said, I suggest reading them before claiming the situation is murky.
> And other experts, with similar credentials than Haidt, have been critical of the work.
> It's not one society, it's every society in which smartphones and social media are available. It's simply implausible to suggest that every society on Earth nearly simultaneously became more anxiogenic for no common reason. The common reason very clearly seems to be social media.
It does not make sense: social media, and even more smartphones, can be used in a lot of different ways, and is strongly linked to social behavior of the community you live in. If you are arguing that different societies will not become more anxiogenic at the same time, you cannot also argue that usage of the smartphone, due to a magical reason, turn out to be toxic exactly the same way at the same time for different societies.
What you are saying is both that it is very improbable that every society reacts in the same way when it comes to reaction to globalisation (which, by definition, is affecting the majority of society), but that it is very probable that every society reacts exactly in the same way when it comes to use social media AND ALSO happen to react exactly the same way when adopting smartphones.
I would argue that the first one is way more plausible: globalisation has a stronger chance to affect societies in a similar way than just smartphones, because for globalisation there is an explanation of why they react the same way (a stressful situation is a stressful situation, it does not matter if you are Chinese or Argentinian), while there are no explanation of why all over the world, people started to use the smartphone in a toxic way at the same time, especially if you are pretending that these societies are separated.
> but he's focusing specifically on the Anglosphere in this article. He literally links to all of the prior work discussing the trends and possible explanations,
But that's my point: he is switching to what is more convenient for his conclusion. The elements found in the "focus specifically on the Anglosphere" are NOT the same scale and the same details as in the other society. He just cherry-picks: "this aspect is different, which prove I'm right because US is different than other society, but this aspect is the same, which prove I'm right because these other societies also have smartphones".
> so like I said, I suggest reading them before claiming the situation is murky.
It's interesting that you are saying I haven't read them.
Yes, I know this article, and it is very disappointing, a lot of his counter-argument either don't understand the initial criticism, or use arguments that apply to his own work (for example, the whole "in social science, we cannot prove causation, so if I say A -> B it's ok, but if you, you say B -> A, then magically it's not ok")
> he jury is not as far out as you think, only a few jurors are holding out but the direction of the verdict is quite clear now.
Are you sure you are not seeing just the Haidt bubble? I may myself see the situation through a bubble, but what I see is people who are working in Haidt's field and are saying that his theses are not taken that seriously inside this field. How do you know the "verdict is quite clear"? What does it mean for the long list of experts disagreeing (list long enough that Haidt needed to address them, something that would not happen if "the verdict is quite clear"), do you accuse them of being dishonest or biased? Why is it fine when you are accusing these experts of such dishonesty and not when others suspect that Haidt was honest but not careful enough?
> If you are arguing that different societies will not become more anxiogenic at the same time, you cannot also argue that usage of the smartphone, due to a magical reason, turn out to be toxic exactly the same way at the same time for different societies.
Different societies will not undergo simultaneous changes without a reason.
Social media is a reason. Social media is algorithmically designed to drive engagement, often via negative emotions, to gather information about people. It is a great homogenizer, a systematic, unidirectional global pressure, which explains why different societies have undergone similar changes simultaneously with the advent of social media. Furthermore, it's well established by now that second order effects of social media and phone use is the disruption of sleep patterns, and sleep is particularly important to teens undergoing puberty. Haidt has pointed out all of this.
Now contrast to your suggestion: globalization, which has been going on for 50 years, suddenly led to mental health issues only 10 years ago for no discernable reason we can see, but not among people actually in the workforce and experiencing its direct effects, but in people who have never had a job, have very little understanding of foreign policy tariffs and trade, and it didn't affect disparate societies proportionally to the extent that they adopted globalization policies, but it affected them all about the same.
I honestly can't take you seriously if you think nebulous, indirect third order effects of globalization are more plausible than direct first and second order effects from a device kids have in their hands for 16 hours a day.
> But that's my point: he is switching to what is more convenient for his conclusion. The elements found in the "focus specifically on the Anglosphere" are NOT the same scale and the same details as in the other society.
No, that's not what he said or why he's focusing on it. The data is basically the same across other nations, and he's focusing on that specific subset because that's what he's consistently covered in his other articles. If you had read the other ones, as you claim, then you know he had other researchers gathering the same data from other nations across the globe which all showed the same trends, and they've been writing their own articles on those.
Exactly. Social media is accessible through smartphones, laptop, any connected device.
If the reason is social media, then talking about smartphones in itself is really a mistake: they would not have existed, the same phenomenon would have happened too.
> globalization, which has been going on for 50 years, suddenly led to mental health issues only 10 years ago for no discernable reason we can see
Globalization is not something "that has been going on for 50 years", it is something that is always evolving and that have different impact in time.
Globalization in the 2010 was VERY DIFFERENT from globalization in the 1990. For example, in the 90's, more conservative / pro-market political parties was presenting it as a good thing. In the 2010, globalization suddenly started to be this "thing that no one really want to happen but is happening anyway", even by the pro-market people. It changed way people see themselves, they start to feel powerless. It affects parents and therefore children, it affects social media, it affects popular cultures, movies, ... In the 2010, there was a real change in mentality, globally, about the fact that the globalization may drive us towards the wall.
(even South Park went from "climate change is overstated" to "man-bear-pig is real, but what can we do anyway", which shows in a particular US example how the media mentality shifted from "we are in control and everything is fine" to "in fact, we are powerless". And even in SP, the man-bear-pig example is just one example, there are others where "unfair ending" becoming more and more prevalent)
Also, social media existed since ages too, before the crisis you talk about, and yet, you mention it in your equation.
