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Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health
- mdp2021 4y agoShowing a correlation without investigating the paths of causation is like blaming life for death.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stametseater 4y agoDeath is an inevitability for us all. Depressed children is not.
- itsoktocry 4y ago"Correlation is not causation!" is a midwit[0] argument. Not everything can be a RCT. Correlation is where you start, and it doesn't take a ton of imagination to understand how causation might work in this case. [0]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit
- omnicognate 4y agoMiddlebrow dismissal, as it's often called on hn. ("Shallow dismissal" in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
- cowuser666 4y agoIt clarifies the point he's making. It's not the point itself.
- omnicognate 4y agoNot sure what you mean? I wasn't correcting or disagreeing with anyone if that's what you thought.
- mdp2021 4y ago> Middlebrow dismissal ...In Argument Theory. Not in the current context though, as the poster (hi there) expressed something quite different. Details around, if the original post does not suffice.
- mdp2021 4y agoHave you perchance misunderstood my post into that «Correlation is not causation»? What I meant is there literally: you have to «investigat[e] the paths of causation», which is meant to mean, you cannot (should not) practically fight the full correlated context, but the specific cause. I.e., in the picked metaphor: "you do not blame life for death" - find specific causes and curb them. Which, by the way, if the "«midwit»" reference were still applicable, is beyond "IQ", because what was expressed is meant to be "in the set of basics" - yet to appearance absent in the article. I expressed that the article seems to miss that basic point. I.e., the idea that "smartphones and social media" would be detrimental is extremely cheap, as if saying that "heating is polluting" - yes, and also useful, so you identify the weak parts and try to act on them. > and it doesn't take a ton of imagination But the article did not exercise that. And I think it would have been "kind of required". See my other reply nearby, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35102296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35102296
- frereubu 4y agoYou might like to read this if you're looking for causation: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
- mdp2021 4y ago> looking for Thanks - but I was actually looking for a constructive article if from the FT, which requires avoiding a cheap early stopping in the class of "entrepreneurs are at risk of distress". Lack of analytic depth in the identification of strict causes that brings the article author to solutions like "«educate»" (to what?), "fight «addiction»", "pause then just stop", "have an age limit enforced". In the parallel: "entrepreneurs: know the risk, fight your drive to be a workaholic, take a vacation and maybe you will decide that it is a better life". And if you wanted to be on HN - well, let us see your documents (we'll check your age). ...Post naturally related to my other reply nearby.
- simmerup 4y agopaywall.
- nisegami 4y agoI sure am glad there aren't confounding factors like wage stagnation or a global pandemic involved.
- garbagecoder 4y agoThere are. It turns out some of these people know fancy stats vocabulary too and have thought about it a bit. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
- retrac 4y agoThe apparent decline in children's mental health seems to have started in late '00s or early '10s. E.g. here's a study from just before the pandemic making the same conclusion - digital media: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190315110908.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190315110908.h... The decline has occurred in almost all developed countries, as far as I know. This includes countries where wages aren't stagnant and the employment market is solid.
- thefourthchime 4y agoEvery time I see headlines like this, I think of this clip from True Detective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZGMcwi758 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZGMcwi758
- rationalist 4y agoAt some point one change will be more drastic than all the changes before.
- Eumenes 4y agoFirst generation to be exclusively raised on social media/smartphones/constant tech engagement is not simply, old man yells at clouds.
- dakiol 4y agoSounds to me very similar to past situations. First generation to be exclusively raised on... - MTV? - video games? - rock and roll? - ...
- Aaronstotle 4y agoThey didn't have those things in their pockets 24/7, and the social media apps are designed to be addictive. Not exactly the same scenario
- wiseowise 4y agoDid you seriously compare constant engagement of phone to occasional MTV or video games?
- megaman821 4y agoRead this book, Amusing Ourselves to Death https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLH6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o08?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLH6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b..., but replace the word TV with Internet. You will be surprised how remarkably similar the arguments are.
- ranting-moth 4y agohttps://archive.is/6keN4 https://archive.is/6keN4
- robg 4y agoCouldn’t there be a common cause, like lost sleep? Considering the role of sleep in washing away the daily damage to the brain.
