7 ms·

The Problem with Teens Isn't Smartphones–It's Their Families

69 points by illinx 1y ago

nateburke 1y ago
Why does the chart only include data from 2003, 2020, and 2023? I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing. It is hard to get a sense of the actual data supporting the claims in the article.
- ndileas 1y ago
  Yeah, this is more journalism than science.
- decode 1y ago
  > I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing. I also found this confusing at first, but I realized that the author uses "American Indian" and "Native American" interchangeably. In the chart, this group is labeled "Native American Men".
NikolaNovak 1y ago
I disagree with the data premise that only suicide data is valid. For example, one possibility is that we DO have mental health crisis in young population, but availability and proficiency of mental health today avoids the suicide scenario. Plus there are tremendous number of significant mental issues which might not result in that most drastic of outcomes. Not claiming that's the case, just that the very first paragraph of data selection feels massively arbitrary and hand-waved.
alistairSH 1y ago
First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
- ashoeafoot 1y ago
  ? So, the goal is not to prevent or reduce trauma, but treat it more often once it happens ? What nonsense is that? Do you get a per patient kuckback by the psychiatrist guuld and associated parties?
  - alistairSH 1y ago
    Yeah, I get kickbacks when I state mental health care in the US is mediocre. /s Get the fuck out with that nonsense.
    - ashoeafoot 1y ago
      The goal should never ever be bandaid first, always reduce, stop stabbing first, bandaging second.
- maerch 1y ago
  Whenever I see arguments about past scapegoats, something about them doesn’t sit right with me. Some things today are simply more addictive than others—and often deliberately designed that way by large corporations. More importantly, they’re everywhere and carry intense peer pressure. I never experienced that with the things people used to worry about. I listened to a lot of so-called “devil’s music” and played plenty of first-person shooters, and it was never quite the same.
  - abnercoimbre 1y ago
    The false equivalence is always striking, and your reasonable counterargument usually gets dismissed too. I wish I could unravel the mysteries behind our peers defending the status quo so much.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  Don't you think rap music has a negative influence? Or pornography? When was it decided that it's not true that popular culture and technology can have a destructive influence on people? This was decided before I was born, so why should it be my duty to accept it as true? The more I notice this, the more crazy it seems. When was it decided that the TV should be center in every home and treated like the most important thing in life? Those are just people in a studio, yet most people and especially old people consider those people to be gods, deserving the greatest reverence. Who told them to buy a TV and put it into their homes? How could that become normal?
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I think that the example our generation sets, is pretty important. > "What you do speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying." -Ralph Waldo Emerson For example, I know that I can get fairly cranky about ageism in tech, but I also understand where some of it comes from. My generation has been a pretty big dumpster fire, when it comes to examples. We're the Gordon Gecko "Greed is Good" generation. Our kids kind of took the brunt of it, and, in my opinion, the world is on fire, basically due to our generation's selfishness (and we're not done, yet).
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  Sadly, looking back through history you'll see that every generation is the "greed is good" generation.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    It’s the same but different. Gen X Cops is a great song about this. “Each generation makes its own apology” https://genius.com/Vampire-weekend-gen-x-cops-lyrics https://genius.com/Vampire-weekend-gen-x-cops-lyrics https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kW9Qk00693c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kW9Qk00693c
  - graemep 1y ago
    I do not think that is true. While there are always greedy and selfish people, celebrating greed was new.
ndileas 1y ago
I think the core observation makes intuitive sense. But that's not the same thing as it being true. These issues are too subtle, complicated, and distributed for current social science tools. I kind of think the whole idea of science being able to improve societal well-being beyond the basics is misguided at this point.
huem0n 1y ago
I think they leave out a lot of evidence, like rates of bullying-and getting bullied, being dramatically higher with cell phones. I'm not convinced that one correlation being murky == teen social media and smartphones are not a problem at all.
xlii 1y ago
