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Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

• bdangubic 3y ago
  Main issue here is that parents are allowing kids to use “phone” feature and not as much “smart” features. This is all on parents. If parents only allowed “smart” features of the smartphone to be used…
• T3RMINATED 3y ago
  [dead]
• sigzero 3y ago
  I have zero doubt about that.
• sammywater 3y ago
  first smart phone (iphone): 2007 2023-2007 = 16 years Personally I don't thikn Smart phones haven't been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don't think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me. Using screens in general result in less social time -> isolation -> mental health concerns
  • jprete 3y ago
    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.
  • aynyc 3y ago
    I doubt kids were getting smart phone when they were born. Assume they were given smart phone at 7, they would be adults now.
• zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  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.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > 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).
    • spicymapotofu 3y ago
      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.
      • tivert 3y ago
        > 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.
  • nancyhn 3y ago
    Or disconnected parents give their kids ipads and iphones the earliest and with the least oversight. And note the large spike in this graph from 17 to 18. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffbff8dea-3dc7-4bef-9c12-a7bfcdd73794_1300x1168.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
• rcme 3y ago
  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.
  • dumpsterlid 3y ago
    [dead]
  • caf 3y ago
    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.
• rtpg 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • rcme 3y ago
    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.
    • cauch 3y ago
      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.
      • rcme 3y ago
        > 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.
        • cauch 3y ago
• DrThunder 3y ago
  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.
  • Freak_NL 3y ago
    > She might be a weird outcast but oh well […] Which totally won't affect her mental health. Damned if you don't, damned if you do.
    • tgv 3y ago
      > Which totally won't affect her mental health. 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.
      • Dudeman112 3y ago
        >There's really no data on that I find it extremely unlikely that there's no data on how being an outcast affects one's mental health
        • tgv 3y ago
          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.
          • pb7 3y ago
• ekianjo 3y ago
  Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media
  • tgv 3y ago
    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.
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      Just saying they identified the wrong thing that mattered
  • krunck 3y ago
    Or the always-available escape from reality, preventing from from having to face the world and/or their issues.
  • yamtaddle 3y ago
    Smartphones are why social media is the way it is. It'd be a lot different, and a lot less-used, if you still had to go sit at a desk to use it.
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      Depression and mental health issues is directly coming from the software on mobile phones not the fact that you carry a computer in your pocket. They focus on the wrong variable. It would be hard to ban mobile phones. But less hard to curb down on social media.
      • badkitty99 3y ago
        [dead]
  • weego 3y ago
    Guns don't kill people bullets do
• eurekin 3y ago
  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
  • IceHegel 3y ago
    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.
    • jstarfish 3y ago
      Boredom leads to curiosity. Smartphones ensure the user is never bored.
      • mordae 3y ago
        Does it?
        • aio2 3y ago
          that's how it is designed
• ape4 3y ago
  Aren't there "parental controls" to limit access?
• synergy20 3y ago
  How early is too early? Also the phone can be set up for like one hour a day of usage too.
  • knallfrosch 3y ago
    The earlier, the worse your kid's mental health. Decide for yourself (and your kid.)
• owlbynight 3y ago
  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.
  • timmytokyo 3y ago
    > 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.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      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. https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-imfs-world-economic-outlook-for-2010 https://seekingalpha.com/article/184723-an-analysis-of-the-i...
      • cpsempek 3y ago
        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. [1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
• 23B1 3y ago
  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.
  • Clubber 3y ago
    >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.
    • IceHegel 3y ago
      > We don’t know what’s causing it. Speculatively, I’d say it’s social media for girls (instagram, tiktok, snapchat) and porn for boys.
      • trinix912 3y ago
        As if it’s impossible for boys to have body image issues because of all those Instagram models.
        • hibikir 3y ago
          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.
• psychlops 3y ago
  Did the kids respond to this survey on their smartphones? Does the brand of the smartphone matter?
• alexb_ 3y ago
  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.
  • artursapek 3y ago
    anyone denying this is just coping with their bad parenting decisions lmao, it's obvious that smartphones are bad for mental health.
  • swayvil 3y ago
    Nobody wants to be a lemming heading for the cliff. Nobody wants to be a stoneage troglodyte drinking from a lead cup. So I have this semiconscious reaction. The logical refutations appear in dozens, without even having to think about it. Automatic reality editing.
  • jimmyjazz14 3y ago
    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.
    • PragmaticPulp 3y ago
      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.
• nr2x 3y ago
  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.
• ouid 3y ago
  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.
• kyleyeats 3y ago
  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.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    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.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• weatherlight 3y ago
  is it smart phones or specific applications on smart phones, i.e social media?