> if you think nebulous, indirect third order effects of globalization are more plausible than direct first and second order effects from a device kids have in their hands for 16 hours a day.
And I cannot take you seriously if you are thinking that complex social phenomenon is as simple as adding or removing a technological gadget. In fact, you say it yourself that the tool itself is not the reason, you are talking about social media.
> If you had read the other ones, as you claim, then you know he had other researchers gathering the same data from other nations across the globe which all showed the same trends, and they've been writing their own articles on those.
I have read them, and I have also read other articles showing how those trends in these articles have been cherry-picked. I think the difference between you and me is that you've read only Haidt, so obviously, when Haidt says "it's funny, people in US speak english as a first language, but this trend also exist all over the world, let's take some random countries: england, australia, india, south africa", it sounds logical and true.
(ps: I'm not saying Haidt is lying, I'd rather think he thought of an attractive theory and then started seeing the things that confirm it and started finding excuse to conclude that the things that does not confirm it should be considered as irrelevant)
> Exactly. Social media is accessible through smartphones, laptop, any connected device. If the reason is social media, then talking about smartphones in itself is really a mistake: they would not have existed, the same phenomenon would have happened too.
No, those other devices are not attached to your hip every waking moment, they don't interrupt your regular thought patterns and daily activities, they don't track your movements through physical space and people you physically associate with, and people mostly don't take them to bed and use them before sleep and first thing after they wake up.
> In the 2010, globalization suddenly started to be this "thing that no one really want to happen but is happening anyway", even by the pro-market people. It changed way people see themselves, they start to feel powerless. It affects parents and therefore children, it affects social media, it affects popular cultures, movies, ... In the 2010, there was a real change in mentality, globally, about the fact that the globalization may drive us towards the wall.
1. Prove the existence of this global shift in attitude against globalization.
2. Again, the trends are among teens and pre-teens. Prove that this cohort knew or even cared about these issues. There is no trend of parental well being decreasing, therefore your claim that this would not apparently affect parents but would somehow affect children is bordering on the absurd.
> Also, social media existed since ages too, before the crisis you talk about, and yet, you mention it in your equation.
Not the algorithmically curated feeds optimized to drive engagement. Not phones with self-facing cameras.
> And I cannot take you seriously if you are thinking that complex social phenomenon is as simple as adding or removing a technological gadget.
Printing press. Nuclear weapons. Refrigeration. Aviation. The computer. All technological gadgets that had dramatic social effects.
> I have read them, and I have also read other articles showing how those trends in these articles have been cherry-picked.
Not "showed", "claimed", and poorly at that. They're wrong. Everyone who has ever quit social media for any extended period has reported improvements in well being. Those are direct interventions that test the dose-response hypothesis.
> No, those other devices are not attached to your hip every waking moment, they don't interrupt your regular thought patterns and daily activities, they don't track your movements through physical space and people you physically associate with, and people mostly don't take them to bed and use them before sleep and first thing after they wake up.
And yet, there are plenty of people who have smartphone and don't use them in the way you describe it. So my question is: how do you explain that, according to you, all over the world, people ended up reacting to smartphones in a way that is similar, but, according to you, it is unrealistic to say that maybe, all over the world, people ended up reacting in the same way faced with other recent worldwide changes?
That's my point: smartphones is used the same way around the world shows that people around the world adopt similar behavior in similar circumstance, which is a counter-argument to your idea that it is not possible.
> 1. Prove the existence of this global shift in attitude against globalization.
It is not to me to prove it. You are saying "the _only_ change is the smartphone", and I'm saying "are you sure? from what I see, I really feel like there are others, for example X or Y. Sure, maybe I'm wrong, but you are the only claiming there is only one, so, surely, you have number demonstrating X and Y is not a change", and you answer "I have no proof that X or Y was not a change, but I have decided they are not"
> . Again, the trends are among teens and pre-teens. Prove that this cohort knew or even cared about these issues. There is no trend of parental well being decreasing, therefore your claim that this would not apparently affect parents but would somehow affect children is bordering on the absurd.
Well, if these teens and pre-teens watch TV, or even watch TikTok videos made by young adults, then, yes, they are directly feed by the tone that people directly concerned by these problems (unless you pretend that TV is made by pre-teens).
Honestly, you seems to have a very naive and simplistic vision of sociology. Sociology is hard, social interaction and influence between groups are very very very very complicated. It's very ridiculous to pretend that pre-teens are not influenced by adults: the majority of the content they are feed is directly from adults and the rest is from teens trying to imitate adults.
> Not the algorithmically curated feeds optimized to drive engagement. Not phones with self-facing cameras.
And globalization existed for ages, but not with the algorithmically optimised information exchange, not with the mass tracking and recording of human resources.
If you pretend that this argument for the change of context for social media is enough to induce the change, then change of context for globalization is also enough.
> All technological gadgets that had dramatic social effects.
Where did I say the opposite? I've said "is as simple as ....". They had dramatic social effects, but they were not simple. The impact of printing press, for example, was strongly modulated by the pre-existing graphs. For example, European press had a big impact because they printed a best seller: the Bible, with roman characters that made the pages look as good as hand-written. In Muslim countries, the printing press boom was strongly affected by the fact that, by chance, arabic script is way more tricky to decompose in movable type. The result was that they did not print religious text because it would have been ungodly to diffuse it with simplified characters. The printing press dramatic social effects was not the results of a technological gadget, it was the results of social interactions and circumstances. In a parallel universe where all graphs were as complex as arabic script, you would have introduced the printing press and this "dramatic effect" would not have happened. So, no, simply introducing a technological gadget like the "printing press" is not enough to have a dramatic social effect.