> That’s not actually true…there’s little evidence of a crisis at all in most European countries. There's plenty of evidence, but Europe is not US. US is federated, but has single entity that gather information in one language. Europe is much more fragmented and outside of some EU stats (that are sometimes incomplete) there isn't a single source of truth to get. The reality is simple: it's a little bit of everything. Parents are busting their ass to pay for expensive housing and overall high costs of living. Attention is grabbed by greedy corps that don't care if you get depressed about your situation as long as they get their euro/dollar/whatever and kids are neck deep in illusion of great created by influencers.
llm_nerd 1y ago
Suicide rate isn't the singular outcome of mental health problems. Saying there isn't a mental health crisis because teen girls don't successfully kill themselves as much as middle aged white men seems spectacularly ill-conceived. I also was thrown off by the use of the word "Indian". I know "American Indian" is still used by the US government and in many circles, but it is jarring to see it like this. Literally thought it was actual transplants from India that were the subject, and was confused why the chart was showing "Native American" instead. And FWIW, I don't think smartphones are the cause of mental health issues, even if it's an easy target. And bullying was prevalent long before we had social media. Just on the theme of speculating, I think the ennui of youth comes from the wider world. AGW, the growing political divide, the tendency of everyone to catastrophize and fear monger about literally everything -- if you slightly disagree with a choice, hold it as guaranteeing the end of humanity (see Elon Musk as a hilarious proto-example of this) -- to the point where everything feels broken and dire. And more recently teens live in a world where there aren't even really career hopes because everything, we are told, is going to be done by robots and AI.
ayushrodrigues 1y ago
Suicide rate is a strange metric to choose here. I believe smartphones are exceptionally damaging to teens, but the biggest effect is around their attention span and motivation. The biggest mental health effect is the ADHD epidemic it's bringing on.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Is it bringing on ADHD? It appears to me more like now that we can help people with ADHD it is worth the bother to diagnose people with it so they can get help. I'm pretty sure I have some rare things myself, but a quick investigation suggests there is nothing useful that could be done if I was diagnosed it isn't worth bothering to get an official diagnosis.
- xrhobo 1y ago
  Tiktok especially. The only time I have ever seen Tiktok videos is from dating someone younger and watching them engage with Tiktok over their shoulder out of curiosity. To me, it felt like my brain was being scrambled. The worst part was I could tell they were addicted to that same feeling. It is not really fair if a person is addicted to having their brain scrambled while I found the experience absolutely horrendous. If I engage with Tolstoy/Dostoevsky audiobooks in my free time instead of having my brain scrambled, there is obviously going to be huge carry over to all sorts of other activities. Focusing at work is just one of them.
- bobcatmin 1y ago
  I would say the real culprit is the dramatic decrease of teenagers using tobacco products. A quarter of high schoolers would use cigarettes regularly 20 years ago, but that number is now more like one in fifty. It is well known that nicotine, as a stimulant, improves several ADHD symptoms (ex. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091305707003048 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009130570...). It also improves negative symptoms in schizophrenia which is why they tend to smoke much more than the average population. Since smoking is very uncommon nowadays I feel like the people who would have self-medicated (i.e. a pack of cigs a day) in the past don't exist anymore. How many high schoolers have you met who smoke a pack of cigs?
codeduck 1y ago
I call shenanigans on this. Suicide rates are not a reliable signal for underlying mental health issues in isolation Bullying via social media and group chats is endemic, and phones function as a massive signal amplifier in this regard. Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence which link early smartphone use to poor outcomes in social skills, degraded critical thinking ability, and elevated rates of depression. This feels very much like someone picking data to fit their hypothesis.
- deleted 1y ago
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lolinder 1y ago
This article's methodology leaves a lot to be desired. They throw out dozens of studies with a flippant, poorly justified dismissal and then proceed to take a cursory, high-level glance over a single other study that supported their desired conclusion. Having given that study a passing thought they proceed to wonder at "just how glaring this data is" from that single report and how it is that everyone else can't see it. Ironically, the whole thing reads like someone did all the research and writing on a smartphone and didn't take the time to really construct an argument. I don't disagree with the title—my assumption is also that parenting would have the largest impact—but the article does a very bad job justifying it and the conclusion that therefore technology isn't worth talking about is absurd. We do a lot of research that is aimed at helping out with marginal gains because marginal gains matter! The entire field of K-12 education exists to be a marginal improvement on top of what parents are already offering. Should we stop researching that field because there's evidence that parents are the single biggest factor in educational outcomes? Most of our policy choices surrounding children are there explicitly to be a safety net for children whose parents can't provide the environment that they need.