- deltarholamda 4y agoIt can be many things, and sleep certainly is important. Social media is a lot of things, some of them good, some bad, but young people are not well-suited to handle the bad. Heck, most adults aren't either. You have to be a particular sort of person to handle a couple thousand people all over the world screaming "LOSER!" at you because you said something awkward. I've seen a lot of "you need to touch grass" comments recently, and it kind of gets to the heart of the problem. We didn't evolve in an environment where every facet of your life is available for inspection from freaking everybody in the world. One can counter that we should train our children to be circumspect in how they manage their online activities--a kind of abstinence education for the digital world--but that is a massive uphill battle. Digital communications are pretty good overall. I know my kids make use of it to manage homework, keep in touch with friends who are not local, etc. But there is a pretty big difference between texting the folks you met at summer camp and Instagram.
- recursivedoubts 4y agoI'll say it again, and I'll take the downvotes: in the future we will look back on allowing children access to social media and smart phones the way that today we look back at smoking ads targeted at children. Maybe even more incredulously.
- notch898a 4y agoAnd the adults' access to the phone. It's made it incredibly easy and low-effort to snitch out any kids actually independently outside no matter where they are. People would shit bricks to see the freedom I had as a kid, to roam the countryside alone with a rifle shooting rabbits. Or going miles out from age 7 up snake infested creeks. The average fat American is way too lazy to walk all the way home to snitch a kid out, but with a cell phone they can call the cops immediately.
- StrangeATractor 4y agoIt's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.
- thriftwy 4y agoHow about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?
- edejong 4y agoWe decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.
- thriftwy 4y agoWhat if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone? What of people have, like, free time? For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.
- jamesgill 4y agoSome anecdata: My wife, a 25+-year middle school teacher, agrees. And so does just about every other teacher we know. In the past 10-15 years, teachers have seen a startling shift in children's health overall, but especially mental health. Attention span is out the window. Prying away devices is like pulling a toy from a toddler, often with the accompanying screams and wails (and occasionally violence). Kids have always mocked and gossiped and bullied, but devices and media have turned it beyond 11. Some kids (says my wife and others) seem in a constant state of fight-or-flight, unable to deal with the stress. Also: it's not just phones; at my wife's school, Chromebooks are prevalent and kids carry them everywhere, often open in the hallways as they walk, using them like phones. Side note: maintaining boundaries with Chromebooks is an even worse nightmare at some schools than smartphones. Google's hard push into K-12 education has been wildly successful; 'Google Classroom' and other tools are adopted by districts and create a hellscape of maintenance, security, and privacy concerns. For both staff and students.
- madduci 4y agoOTOH, how do you defend yourself/your child from smartphone frenzy, when every other kid at school has one? Are you forcing your kid into (virtual) isolation from other friends or give it up?
- tastyfreeze 4y agoJust say no. If you want a reason, phones and data plans are expensive. They can see their friends in person.
- retrac 4y agoThere has been a change in social behaviour which I think is obviously linked to electronic media, and probably also the mental health issues. The % of American students who say they meet up physically with friends "almost every day": https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/0265407519836170/asset/images/large/10.1177_0265407519836170-fig1.jpeg https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/0265407519836170/as... It declines slightly through the 70s, 80s, 90s from ~55% to 50% (almost statistically insignificant) and then, starting in the mid-late '00s starts dropping steadily, now down to less than 25%. Half as many teenagers socialize in person with their friends almost every day, as they did in my generation. (And going by the data on "how many parties" attended, my generation in the 90s/00s was still relatively introverted compared to my parents' generation, even though we saw our friends every day.) source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0265407519836170 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02654075198361... ( https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0265407519836170 https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0265407519836170 )
- kurthr 4y agoThank you for this. That it corresponds almost exactly to the introduction date of the smartphone, then 4G, and then IG is telling. Maybe it's just correlation, but the feedback loop doesn't look like it.
- 463463846 4y agoI think with just the numbers presented it's hard to say if this is actually problematic. It's certainly a shift, but my teen half-sibling is hardly less social than I was at his age. He spends all of his time in discord with 'the boys', socializing on insta, or sending TikToks to girls he wants to flirt with from school. If anything I'd argue that style of teen life is hyper social compared to my time. And it's not like he can't meet physically with his friends or girls either, there's just not usually a reason to since with friends they have the most fun playing videogames and with girls there isn't much of a point unless it can be done outside parental supervision which happens but takes planning.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 4y agoSmartphones and social media are destroying adult's brains, too.
- 11235813213455 4y agoexactly, HN is one of them, even if the content is more elaborated usually
- DeathArrow 4y agoModeration and self control is the key to a normal life.
- Kye 4y agoSometimes moderation and self-control means avoiding something entirely if you aren't able to practice moderation and self-control once you start. I could spend more of my finite life trying to practice restraint in the middle of it, but I prefer to do what's actually worked: staying away entirely from any social media platform that I struggle to pull away from.