No, whatever you are saying, depression did not just pop out just because we gave piece of plastic and metal to teenage girl. There were a lot of social interaction and social trend involved too. As long as you have a naive and simplistic grip on those, all your conclusions on "how to solve it" are based on "proverbial wisdom" (which is fine), not on "science".
And as I've said before, I'm myself 100% for banning smartphone in school, I think it will be very good for mental health. Yet, it is dangerous to reducing this complex problem to one easy and comfortable enemy.
> Not "showed", "claimed", and poorly at that. They're wrong. Everyone who has ever quit social media for any extended period has reported improvements in well being. Those are direct interventions that test the dose-response hypothesis.
It's hilarious that you say "they are wrong" and then say "everyone who has ever quit social media has reported improvements" as you stupidly think experts who questioned Haidt logic don't agree with that.
> Those are direct interventions that test the dose-response hypothesis.
Well, you should go to the end of your experiment then: if the smartphones are the problem, it means that someone who has quit social media but still kept a smartphone should not have reported improvements in well being. Is it the case?
On top of that, how do you count the number of people who don't go out of social media and are not unhappy. Or the one that are more happy with social media. This is a typical survival bias: of course people who feel better after quitting will say it out loud. People who don't feel better or even feel worse don't come to you to say "yeah,you know what, I stop social media and it did not change anything". And what about the fact that people quitting social media decide also to "not care anymore" which means they are less affected by non-social-media stress? All you see is that some people are stressed when on social media, which is a consensus that nobody denies.
All you are saying is that you are unable to fathom that 1) smartphones cannot be used differently than in a toxic way, 2) social media can only be used by smartphones
>> showing how those trends in these articles have been cherry-picked
> They're wrong.
I don't understand that. What these experts are showing is from the articles that Haidt used, they are parts that Haidt "forgot" to mention.
How can they be wrong? How is that possible to show some paragraphs showing that the article was way more nuanced as Haidt is saying it is? Either they are wrong and those paragraphs don't exist, either they are legitimate.
But you don't care about the reality, don't you? You decided that these authors are wrong, you don't even need to read their articles to know it's the case. I personally don't care if Haidt is wrong or not, I don't understand why people like you are so invested. It is not difficult: blaming all on smartphones is just not scientific. It does not mean we should not ban the smartphones. But it means that all blaming on smartphones is dangerous and will have bad consequences (mainly because we are not going to fix the problem, just hide it and pretend it's fine while it's not).
I commented this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating because actually reading the author's arguments (granted, in other writings, not OP) will allow you to see he's considered this point and is will to accept that causation works the other way around.
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 [1]. 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.
And these arguments have been heard, but they are still not convincing.
I don't know what is the reality, maybe indeed the smartphone is causing the problem. But the author is just jumping to the conclusion without proper scientifically caution.
There are a lot of other hypothesis that explain exactly the same observations, and that are not far-fetched (as you say, there is none _according to the author_, who then list all of these hypotheses in his rebutal). In his article, he goes through a lot of them but don't address them properly. For example, the more recent social anxiety about climate change is just "I don't think so".
Personally, if I have to bet, I think it is social media. But then, 1) I will not claim "it is social media", just "it may be social media", 2) it would be stupid of me to then isolate smartphone: if it is social media, then forbidding smartphone but not the laptops would be totally useless (and if the argument is turned into "no but the problem is the constant usage all the time, which you cannot do with a laptop", then, again, it's just pure conjecture: it may end up being true, but it is still scientifically incorrect to present these conclusions as scientific)
While I agree with you on the scientific front, I agree with the author on the risk/action cost front. There's not much cost to preventing the use of phones during school hours, it seems to be a net benefit to education and teacher/student relations even if the hypothesis is wrong.
Banning platforms from allowing under 16s to have accounts is harder because kids will work around it very easily, but I would be happy to see it happen anyway, and made Facebook's problem to deal with.
I'm 100% in favor in banning smartphone during school hours.
The big danger is to spread the incorrect conclusion "it's smartphone's fault". For example, if it is social media, then, we need to change social media, not just ban smartphones, because it will not stop social media to do even more victims, and the number of victims will be bigger if people were convinced by the incorrect conclusion.
Why then is there an uptick since 2012, for example? Your theory doesn't explain this, while the author's does.
We can't just consider all theories equal because they are all in the realm of the possible.
Some evidence, while not proof, strongly points toward social media being the cause or at least a very strong factor.
I agree with multiple other commenters here, that banning phones in school would be a high reward chances / low risk decision.
We're talking about LOTS of kids getting their mental health damaged, but in many comments I don't hear the sense of urgency, rather a detached a almost snobbish focus on correlation != causality. I think such answers are partially missing the point.
There are TONS of things that changed in the society around 2012.
(for example, a specific and brand new phase in globalisation, in climate change crisis, in global loss of trust in the media, in disillusion in the capacity of changing elements that matters, in faster access of overwhelming communication, a more open communication about personal issues (gender, ...), ...)
The "smartphone change" is the "what people who don't know sociology think a sociology change looks like". It is still a sociology change, but it's the "nose in the middle of the face".
> I agree with multiple other commenters here, that banning phones in school would be a high reward chances / low risk decision.