- bko 1y ago
  I don't see why teen suicide rate is the definitive measure of how well children are doing. It's still extremely rare. Why not focus on anti-depressants? Surely kids being on a lot of meds is a sign something is off. Everyone knows phones are a net negative for most children. You really don't need a study. Just go check out a local bus stop and see kids staring at their phones. > The median amount of time a teenager in the US spends on their phone each week is estimated to be around 31 to 32 hours. Do we think this is good? How confident are you that this is not harmful? Would you be willing to bet your kids development on it? https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
  - williamcotton 1y ago
    > Surely kids being on a lot of meds is a sign something is off. Couldn't this just be a sign of overmedication? I can't see a clear cut causal relationship here.
eimrine 1y ago
Stupid parents raise stupid kids, no surprises. Schools won't fix that, their goal is to ēducō, so producing smart kids were never the goal of Prussian-style education.
robg 1y ago
I’ve been looking at our school district’s data (top 10 by size in the country, almost 200k kids) and kids aren’t sleeping enough, and tech use is likely a big driver. Less than 20% of our 12th graders report getting 7 or more hours a night of sleep. The pediatric recommendation is 8-10 hours for those 12-18 years old (9-12 hours for ages 6-12). Sleep deprivation is well-documented as linked to mental health concerns like ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Sleep is how the brain washes away gunk (see also the glymphatic nervous system). That said I have little doubt that less aware families are not enforcing sleep times as much as they used to. The moral panics on TVs and video games came with the advent of the tech then hung around for decades. People knew that kids awake late at night was bad for them. With phones, how many high schoolers have them in their rooms next to their beds? How many of us do?
EduardLev 1y ago
I'll echo the other comments in saying that I believe this to be not convincingly argued at best and at worst condescending. Terms like "fairly obvious", implying parents "don't want to hear something" feels to me an oversimplification, etc
bko 1y ago
Usually when statistics conflict with whats in front of your eyes, its the statistics that are wrong. I don't know about suicide rates but let's look at antidepressants. From 2016 to 2022, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate among U.S. adolescents increased by 66.3%. This has been a steady increase, not just covid. Anyone with teenagers in their home knows that a lot of kids are medicated and have high level of angst. Everyone knows that social media is almost always a net negative on their self image and overall well being. That's not to mention the sexualization of children on TikTok and Instagram and the perverse incentive now that only fans is an option and increasingly normalized. Children on phones are distracted. I'm even distracted and I have pretty high self control. They don't belong anywhere near a school. Maybe they're neutral, but are we really willing to bet your children's well-being on that? Shouldn't we try to have them live a life more similar to that of every other teenager born before 1990? Parents experience similar negative consequences of social media doom-scrolling. I don't need a study to tell me whats right in front of my eyes. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e2023064245/196655/Antidepressant-Dispensing-to-US-Adolescents-and?autologincheck=redirected https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e20230...
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ryandrake 1y ago
You can’t tell your kid not to smoke if you smoke 2 packs a day, and you can’t tell your kid not to get addicted to social media if you’re addicted to social media. Kids are great at detecting hypocrisy. Parents need to set a better example with their own behavior.
danielvf 1y ago
As almost every other commenter here has said, this is just a bad article in practically every way. It's quite possible that the problem isn't smart phones, but this article completely fails to show this. Even the suicide data that they decide is the proper measure of mental health, and according to them proves that teens don't have a problem, shows a 2x increase in teen girl suicide. I'm going to so something I almost never do, and flag, since this is just bait. I would love to read a case for this with a better argument however.
haswell 1y ago