- RACEWAR 4y agoAs a former smartphone-using, social media-ing child, this hurts.
- drak0n1c 4y agoUnfortunately, too many parents are either too unaware or apathetic to spend 30 minutes enabling parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them off to their kids. Parental controls are very robust now, and easy to remotely manage from your own device. You can create an app whitelist, or require permission for installs, and limit browser usage. Non-emergency usage duration and time-of-day can be fine-tuned. The ability is there but sorely lacking wide adoption, and parents instead stick to more confrontational and less effective techniques such as manual snooping and taking of devices after the damage is already done.
- avidphantasm 4y agoAssuming, for the moment, that smart phones and social media are bad for these kids, what do we do? We can't raise our kids without exposure to digital technology, but I'm not sure how to keep it at arms length. I have an almost 5yo who obviously (I hope this is obvious and commonplace) doesn't have their own phone or tablet and has never used social media. But in a few years, they'll have peers that do use these things. Do I not buy them a phone? Do I just get them a cellular-connected watch so that they can call me if needed? Right now, my plan is to build them some kind of simple computer (e.g., Raspberry Pi 400) in a few years (i.e., once they can read and write) that probably doesn't have Internet access (at least at first), but allows use of Scratch Desktop and/or BASIC to learn programming, as well as "harmless" games (e.g., chess, etc.). I might also introduce off-line game systems like SNES and Genesis Classic. What are people with literate young kids doing to introduce their kids to digital technology in a sane, non/less-addictive way?
- 13years 4y agoI don't know how we will manage it, but it is about to get exponentially worse. With the introduction of AI, kids are going to bond to a fake reality. The manipulative effect is going to be orders of magnitude greater than social media.
- glomgril 4y agoI have a very similar plan involving a Raspberry Pi, I agree that it's a great middle ground. IMO screentime that only involves video calls with family is perfectly fine, especially if it is a group activity. In general (timeboxed) social activities that involve multiple people watching/interacting with a single screen don't seem as potentially consuming (e.g. a Super Bowl party). That's our arms-length strategy at this point. Seems to have worked quite well so far w.r.t. not getting obsessed with electronics. We'll see what happens when peers start getting phones/tablets though...
- jedberg 4y agoFWIW we got my 8 year old a smart watch, and it's been great. We can text her and she can text us (and her older cousin) and we can call her and track her. She can't use social media or anything else, and I put one game on there for her (pong). Both she and her brother have access to our old phones and tablets with a curated list of games that at least vaguely teach you something. They get limited time on the devices. Rule number one is no screens when the sun is up, except on weekends. Also sometimes I let them play my S/NES emulators, which obviously have no internet access. I suspect she'll ask for a phone when she gets to middle school. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
- trinsic2 4y agoThe article is locked behind a paywall.
- cwoolfe 4y agohttps://archive.is/6keN4 https://archive.is/6keN4
- bstowns1970 4y agoPhones are just a carcass, it's the content that is being fed to the sheep that is the problem. Not the phones themselves. If you don't police the content providers, banning phones will not have any effect. Just like guns. They don't kill people, people kill people. I could say the same things about television. Do I really want my daughter watching The real housewives of *bstown. What kind of values does she learn there? Or the camera angles in which women are depicted in the media. Don't get me started on all the commercials. There is also the influence aspects of our economy and society. Which I will argue is a foundational building block. Bigger and better drives the social media economies piggy backed on click bait and more outlandish claims of achievement. It's all smoke and mirrors and pyramid schemes. But this is nothing new across history. The phone is just a more direct way of transmission. You just wait till the Meta verse, chip implants and really immersive IOT. You ain't seen nothing yet! The frog is boiled across generations, not all at once.
- taylodl 4y agoWhat makes us so sure social media isn't destroying adults' mental health? Adults may have better coping mechanisms but it doesn't mean their mental health is being destroyed all the same.
- barbazoo 4y ago[flagged]
- blockwriter 4y agoIt may well be the thing that is causing them to do so.
- heywherelogingo 4y agoThe timing correlates.
- barbazoo 4y agoI'm not sure I got what you're saying. Are you saying that "smartphones and social media" may be what is causing them to identify as non-binary?
- blockwriter 4y agoIs that not a possibility? In terms of public identification, my answer is, yes, definitely. In terms of private identification, my answer is also yes, but I appreciate that many people think this is a manifestly positive outcome. In which case, it is up to the individual to parse the perceived harms of social media use from the perceived benefits benefits and the desired outcomes from the undesirable.