And, surprise, I'm 100% for the ban in school too. But we need to solve the problem, not hide it. The problem can be, for example, social media. Banning smartphone at school will not solve the depression crisis, because people will still have their fix on their laptop after school, and will just maintain the toxic social media relationship dynamic in "real life" in school.
If you really care about the kids, you should understand why some people are so unhappy about having a conclusion as naive and simplistic as "let's just ban the smartphone and change nothing in the fundamental ways we are building a society, and I promise you, everything will magically be fine".
(and again, it does not mean smartphones are not part of the equation. But we need to find the real cause, and this is why correlation != causality is important. Nobody cares about the theory, people raise this argument because they know this mistake will have bad consequences)
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.
You don't think that addicted people aggressively defend their habit? Or don't you believe that people can get addicted to social media on phones? Or don't you believe that some of this forum's readers are addicted?
Yeah but the rats did not continue to drink cocaine if they had a nice place to hang out with other rats, right?
So maybe everyone is binging the sewer water simply because life's not really fun nowadays. Have you noticed how tired and cynical are young people nowadays?
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.
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.
Not a direct answer, but I think a part of it is the general anxiety caused when the phone is physically present.
Maybe someone is sending me a message? Or maybe not, and of so, why not? It only takes 3 seconds to respond to a message, what are they doing that they can't respond? And Amy sent me a message four minutes ago and I didn't respond because I want to know what Dustin is doing first, but I don't want her to think that.... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA....
But if you are swimming or something then your phone is out of reach and there's nothing you can do so you just accept it and enjoy swimming and talking to whoever you are swimming with.
Also it mixes everything together, so if you just want to do something benign, you take out the phone and have a zillion other messages to worry about.
Yeah totally what worked best for me was leaving my phone in my trucks glovebox most the day, not having the phone even nearby seemed to make a big difference for me. I wasn't a huge phone user but even so the urge to just check if I had a notification or something was there even though I rarely had any. Now I try to compartmentalize my time better and at least for me it made a huge difference.
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.
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.
Which part is far-fetched? O&G did their best to muddy the waters on the climate "debate" for decades. If you watched the Social Dilemma, executives of social media companies often limit the way their children use smartphones for their own health and safety.
But comparing the overall actions of climate-negationist billion dollar corporations with the individual comments of developers working in the smartphone industry is a bit far fetched in my view…
The developers they chose to talk to are generally higher up on the tree and have an inner view of the motivations of the companies (corporations) they work for.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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".
Parents that are less involved in their kids lives might get them a smartphone earlier. Could also be a proxy for how involved they are with their kids school (the private schools all try to de-emphasize phone use and some exclusive private schools here in the valley ban them altogether).
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.
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?
I would welcome detailed articles about exactly that over this guy harping on his "right" to win this argument with the preponderance of the evidence.
He seems very hung up on stamping his foot and insisting the world admit he's right, damn it, and not actually all that concerned about helping parents raise their children better.
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”
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.
> 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).
> 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?
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.
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.
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>?
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.
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.
Books aren't really instant in that way. Plus they're finite, so you don't get hooked on them having a constant new and unexpected dopamine drip. Also i didn't say "distract" I said "escape." There's a difference in that escapism can start to seem like a long-term solution, when it's not and often leads to neglect of your real life, that leads to more escapism, etc.
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.
What about the physiological effects, such as dopamine addiction and the consequential withdrawals, which are probably the main cause of the depression?
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.
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:
"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".
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.
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.
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.
Who are the trained professionals prescribing and dosing out smartphones and social media? Like, I get your analogy, but they are so dissimilar in practice that it just ends up reading naive.
Some people seek out their own drugs to harmlessly fill a void of boredom, or to be a social tool, or for entertainment after a hard days work. Some of those people who innocently tried to use a tool to alter their brain chemistry for the better eventually abused drugs to their detriment.
Some people seek out their social media experiances to harmlessly fill a void of boredom, or to be a social tool, or for entertainment after a hard days work. Some of those people who innocently tried to use a tool to alter their brain chemistry for the better eventually abused social media to their detriment.
But you can also go to the Apple Store and a trained professional will sell you an iPhone if you want to get on TikTok to make new friends because you are lonely.
By that analogy, most drugs are not suitable for children, and for the ones that are it's never good to allow a child to self-medicate. It's always an adult giving ibuprofen to a child when he has a fever, not giving the child a 100 pill bottle and telling him to go play.
As a blanket rule, I wouldn't let children use drugs or social media on a regular basis. Certainly not at will.
But I also think total abstinence doesn't always work for everyone. There can be some exceptions. A child with cancer should have access to medicinal cannabis if it's appropriate for their condition for example. Some children may benefit from LSD/MDMA/mushroom assisted therapy. But active kids shouldn't be labeled as ADHD and medicated. And the occasional sip of wine at dinner with parents might help kids learn to respect alcohol and not go overboard when they go to college.
Went to a high school graduation this weekend. Because we were running behind, we were in the top of the seats, right in the middle. It was nice because we could see absolutely everything, and I did notice a trend -
In the crowd, the 50+ year olds were the ones getting their phones out to dick around during the ceremony.
Youth would get the phone out to take pictures, post quickly on socials, then put the phone away.
Older folks would take a picture, post on socials, scroll through socials, check the news or whatever, then take another picture and repeat.
My children are around that age, which means I recall going to young children's birthday parties at the age (5 to 8) where about half the parents would stick around for the whole party, but they would all be scrolling through their smartphones. This was probably around 2010.