Anecdotally, almost everyone I know laments the decline of real social contact in recent years, and everywhere I go, people are buried in their phones, ignoring the real world around them. Social media discourse is more toxic than ever, and yet it continues to be a major aspect of people’s social contact. For sake of argument, let’s say the issue is their families. Why are so many families turning out to be harmful environments? My pet theory is that this erosion of social contact and propagation of toxicity is affecting all of us, so it seems natural that many family environments will suffer. I think it’s too simplistic to conclude that “teens using phones” is the whole issue, but do think that phones and the underlying tech they currently represent is responsible for causing major systemic issues that in turn tend to effect teens more. Singling out the suicide rate as a proxy for mental health seems like a major problem.
- soupfordummies 1y ago
  "It's not the phones, it's the parents (who are on their phones nearly as much)"
  - abnercoimbre 1y ago
    I recently bought a Rugrats Comic Book. Re-imagined for modern times, it shows how the babies are "being watched" by some all-knowing entity while the adults are absent in their formative years. SPOILER ALERT BELOW. The comic is a criticism of surveillance devices on children and the smartphone addiction of adults. (Even the adults were zombified in their interactions with each other.) Tommy's solution was to rally the babies to drown all devices in water -- and to continue breaking them until their parents gave up buying new ones.
- j-bos 1y ago
  I've noticed people make much less eye contact with strangers, when I was young I only ever saw that in NYC (I imagines the same in other big cities). Today I see that everywhere except the boonies, smaller than small towns.
_rpxpx 1y ago
Suicide rates are not a good metric of mental illness: they are a function of several things, most obviously opportunity and access to a means. E.g., in the UK, farmers have a disproportionately high rate of suicide because they have unusually ready access to guns. This post also distinguishes itself in speaking arrogantly about teens without bothering to check any record of what they have to say themselves. I think movements like "Luddite Club" are only going to accelerate, and they will be led by young women. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smartphones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smar...
arp242 1y ago
This post seems to be a McNamara fallacy: "if it can't be quantified and measured then its irrelevant and can be ignored". Look, I don't have any answers here. I'm not involved with teens. I don't really know much about this and maybe the author is correct. But I can spot a bad argument, and fixating only on suicide data and dismissing everything else as "unreliable" (based on a single small study) doesn't seem the right approach. In addition "mental health" is complex and most people suffering from poor mental health don't commit suicide. There are different types of "mental heath" problems one can have, and it seems entirely plausible that some lead to relatively high rates of suicide and others have much lower rates.
mavsman 1y ago
If smartphone companies and social media companies are stating that their products are causing a mental health crisis, there's probably some merit to that.
wintermutestwin 1y ago
In 1988, California enacted a mental health parity law which private insurers to provide equal coverage for mental health and substance use disorder treatments, including services for children. There was a resultant explosion of rehab centers for kids opening in CA. Kids (mostly mid-upper class white kids) got put into rehab centers en masse. Suddenly, every parent in a dysfunctional family could point their fingers at the ubiquitous use of drugs (mostly alcohol and cannabis) among teens and thus absolve themselves of their personal failings as a parent. Of course I am not arguing that kegger parties and smoking weed were positive things for kids, and certainly some small % of these kids were doing worse drugs, but I am quite certain from my own (fairly broad) annecdata that the root cause of these kids' self destructive behavior was their fucked up families. And now parents can point their fingers at social media. History repeats, but the difference this time is that kids aren't put into rehabs away from the family dysfunction and in an environment where some degree of self examination and self work is promoted. When I was very young, I thought that my family dysfunction was an outlier, but my experiences in life lead me to believe that it is the norm and that healthy families are the outlier. Of course, that's my own experience, but I am a greybeard now and have interacted with a large number of individuals across the full spectrum of social strata so the assessment of my anecdata sure seems more poignant with each passing year...
jacknews 1y ago
So basically the problem is that the parents are stuck to their phones, and are neglecting the kids. same same.
spacemadness 1y ago
My eye hit the nazi symbol right next to his name then I scrolled and saw “white people” in the graph and noped the hell out of this one.