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  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)..." (pdf) https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Sapien-Labs-Age-of-First-Smartphone-and-Mental-Wellbeing-Outcomes.pdf https://sapienlabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Sapien-Lab...
• quacked 3y ago
  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.
• Eumenes 3y ago
  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.
• nashashmi 3y ago
  Every child needs guardrails before they are given extra, extra features. This article seems to stress that point. The title is just hype. Lots of people are commenting here without reading the article. Edit: the main line here is > We cannot be certain that the correlations shown in the data are evidence of causality
• pavlov 3y ago
  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.)
  • watwut 3y ago
    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.
  • urthor 3y ago
    Bring back the flip phone. Got a kid, give them Motorola. Job done.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    > 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.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      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.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  Be careful about applying the strongest skepticism to studies with conclusions you disagree with.
• canyonero 3y ago
  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.
  • civeng 3y ago
    Check out the thelightphone dot com, they have already done an incredible job doing that for you.
    • canyonero 3y ago
      Oh cool. This is definitely something I'd consider if it's still around by the time she reaches an appropriate age. Thanks for sharing!
• jacquesm 3y ago
  Someone tell the local high school here please, they definitely won't listen to me and require that every student have a smartphone.
  • 0xffff2 3y ago
    How? Do they issue the kids phones? Assuming not because that seems implausibly expensive, what happens if you just don't give your kid a phone?
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      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.
      • SoftTalker 3y ago
        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.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          That would be acceptable.
      • 0xffff2 3y ago
        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?"
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          Dutch high school.
  • 3y ago
• b800h 3y ago
  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.
• thenerdhead 3y ago
  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. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9NZ1T8C https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B9NZ1T8C (If anyone else is struggling and wants a free copy, send me an email and I'd gladly send you one) Also more thoughts on this: https://jondouglas.dev/entertained-from-disappointment/ https://jondouglas.dev/entertained-from-disappointment/
• civeng 3y ago
  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.
  • MichaelNolan 3y ago
    > Lightphone (absolutely love this product) 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.
    • civeng 3y ago
      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.
  • obtusifolia 3y ago
    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.
• mschuster91 3y ago
  How much of that is correlation vs causation? 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.
  • jstarfish 3y ago
    > 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.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      > 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. [1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...
• gerbilly 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion: Life was better before smartphones. I wish they'd never been invented.
  • imran-iq 3y ago
    How many police brutality cases would we have never known about if not for smartphones?
• uptownfunk 3y ago
  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.
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    "Don't be evil" was never the company ethos, only a smokescreen.
    • uptownfunk 3y ago
      Yes exactly, they all have their smokescreen. It is all run by executives who want their bonus at any cost.
• marcodiego 3y ago
  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.
  • Tade0 3y ago
    > 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.
• jefc1111 3y ago
  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).
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  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.
  • aio2 3y ago
    Chromebooks are designed to make tho schoolwork easier for the schools. Assignments and other things are online, and that's all they care about.
• xwdv 3y ago
  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.
• ok_dad 3y ago
  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.
  • hoosieree 3y ago
    Ted Chiang has an essay that also compares our current era to the gilded age: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel... It's ostensibly about AI but the deeper issue is concentration of wealth and power. Banning one harmful social media company (e.g. TikTok) does nothing to change the incentive structure. As long as harmful social media remains profitable, it will continue.
• maxdoop 3y ago
  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?
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    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.
    • hardware2win 3y ago
      I dont believe that it isnt tiny %
      • makeitdouble 3y ago
        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.
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  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.
  • ericmcer 3y ago
    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.
• abirch 3y ago
  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.
• grapesurgeon 3y ago
  [dead]
• philsnow 3y ago
  > 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.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  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.
• JustSomeNobody 3y ago
  It's not smartphones. It's Facebook, twitter, reddit, HN, etc. Yes, even HN. Smartphones simply mean that kids have near constant access to it all. And it's just as bad for adults.
• djcooley 3y ago
  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.
• influxmoment 3y ago
  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
• za3faran 3y ago
  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.
• bvsrinivasan 3y ago
  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. https://youtu.be/VN5lrKMeAOs https://youtu.be/VN5lrKMeAOs I showed this to my teenaged daughter and while she was irritated, she reluctantly agreed that it made sense.
  • civeng 3y ago
    Our family is a huge fan of Cal Newport with respect to these matters, he is an inspiration and part of the solution!
• Alifatisk 3y ago
  This doesn't feel like any news to me, I thought this was well known?
• dahwolf 3y ago
  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?
• mbrochh 3y ago
  I can only urge everyone to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma4VZ7rxGOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma4VZ7rxGOw It's not only kids. It's everyone.
• Perenti 3y ago
  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.
• ajma 3y ago
  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.