I've always found most peoples' fascination with their screens a bit uncanny, but I have to say that I do understand anything that could pass the time at a graduation ceremony. I skipped my own college ceremony, and my only regret to this day is that I didn't apply for tickets because people were re-selling them for decent money.
This to the power of ten. Saddest realization of my life was seeing my mother who always scolded me about screen usage becoming more addicted to her phone than me.
my mom is 62 and has started taking her ipad to bed every night, it's definitely affecting her sleep and health and she resists any suggestion that it is bad for her. When I was growing up, she didn't even want a TV in the house.
> 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.
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.
Yes, but they're obvious things that could be dissected ad nauseam in the course of academic – as opposed to pragmatic – discourse.
Water is wet, sky is blue, obsessive social media use is bad. I understand this is HN and the Internet, and so niggling academic arguments are fun and all, but sometimes it's okay for the obvious to be uncontroversial.
For what it's worth, I'm with you. Worst case is we somehow dwindle phone usage and it turns out that that wasn't the issue -- hardly a tragedy. Even if it doesn't affect mood/mental health, the time savings alone will be worth something.
>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.
Oh, boys can absolutely have image problems for looking at instagram models. In general, comparing oneself to the photoshopped version of people that are already in the top percentage in the good looks lottery is bad, regardless of gender.
However, statistically speaking, boys just don't follow male instagram models in the first place. Far fewer install instagram in the first place, and if they do, it's not to get fashion tips and lifestyle advice models. Those that do are probably going to end up very insecure too. But in practice, boys don't do that, and therefore the practical levels of harm are lower. It's just like how teenagers that have friends that binge drink end up having more alcohol related problems. It's not that the alcohol itself is more dangerous, physically speaking, the more friends that drink the teenager has. It's that if their friends are binge drinkers, chances are higher that they themselves will binge drink too.
Also I don't think it's 'kosher' amongst the male species to admit and seek mental health assistance either – so THAT correlation could be an important one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
The author, Jonathan Haidt, has considered the global financial crisis but doesn't believe it explains the data [1], he writes
"It’s not because of the Global Financial Crisis. Why would that hit younger teen girls hardest? Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better? Why did a measure of loneliness at school go up around the world only after 2012, as the global economy got better and better? (See Twenge et al. 2021). And why would the epidemic hit Canadian girls just as hard when Canada didn’t have much of a crisis?"
He is admittedly open to other ideas, but claims that no one to date has been able to provide a explanation for the upticks depression and mental health issues which disproportionately impacts young, pre-teen girls and is seen across many developed countries.
Let's step back a minute: the author strongly believes that social media directly causes mental illness in teenagers (blog written in February, wo before this one), but he's still dead on blaming smarphones in general for all the ills ?
> Why would teen mental illness rise throughout the 2010s as the American economy got better and better?
Inequality also rose in that same time period. I mean, we could go through hundreds of indicators that somewhat fit the curve. Taking any of those to ask "Why wouldn't this one fit better than the others ?" is a fine exercice, but at the end of the day we're still playing a guessing game and not progressing much.
> 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.
The other poster noted data points that refute your claim, mainly because this is a global trend and you've pointed out a mostly US-centric condition.
Another point to consider is that it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
A final point: previous generations went through literal wars with military drafts, and Cold War nuclear bomb drills which are far more direct dangers, and yet we did not see these other issues with mental health. They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Many other possible causes have been explored, but systematically eliminated because they aren't global, wouldn't preferentially affect genders or age groups, and so on. Other explanations just don't fit all of the data.
> it's simply implausible that 10-12 year olds understand or call all that much about the economy or recovery.
I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc...And of course it's also more complex than just money going in and out. Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
The economy is not just a line going up or down in someone's chart.
> They only arose since the advent of smart phones and social media.
Are we positing that nothing else changed in comparison ? Do we really want to compare the war time many decades ago and our current situation and say phones are the only thing that differs ?
> I'm surprised about this kind of takes. Is it assuming that kids aren't affected by their dad getting laid off, or money getting tight in the family in general, adults' reactions to the news or everyday events etc
Except this trend didn't happen at any previous downturn, so now you're special pleading that this economic downturn specifically is different somehow, based on... What exactly? And again, these mental health trends are international and cross-cultural and none of the other explanations can account for this. In fact, your suggestion that it's due to economic downturn is essentially refuted since even nations that didn't experience a downturn saw these mental health declines.
> Adults' feelings, anxiety, pressure usually propagate through kids.
What about adult anxiety about the Vietnam war, the nuclear threat of the cold war, the anxiety over terrorism that took out the twin towers. No meaningful blips seen with those momentous events.
You keep pointing to possible second and third order effects that maybe-somehow-sort-of indirectly filtered down to kids through mechanisms like "parental anxiety", instead of a direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day, and whose use we know has been algorithmically optimized to drive engagement, fear and anger, and whose second order effects are known to disrupt sleep, which is particularly important for teens going through puberty.
Like, don't you see how absurdly implausible your second and third order effects are by comparison? To say nothing of the fact that they don't even explain all of the data, which is not a problem for the social media hypothesis.
> direct and obvious first-order effect from a device that's literally in their hands 16 hours of the day,
This is the core of the issue. You are right that none of the examples I gave are definitive first-order causes of a suicide trend (nor do I believe they are, I see any specific cause as only a part of more complicated situation). And it's exactly the same with smartphones: you assume it's a first-order effect through circumstancial observations, but I'd argue that's just your personal bias, and we have no effective tools to split the different.