69 points by illinx 1y ago

Why does the chart only include data from 2003, 2020, and 2023? I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing. It is hard to get a sense of the actual data supporting the claims in the article.

ndileas 1y ago
Yeah, this is more journalism than science.
decode 1y ago
> I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing. I also found this confusing at first, but I realized that the author uses "American Indian" and "Native American" interchangeably. In the chart, this group is labeled "Native American Men".

NikolaNovak 1y ago

I disagree with the data premise that only suicide data is valid. For example, one possibility is that we DO have mental health crisis in young population, but availability and proficiency of mental health today avoids the suicide scenario. Plus there are tremendous number of significant mental issues which might not result in that most drastic of outcomes. Not claiming that's the case, just that the very first paragraph of data selection feels massively arbitrary and hand-waved.

alistairSH 1y ago

First it was rock and roll, then video games, then cell phones. When all along it’s been lack of mental health care in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

ashoeafoot 1y ago
? So, the goal is not to prevent or reduce trauma, but treat it more often once it happens ? What nonsense is that? Do you get a per patient kuckback by the psychiatrist guuld and associated parties?
- alistairSH 1y ago
  Yeah, I get kickbacks when I state mental health care in the US is mediocre. /s Get the fuck out with that nonsense.
  - ashoeafoot 1y ago
    The goal should never ever be bandaid first, always reduce, stop stabbing first, bandaging second.
maerch 1y ago
Whenever I see arguments about past scapegoats, something about them doesn’t sit right with me. Some things today are simply more addictive than others—and often deliberately designed that way by large corporations. More importantly, they’re everywhere and carry intense peer pressure. I never experienced that with the things people used to worry about. I listened to a lot of so-called “devil’s music” and played plenty of first-person shooters, and it was never quite the same.
- abnercoimbre 1y ago
  The false equivalence is always striking, and your reasonable counterargument usually gets dismissed too. I wish I could unravel the mysteries behind our peers defending the status quo so much.
carlosjobim 1y ago
Don't you think rap music has a negative influence? Or pornography? When was it decided that it's not true that popular culture and technology can have a destructive influence on people? This was decided before I was born, so why should it be my duty to accept it as true? The more I notice this, the more crazy it seems. When was it decided that the TV should be center in every home and treated like the most important thing in life? Those are just people in a studio, yet most people and especially old people consider those people to be gods, deserving the greatest reverence. Who told them to buy a TV and put it into their homes? How could that become normal?

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I think that the example our generation sets, is pretty important. > "What you do speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying." -Ralph Waldo Emerson For example, I know that I can get fairly cranky about ageism in tech, but I also understand where some of it comes from. My generation has been a pretty big dumpster fire, when it comes to examples. We're the Gordon Gecko "Greed is Good" generation. Our kids kind of took the brunt of it, and, in my opinion, the world is on fire, basically due to our generation's selfishness (and we're not done, yet).

Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
Sadly, looking back through history you'll see that every generation is the "greed is good" generation.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  It’s the same but different. Gen X Cops is a great song about this. “Each generation makes its own apology” https://genius.com/Vampire-weekend-gen-x-cops-lyrics https://genius.com/Vampire-weekend-gen-x-cops-lyrics https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kW9Qk00693c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kW9Qk00693c
- graemep 1y ago
  I do not think that is true. While there are always greedy and selfish people, celebrating greed was new.

ndileas 1y ago

I think the core observation makes intuitive sense. But that's not the same thing as it being true. These issues are too subtle, complicated, and distributed for current social science tools. I kind of think the whole idea of science being able to improve societal well-being beyond the basics is misguided at this point.

huem0n 1y ago

I think they leave out a lot of evidence, like rates of bullying-and getting bullied, being dramatically higher with cell phones. I'm not convinced that one correlation being murky == teen social media and smartphones are not a problem at all.