- barbazoo 4y ago> Is that not a possibility? I was just asking what you meant, not implying wrong or right
- skee8383 4y agostop posting this paywall garbage on here.
- cwoolfe 4y agohttps://archive.is/6keN4 https://archive.is/6keN4
- the_brin2 4y agoI have a running thesis that I've been building out in my head for a while, and continue to see more data to support it. Basically - our technology has significantly outgrown our biological and evolutionary roots. So much of the modern world is unnatural from an evolutionary perspective. One post can reach millions of people, a far cry from how our brain evolved to process social connections. We just don't have the tools to process the modern media and social media landscape. I can't imagine what it's doing to the developing brain. I see so much of society similar to a deer freezing in headlights. Cars have been around for a while, but only blink of an eye in an evolutionary timescale. Deer haven't been able to catch up. In some ways, I fear our society is quite the same for us.
- flas9sd 4y agothe deer in headlights, the blink of an eye are interesting representations. You can make that argument of what is deemed unnatural on a lot since industrialization took root (and you did, as in cars). That genie is out of the bottle with world populations raising in lock-step to technology. Humans continue to live - in mega cities, with mass transportation, mass communication, world wars for more than 100 years. I don't know to what degree we biologically adapt, but most certainly we do adapt. Smartphones are yet another shock to populations that I'm sure we'll absorb. The web-accessed FT article on youth mental health, this conversation, this message board of worldwide concurrency are all adaptions.
- Philorandroid 4y agoI'd held the position for years that social media had demonstrably negative effects on childrens' minds -- and all the while, I was derided, because at the time there was no empirical evidence assembled conclusively stating such, and my inductive reasoning to that end was handwaved away. I feel vindicated. Technology can be a powerful force for good, but perhaps giving impressionable young minds unrestricted access to the internet is short-sighted and fraught with peril.
- AlbertCory 4y agoOddly enough, once the hype machine has moved on to TikTok: Facebook has stayed there. Come at me; I don't care. As long as they don't try to stay "relevant" and keep me "engaged" (I know, that ship has sailed), they're still a way to stay connected to friends & relatives. Facebook should just settle into a comfortable senescence and die eventually, like any natural organism. Or not die, like everyone's been warning about classical music for 100 years. Unfortunately, MZ doesn't seem inclined to do that. I never, never got any news from FB, and when someone gets political, or Instagram-ish with their perfect lives, I instantly Unfollow or Unfriend them. I never walked around staring at my smartphone with FB on it and I doubt any of the kids do, either.
- 11235813213455 4y agoIs HN a social media as well? Fortunately I'm not on a smartphone /s
- GeekyBear 4y agoI think there's ample lived experience showing that larger groups of adolescent human beings can be hateful towards people who are different in any way. In the past, young people were unable to escape this while at school, but once the school day was over they at least had a reprieve until the next school day. With social media, there is no longer any down time. You are vulnerable to harassment all the time.
- clarge1120 4y agoWill someone please think of the children?!
- Diederich 4y agoWe got a lot of shit about it at the time from various sources, but I think my wife and I were correct in limiting our son to a flip phone until he was 18. It was very awkward in a lot of ways, because all of his peers had smart phones, and him not having one got in the way of some good things. However, a couple of years later, now with a smart phone, he seems a lot more grounded than a lot of other young people he interacts with.
- lacoolj 4y agoIt's definitely not just kids that have a problem
- jacobmartinez3d 4y agoThe users of social media have a LOT of guilt and responsibility that never gets recognized in my opinion. The subtle “I’m hot/smart - sucks to be you” in literally every conceivable topic is so well disguised as being “how everyone else does it” that it goes unnoticed as being vain and narcissistic. Making video about blue whales? Make sure a quarter of the screen is covered with your filtered, augmented face and better yet your gym body! Making a short about how cute your relationship is? Make sure to make the point somehow in some subtle way that your in the relationship because you physically are more attractive or else it doesn’t “hit” as much. Like be sitting down and then stand up to show you’re tall when the beat drops haha - they get pretty creative and it’s like clockwork. The subtle nature of it is what’s so damaging to young people in my opinion because its how everyone gets away with being disgusting and vain - it’s actually quite passive aggressive and if you are young you are just absorbing it like someone in an abusive relationship.
- AKCBRANDY2 4y agoSmartphones and emails already destroyed our lives me and Brandy my golden retriever's lives!
- AKCBRANDY2 4y agoSmartphones and emails, all the apps has already destroyed our lives me and Brandy my golden retriever's lives! AT&T among others that's a huge problem asI don't care what others do but why am I still on this smartphone?