To step back, the starting point of this was whether we could just randomly blame smartphones just before they became popular following the trend. There's just so many other things, including the technical evolutions that allowed smartphones to get popular in the first place, the social changes that also happen as we get a more global society etc.
And I also see a difference between saying "it's the smarphones!" and "it's social media!" (getting rid of smartphones doesn't delete social media)
You (and the author) seem to assume that because other people aren't coming up with random guesses that look convincing, your own random guess has suddently extra weight and validity. My opinion is a random guess is still a random guess, what I'm trying to argue would be that there's probably a lot more to this than a single cause, and if it really was mainly the smartphones front and center, we'd have seen specific issues way before 2010, especially in SEA for instance.
> And it's exactly the same with smartphones: you assume it's a first-order effect through circumstancial observations, but I'd argue that's just your personal bias, and we have no effective tools to split the different.
Incorrect, we have many self-reports from direct interventions of people leaving social media and reporting drastic improvements in mental health. We also see in the data, temporal correlations from the onset of poorer mental health after people receive cell phones and join social media.
> There's just so many other things, including the technical evolutions that allowed smartphones to get popular in the first place, the social changes that also happen as we get a more global society etc.
What other things are simultaneously global/cross-cultural and affect genders differently?
> And I also see a difference between saying "it's the smarphones!" and "it's social media!" (getting rid of smartphones doesn't delete social media)
It's both. The effects are clearly synergistic. Phones are a constant distraction and engaging on their own, which could lead to sleep loss and less direct social engagement, and social media itself is also toxic in numerous ways, and its constant presence by your side means constant preoccupation, and compounded with their algorithmic optimization to drive engagement, it's a recipe for poor mental health.
> You (and the author) seem to assume that because other people aren't coming up with random guesses that look convincing, your own random guess has suddently extra weight and validity.
Not extra weight and validity, it carries all the weight and validity that literally the only explanation for the current data should carry.
> and if it really was mainly the smartphones front and center, we'd have seen specific issues way before 2010, especially in SEA for instance.
Haidt has been very clear that smartphones + social media are the main drivers. Phones themselves might cause some issues but not enough to explain the trends, and social media alone might cause some issues but not enough to explain the trends if you're only logging in a couple of times a day from your desktop or laptop. Combined, they clearly augment each other.
Doubtless these effects were felt by children through increased hardship at home, but having witnessed first hand the vice grip that negative social media interactions had on the friends I had during high school (starting 2011) and the complete lack of awareness the social circles I ran in had of the wider economic situation, I'm more inclined to believe that the shock therapy exposure to social media and smartphones had a large part to play.
I, for one, was pretty adversely affected by what I saw and was subjected to on social media as a young teenager. It gave me and most other kids I knew additional stress outside of the in-person problems that would arise at school.
>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.
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)..."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think there's a large gap between what teenagers think and care about, and what they'll show to adults + how they express what they think.
Sometimes I feel most people's image of a teenager anxious about their future is some hippy kid with a "save the earth" sign in front of a Starbucks. I think it's probably more a very irritable and groaning kid who's pissed at adults but just doesn't see what they could even do so just spend their time hanging out with their other distressed friends.
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
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.
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.
But whatever is different about the parental groups surely existed before the introduction of smartphones, so even if the parental groups are different, you can still conclude that introducing smartphones caused worse mental health outcomes.
No, you cannot conclude that. You say "surely existed before the introduction of smartphones", but you are also saying that the smartphones have introduced something that did not existed. If it's the case, it means that "new things can be introduced". You still need to prove the real mechanism that really modify the mental health and that is really specific to smartphones. For all we know, plenty of other things were introduced amongst the same time. For example, maybe in a parallel universe where everything is identical but smartphones were not introduced, you would have exactly the same depression curve, because, I don't know, the real source is the social media and people without smartphone will access it on laptop, or because the real source is disillusion from prospects as that generation has noticed they will never have a life as easy as their parents (which was not the case in the past either).
To be clear, it is 100% possible that it is the smartphone, but you cannot "scientifically conclude" it's the smartphone, not with the data that we have. It's not even a question of p-value, the problem is that this conclusion is too much driven by "it feels logical to me" and confirmation bias, rather than honestly trying to drive a conclusion from observations.
Phones are a factor, but social media is the pits. The more I engage with it, the worse I feel in general. It's a combination of endless advertising (whether via traditional ads or "sponsored posts") and endless rage bait.
Different platforms seem to optimize for different "mixes". On Instagram, everyone seems to be selling something. While Twitter is rage-bait central. Don't have enough experience with TikTok or Facebook to comment on those.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
I think you're reading that into their comment when it's not there. They didn't mention nagging at all, and even if the kid nags, the parent still has all the agency.
If there's some correlation-not-causation criticism here, it's probably some along the lines of parents with the fortitude to say no to their kids will raise more mentally-healthy adults, and successful phone restrictions are correlated with that.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me.
Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns
I think Haidt’s overarching argument is that negative effects are caused by continuous social media access facilitated by the smartphone. It’s not the smartphone itself, but the ability to constantly check social media.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> Yeah, I'm not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet.
i can tell you how this goes. when it becomes socially important to get one, she's going to do everything in her power to get one behind your back, turning her into an extremely skilled liar (since her entire life will revolve around this lie), a skill which she will use whenever an opportune moment comes up.
This is totally what a healthy and non-addictive thing does to children, right? Children being socially pressured into lying to their parents and hiding what they do is something that happens with drugs. The fact that it happens with smartphones as well should tell you something.
Except drugs aren't the main means of socialization among today's children.