xlii 1y ago

> That’s not actually true…there’s little evidence of a crisis at all in most European countries. There's plenty of evidence, but Europe is not US. US is federated, but has single entity that gather information in one language. Europe is much more fragmented and outside of some EU stats (that are sometimes incomplete) there isn't a single source of truth to get. The reality is simple: it's a little bit of everything. Parents are busting their ass to pay for expensive housing and overall high costs of living. Attention is grabbed by greedy corps that don't care if you get depressed about your situation as long as they get their euro/dollar/whatever and kids are neck deep in illusion of great created by influencers.

llm_nerd 1y ago

Suicide rate isn't the singular outcome of mental health problems. Saying there isn't a mental health crisis because teen girls don't successfully kill themselves as much as middle aged white men seems spectacularly ill-conceived. I also was thrown off by the use of the word "Indian". I know "American Indian" is still used by the US government and in many circles, but it is jarring to see it like this. Literally thought it was actual transplants from India that were the subject, and was confused why the chart was showing "Native American" instead. And FWIW, I don't think smartphones are the cause of mental health issues, even if it's an easy target. And bullying was prevalent long before we had social media. Just on the theme of speculating, I think the ennui of youth comes from the wider world. AGW, the growing political divide, the tendency of everyone to catastrophize and fear monger about literally everything -- if you slightly disagree with a choice, hold it as guaranteeing the end of humanity (see Elon Musk as a hilarious proto-example of this) -- to the point where everything feels broken and dire. And more recently teens live in a world where there aren't even really career hopes because everything, we are told, is going to be done by robots and AI.

ayushrodrigues 1y ago

Suicide rate is a strange metric to choose here. I believe smartphones are exceptionally damaging to teens, but the biggest effect is around their attention span and motivation. The biggest mental health effect is the ADHD epidemic it's bringing on.

bluGill 1y ago
Is it bringing on ADHD? It appears to me more like now that we can help people with ADHD it is worth the bother to diagnose people with it so they can get help. I'm pretty sure I have some rare things myself, but a quick investigation suggests there is nothing useful that could be done if I was diagnosed it isn't worth bothering to get an official diagnosis.
xrhobo 1y ago
Tiktok especially. The only time I have ever seen Tiktok videos is from dating someone younger and watching them engage with Tiktok over their shoulder out of curiosity. To me, it felt like my brain was being scrambled. The worst part was I could tell they were addicted to that same feeling. It is not really fair if a person is addicted to having their brain scrambled while I found the experience absolutely horrendous. If I engage with Tolstoy/Dostoevsky audiobooks in my free time instead of having my brain scrambled, there is obviously going to be huge carry over to all sorts of other activities. Focusing at work is just one of them.
bobcatmin 1y ago
I would say the real culprit is the dramatic decrease of teenagers using tobacco products. A quarter of high schoolers would use cigarettes regularly 20 years ago, but that number is now more like one in fifty. It is well known that nicotine, as a stimulant, improves several ADHD symptoms (ex. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091305707003048 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009130570...). It also improves negative symptoms in schizophrenia which is why they tend to smoke much more than the average population. Since smoking is very uncommon nowadays I feel like the people who would have self-medicated (i.e. a pack of cigs a day) in the past don't exist anymore. How many high schoolers have you met who smoke a pack of cigs?

codeduck 1y ago

I call shenanigans on this. Suicide rates are not a reliable signal for underlying mental health issues in isolation Bullying via social media and group chats is endemic, and phones function as a massive signal amplifier in this regard. Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence which link early smartphone use to poor outcomes in social skills, degraded critical thinking ability, and elevated rates of depression. This feels very much like someone picking data to fit their hypothesis.

deleted 1y ago
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lolinder 1y ago

This article's methodology leaves a lot to be desired. They throw out dozens of studies with a flippant, poorly justified dismissal and then proceed to take a cursory, high-level glance over a single other study that supported their desired conclusion. Having given that study a passing thought they proceed to wonder at "just how glaring this data is" from that single report and how it is that everyone else can't see it. Ironically, the whole thing reads like someone did all the research and writing on a smartphone and didn't take the time to really construct an argument. I don't disagree with the title—my assumption is also that parenting would have the largest impact—but the article does a very bad job justifying it and the conclusion that therefore technology isn't worth talking about is absurd. We do a lot of research that is aimed at helping out with marginal gains because marginal gains matter! The entire field of K-12 education exists to be a marginal improvement on top of what parents are already offering. Should we stop researching that field because there's evidence that parents are the single biggest factor in educational outcomes? Most of our policy choices surrounding children are there explicitly to be a safety net for children whose parents can't provide the environment that they need.