You can stay off the grid, and deny your kids access to it, but you can't stop the advance of technology itself. Eventually your children will be left behind, ostracized by their peers for being weird/lame. Maybe even paranoid for life as a result of your helicopter parenting. And of course, when they finally get a smartphone, they will have zero experience in managing its "addictive" capabilities, which probably won't help their adult lives either.
Source: anecdotal evidence of a friend who lives with depression and severe social anxiety as a result of similar experiences. Of course, there were other deciding factors that turned said person into what they are today. Make of this what you will.
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.
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.
That's not the question, is it? You just jump to the conclusion that a child without a mobile phone becomes an outcast, and equate that to the classical outcast picture.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
My kids' schools always issued a tablet or laptop for online courseware. It was not optional, you got a device locked down and pre-configured with the software the school was using.
Wild. Is this a US public school? Just wondering if I should file this away in the very large folder of "WTF are we doing with primary education in this country?"
There is nothing else than correlations. How in heaven's name are you going to find a causal relationship? Giving children a placebo phone?
> very very dishonest
It isn't dishonest. You know what's dishonest? Calling it "5 minutes of Excel". Jonathan Haidt isn't in the business of selling substack. He's a professor at NYU.
In one sense you’re of course right that correlations are all we have.
I think the most basic thing is correlating with wealth, or other aspects of a livid environment. “Urban life engenders both early smartphone acquisition and more mental issues (at least self reporting)” is one hypothesis. Another is “social network usage correlates to more mental issues, and having smartphones gives more access to this” (which is relevant! But should be checked. Is it the phone? Is it social networks?)
The point being that you are trying to establish a causal narrative, and right now there’s not much to chew on.
If we want to help children we should dig deeper to understand actual causes instead of simply reporting the horizontal lines we found.
You might not know that Haidt is a well-known p-hacker and has a record of strongly advising ideology under the guise of social psychology. I haven't trusted any claims of his since his modern peace thesis, and that's not his most outlandish one. Moral psychology appears to overlap 100% with culture war for discourse-killing effects, and Haidt is a giant in the field.
I've never heard of Haidt as a p-hacker. A friend of mine is an acquitance of his, which made me assume that Haidt was more in the Bayesian camp.
But it's good to view social sciences sceptically. Their theories don't offer much in terms of truth. It's best if they keep their theoretical judgement to themselves, and see where the research takes them. Psychological and sociological theories are not a good basis for policy.
The data don't lie, though. Now, there may be issues with the way it was gathered and whathaveyounot, but Haidt isn't exactly the first to observe a large increase in mental health issues. As a matter of fact, the papers have been mentioning it for years by now, as have the health organizations. The correlation from the article can almost not be denied. It's like climate change: you can try to find an alternative explanation (which will bring you into the exact same problems the psychological research you criticize is facing), but until then, we must be cautious.
The fact that you don't like messenger is simply not enough to ignore the message.
It is even worse because the participants in the survey were not randomly selected. They instead must choose to visit the Sapiens Labs website to complete the survey. Taking the survey is encouraged through advertising.
I can't say for certain but I imagine that voluntarily visiting a website to complete a mental health survey might appeal more to those with mental health issues thus skewing the data. Also you may have some people that visit to purposely give false data. Very much not unheard of in internet polls. I have no real idea how much either of these have affected the data but it makes me very suspect of the data. If you can't trust the data you can't trust any studies based upon it.
It's not as if the papers, and the health organizations, haven't been saying this for years now. Demand for mental health care under children and young adults has skyrocketed, and demand far outstrips supply. Is that sufficient?
No, dude. Conclusions cannot be made based on feelings. Where exactly is that step in the scientific method? It certainly doesn't sound like the rigorous skepticism that should be applied to what is observed.
I am appalled at the willingness to make huge logical leaps on the basis of emotions or morality in this thread.
We're talking reasonably informed caution here. Science doesn't come into it, at all. Science is trying to make sense of the world, this is about preventing harm. And, as I wrote elsewhere, the social sciences have almost nothing to offer in terms of policy and decision making. They're too unreliable.
We can however easily imagine what's happening in this particular case, and the data support it. The damages are enormous. Like climate change, continuing is not an option, nor is waiting until we've got conclusive evidence, because that will take ages.
Making claims based on scientific method (not even theory or findings, because we have them, and they support the tenor of the article) is not helpful.
> We can however easily imagine what's happening in this particular case, and the data support it.
I have yet to see credible data regarding causation and I prefer that large societal decisions not be made based upon imagination. Comic books, pinball, rock n roll, violent video games at some point were all claimed to be destroying our youth and there was "data" presented to back it up.
Teen drug, alcohol, nicotine and sexual activity are significantly down since 2009. Maybe social media is causing that too and on the whole is a benefit. Or maybe teens are more depressed because they aren't getting high, drinking, smoking or screwing enough.
> Like climate change
Climate change has actual quality data and science behind it, so it is nothing alike.
> Climate change has actual quality data and science behind it, so it is nothing alike.
I don't disagree, but
> I prefer that large societal decisions not be made based upon imagination
with that attitude, no decision can ever be taken. Social sciences can't produce the evidence you need. It's correlations all the way.
But also:
* Not acting is also taking a decision, because social media isn't going to stop any time soon. How's there evidence for just letting things continue?
* How is stopping children (until, say, 18) a large societal decision? That's just minor. There isn't even a risk involved. Children didn't have social media until 10-15 years ago at all. Did that stump their progress or something?
Those under 18 are people too and they have fundamental rights just as other people do. This includes free speech rights. This right is even specifically protected by Article 13 of the Convention on the Rights of Children. I recognize that free speech rights have limitations, but I consider any decision by the state to limit speech major and should require more than casual correlation based upon shady data. Individual parents can decide what they want for their children but the state should stay out of it.
You can basically say the same thing about any study that isn't a double blind randomized control trial. At some point, you need to take out Occam's razor.
I think that the problem is that for some, the obvious Occam's razor is that "smartphone is the cause. obviously" and for some "smartphone is a confounding effect of a deeper cause, obviously".
Because it is like that, I would say both of these conclusions is not scientifically acceptable: the fact that some people believe that "obviously it's not the case" is enough to demonstrate that it is in reality not obvious.
It does not mean it is impossible in social science to define causation: it is done in a lot of place, where there is a majority consensus on what is "obvious". The fact that this happened does not mean that you can conclude causation on everything you want.
> or some "smartphone is a confounding effect of a deeper cause, obviously".
But isn't this equally admitting smartphones are the issue? Like whatever deeper cause you're talking about existed before the smartphone. Like imagine you're a farmer and you grow crops that need a lot of water and climate change causes water to dry up in your area. What you're saying is basically "climate change didn't cause your crops to fail because you weren't growing drought resistant crops. Climate change is just a confounding effect on a deeper issue."
I think what makes the discussion about smartphones unique vs. other social topics is that the adoption of the smartphone and social media was so swift that it's very easy to study mental well-being before the smartphone and after the smartphone without worrying about other changes in lifestyle.
> But isn't this equally admitting smartphones are the issue?
Not really: a confounding effect means that there is a cause X that leads to two things: using more smartphone, and depression. If you ban the smartphone, you don't stop the cause X, and you will still have depression.
> "climate change didn't cause your crops to fail because you weren't growing drought resistant crops. Climate change is just a confounding effect on a deeper issue."
That is not a confounding effect. Confounding is: X -> A + X -> B, and if you break the link between X and A, X -> B is unaffected. Your example is X -> A -> B, with X = climate change, A = drought, B = non-drought resistant plant die.
A confounding effect with climate change would be: imagine you're a farmer and you grow crops that need a lot of water and you use the electricity from the hydroelectric central 100 miles away. What you are saying when you say that smartphone are the issue is like saying "the crops are dying and the central cannot produce electricity anymore, so if I use photovoltaic panel, the crops will not die anymore".
("crop dying" = depression, "producing electricity" = not using smartphone)
> I think what makes the discussion about smartphones unique vs. other social topics is that the adoption of the smartphone and social media was so swift that it's very easy to study mental well-being before the smartphone and after the smartphone without worrying about other changes in lifestyle.
That does not make sense: if you are arguing that smartphones increase global depression, then you are saying that smartphones induced a change in lifestyle. If smartphone can do it swiftly, then other things can do it too.
I think you’re missing the point: any confounding factor you can think of would foster before smartphones. So it doesn’t make sense to call phones a confounding factor.
For instance, people are saying “people who get phones earlier may have less involved parents, and less involved parents lead to worse mental health outcomes.” Sure, this is possible, but there have always been poor parents, yet these changes to mental health have only started with adoption of the smartphone.
> if you are arguing that smartphones increase global depression, then you are saying that smartphones induced a change in lifestyle. If smartphone can do it swiftly, then other things can do it too.
Yes, that’s exactly my point! It theoretically could be something else, but what else has so drastically changed in the last 15 years. We see plenty of evidence of how dramatic smartphone adoption has been. What else has experienced such a fundamental in adoption?
And now we’re back to Occam’s razor. Sure, the mental health crisis could be caused by some unseen force that has profoundly impacted life yet has so far eluded observation, or it could be smartphones, whose profound impact on lifestyle is easily observable.
> Sure, this is possible, but there have always been poor parents, yet these changes to mental health have only started with adoption of the smartphone.
They started with adoption of the smartphone, which also corresponds with a specific and brand new phase in globalisation, in climate change crisis, in global loss of trust in the media, in disillusion in the capacity of changing elements that matters, in faster access of overwhelming communication, a more open communication about personal issues (gender, ...), ...
It's incorrect to say that "it has to be smartphones because smartphones are the only thing that appeared", it's just really obtuse, and also a bit of Dunning-Kruger.
> but what else has so drastically changed in the last 15 years. We see plenty of evidence of how dramatic smartphone adoption has been. What else has experienced such a fundamental in adoption?
Smartphone adoption was a dramatic adoption that is visible for the layman, but in sociology, it's a very unimpressive thing. There are TONS of technology that were introduced that fast, from domestic electricity usage to internet, rap music or video games. But layman people are victim of Dunning-Kruger effect: smartphone is very visible to them, so they don't realise to which extent smartphone is in reality important or not.
And again, if I have to bet, I would say it is rather social media that is the cause, and if you ban smartphones, people will just use laptop and the problem will be the same.
There is sadly not even a mention of correlation in the title, and the post heavily implies (except for a single paragraph, which is very late in the article) this correlation implies causation. Which it doesn't, and that's imporant! For all we know, households that yield kids with worse mental health also happen to give them smartphones younger. Perhaps the parents are more disinterested, perhaps the parents have worse impulse control. Perhaps one of those things are the issue.
This is insufficiently discussed, which invites the reader to dismiss the premise. This is bad, because it might also be true. In essence, highlighting it's own criticism a bit more strongly would have gotten the point across better.
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.