bko 1y ago
I don't see why teen suicide rate is the definitive measure of how well children are doing. It's still extremely rare. Why not focus on anti-depressants? Surely kids being on a lot of meds is a sign something is off. Everyone knows phones are a net negative for most children. You really don't need a study. Just go check out a local bus stop and see kids staring at their phones. > The median amount of time a teenager in the US spends on their phone each week is estimated to be around 31 to 32 hours. Do we think this is good? How confident are you that this is not harmful? Would you be willing to bet your kids development on it? https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats
- williamcotton 1y ago
  > Surely kids being on a lot of meds is a sign something is off. Couldn't this just be a sign of overmedication? I can't see a clear cut causal relationship here.

eimrine 1y ago

Stupid parents raise stupid kids, no surprises. Schools won't fix that, their goal is to ēducō, so producing smart kids were never the goal of Prussian-style education.

robg 1y ago

I’ve been looking at our school district’s data (top 10 by size in the country, almost 200k kids) and kids aren’t sleeping enough, and tech use is likely a big driver. Less than 20% of our 12th graders report getting 7 or more hours a night of sleep. The pediatric recommendation is 8-10 hours for those 12-18 years old (9-12 hours for ages 6-12). Sleep deprivation is well-documented as linked to mental health concerns like ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Sleep is how the brain washes away gunk (see also the glymphatic nervous system). That said I have little doubt that less aware families are not enforcing sleep times as much as they used to. The moral panics on TVs and video games came with the advent of the tech then hung around for decades. People knew that kids awake late at night was bad for them. With phones, how many high schoolers have them in their rooms next to their beds? How many of us do?

EduardLev 1y ago

I'll echo the other comments in saying that I believe this to be not convincingly argued at best and at worst condescending. Terms like "fairly obvious", implying parents "don't want to hear something" feels to me an oversimplification, etc

bko 1y ago

Usually when statistics conflict with whats in front of your eyes, its the statistics that are wrong. I don't know about suicide rates but let's look at antidepressants. From 2016 to 2022, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate among U.S. adolescents increased by 66.3%. This has been a steady increase, not just covid. Anyone with teenagers in their home knows that a lot of kids are medicated and have high level of angst. Everyone knows that social media is almost always a net negative on their self image and overall well being. That's not to mention the sexualization of children on TikTok and Instagram and the perverse incentive now that only fans is an option and increasingly normalized. Children on phones are distracted. I'm even distracted and I have pretty high self control. They don't belong anywhere near a school. Maybe they're neutral, but are we really willing to bet your children's well-being on that? Shouldn't we try to have them live a life more similar to that of every other teenager born before 1990? Parents experience similar negative consequences of social media doom-scrolling. I don't need a study to tell me whats right in front of my eyes. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e2023064245/196655/Antidepressant-Dispensing-to-US-Adolescents-and?autologincheck=redirected https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e20230...

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ryandrake 1y ago

You can’t tell your kid not to smoke if you smoke 2 packs a day, and you can’t tell your kid not to get addicted to social media if you’re addicted to social media. Kids are great at detecting hypocrisy. Parents need to set a better example with their own behavior.

danielvf 1y ago

As almost every other commenter here has said, this is just a bad article in practically every way. It's quite possible that the problem isn't smart phones, but this article completely fails to show this. Even the suicide data that they decide is the proper measure of mental health, and according to them proves that teens don't have a problem, shows a 2x increase in teen girl suicide. I'm going to so something I almost never do, and flag, since this is just bait. I would love to read a case for this with a better argument however.

haswell 1y ago

Anecdotally, almost everyone I know laments the decline of real social contact in recent years, and everywhere I go, people are buried in their phones, ignoring the real world around them. Social media discourse is more toxic than ever, and yet it continues to be a major aspect of people’s social contact. For sake of argument, let’s say the issue is their families. Why are so many families turning out to be harmful environments? My pet theory is that this erosion of social contact and propagation of toxicity is affecting all of us, so it seems natural that many family environments will suffer. I think it’s too simplistic to conclude that “teens using phones” is the whole issue, but do think that phones and the underlying tech they currently represent is responsible for causing major systemic issues that in turn tend to effect teens more. Singling out the suicide rate as a proxy for mental health seems like a major problem.

soupfordummies 1y ago
"It's not the phones, it's the parents (who are on their phones nearly as much)"
- abnercoimbre 1y ago
  I recently bought a Rugrats Comic Book. Re-imagined for modern times, it shows how the babies are "being watched" by some all-knowing entity while the adults are absent in their formative years. SPOILER ALERT BELOW. The comic is a criticism of surveillance devices on children and the smartphone addiction of adults. (Even the adults were zombified in their interactions with each other.) Tommy's solution was to rally the babies to drown all devices in water -- and to continue breaking them until their parents gave up buying new ones.
j-bos 1y ago
I've noticed people make much less eye contact with strangers, when I was young I only ever saw that in NYC (I imagines the same in other big cities). Today I see that everywhere except the boonies, smaller than small towns.

_rpxpx 1y ago

Suicide rates are not a good metric of mental illness: they are a function of several things, most obviously opportunity and access to a means. E.g., in the UK, farmers have a disproportionately high rate of suicide because they have unusually ready access to guns. This post also distinguishes itself in speaking arrogantly about teens without bothering to check any record of what they have to say themselves. I think movements like "Luddite Club" are only going to accelerate, and they will be led by young women. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smartphones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smar...

arp242 1y ago

This post seems to be a McNamara fallacy: "if it can't be quantified and measured then its irrelevant and can be ignored". Look, I don't have any answers here. I'm not involved with teens. I don't really know much about this and maybe the author is correct. But I can spot a bad argument, and fixating only on suicide data and dismissing everything else as "unreliable" (based on a single small study) doesn't seem the right approach. In addition "mental health" is complex and most people suffering from poor mental health don't commit suicide. There are different types of "mental heath" problems one can have, and it seems entirely plausible that some lead to relatively high rates of suicide and others have much lower rates.

mavsman 1y ago

If smartphone companies and social media companies are stating that their products are causing a mental health crisis, there's probably some merit to that.

wintermutestwin 1y ago

In 1988, California enacted a mental health parity law which private insurers to provide equal coverage for mental health and substance use disorder treatments, including services for children. There was a resultant explosion of rehab centers for kids opening in CA. Kids (mostly mid-upper class white kids) got put into rehab centers en masse. Suddenly, every parent in a dysfunctional family could point their fingers at the ubiquitous use of drugs (mostly alcohol and cannabis) among teens and thus absolve themselves of their personal failings as a parent. Of course I am not arguing that kegger parties and smoking weed were positive things for kids, and certainly some small % of these kids were doing worse drugs, but I am quite certain from my own (fairly broad) annecdata that the root cause of these kids' self destructive behavior was their fucked up families. And now parents can point their fingers at social media. History repeats, but the difference this time is that kids aren't put into rehabs away from the family dysfunction and in an environment where some degree of self examination and self work is promoted. When I was very young, I thought that my family dysfunction was an outlier, but my experiences in life lead me to believe that it is the norm and that healthy families are the outlier. Of course, that's my own experience, but I am a greybeard now and have interacted with a large number of individuals across the full spectrum of social strata so the assessment of my anecdata sure seems more poignant with each passing year...

jacknews 1y ago

So basically the problem is that the parents are stuck to their phones, and are neglecting the kids. same same.

spacemadness 1y ago

My eye hit the nazi symbol right next to his name then I scrolled and saw “white people” in the graph and noped the hell out of this one.