Age that kids acquire mobile phones not linked to well-being: study
med.stanford.edu
med.stanford.edu
I think the idea is that poor mental health outcomes would be a proxy for a large fraction of the wide range of issues phones could cause.
That’s a huge if and not substantiated by what they measured in this study. It’s like saying “so what if they were sexually assaulted, she’s fine now.
The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.
Was that ever researched? Or is it something that adults just find reasonable?
From my experience people are fairly good as adults, with dealing with memories of their own youth voluntary stupidity especially if it didn't result in damage to their bodies or didn't alter their life in significant manner.
This by no way excuses the behavior of a person that misled a kid into something like that, but I think one can abhor somebody doing something that has potential horrible consequences while at the same time observing that damage they managed to inflict in that case was actually minimal.
There probably isn’t a lot of research wrt OP’s example since it’s such a new(ish) phenomenon.
I was never groomed but I managed to screw up my perception of romantic relationships all by myself with little help of same aged friends as I grew up.
It’s good to survive and thrive. It’s another thing to say that traumatic events in childhood shouldn’t be avoided. And perpetrators of those crimes shouldn’t be punished.
Adults soliciting nudes from minors seems pretty bad to me. The fact that most victims don’t have dire outcomes doesn’t convince me that adults soliciting nudes from minors is ok.
My point was that if they have substantial trauma, that should show up in e.g. higher rates of depression
I can’t find a study of people with depression to see who was sexually groomed as an adolescent vs who wasn’t.
It would be a different story if she got blackmailed or something, but it seems like she was just exploring her sexuality. That's healthy, right?
What are teenagers supposed to do during a pandemic?
They are bored so go ahead and send pictures to a pedophile? What?
- With growing compromises, anything sent on the internet today is likely to be found and linked back someday.
- We have no idea what risks will happen in 20 years.
- Even today, it can lead to stalky / groomy / etc. things
Those sorts of rare events won't be captured well in metrics. Usually, it's not that 100% of people are harmed, but that 1% suffers extreme harm.
So as much as I agree with the logic, I disagree with the conclusion.
(you're the other way around: your conclusion is right, but your logic is missing, and replaced by outrage)
Would you prefer them to just not explore their sexuality?
Or explore it online with people they know, like their classmates?
Everyone matures at different rates, but I think it’s pretty universal that no 13 year old is mature enough to consent to nude photos sent to strangers who are likely adults. Not to mention it’s criminal.
What this means in the grand scheme of things though I'm not sure.
What is the alternative though? Trying to shelter kids from the internet with filters which are guaranteed to be either overbearing or easily bypassed? Deny them a phone which many of their peers will have (in all likelyhood the photos will just get taken on someone else's phone)? Try to treat them as intelligent young people and explain the realities.
The "best" solution in my mind, is probably filtering internet access until they hit puberty, then have the talk. What goes in the talk, idk (probably what catfishing is, promoting neck-down nudes only, sex-positivity, and maybe one or two other things).
The sex-positivity feels like the most important part though, and what I was getting at originally. So many parents (including my own) only focus on what not to do, that kids don't know what to do. So many keep doing the same things in secret and just feel guilty about it.
Is there a future where it's the norm to promote safe sex amongst teens? Or are we too much of prudes to ever touch the topic?
I know this is meant to be a bit of a swipe at the police, but I mean... what can they do? You'd have to subpoena at least 3 entities to find the creep, and then potentially have to extradite them. A guy I play video games with used to be part of the FBI's cybercrime division and he always laments how difficult it is to go after people (he works in cybersecurity now). I hope to have kids one day, and I can't imagine how difficult it is to be a parent in the age of texting, Instagram, and Tiktok.
They could at least subpoena the social media company transmitting the nudes. If it’s across state lines then get the FBI involved. Daily photos means hundreds of counts of felony child porn, soliciting minors, etc etc.
I expect them to pursue this case.
What are we paying those guys for, anyway? What are secret police even for, if not prosecuting people you can't legally gather evidence against?
Ask FSB and it's former head for that.
Sheltering doesn't work because it just postpones the naivete; it's called experience because you have to experience it. Plus it just makes your kids hate you, not trust your advice, and worse not come to you for help.
Your job as a parent isn't to devise some system to make it impossible for your kids to do stupid things, yes even serious ones like this, your job is to try as best you can to help them understand and choose to not do stupid things and, when they do and need an adult, help them deal with the consequences.
I mean if anything what I did at that age was worse, I knew the guys I was talking to were way older and still exchanged spicy photos. Yeah yeah something something daddy issues but it's true. At that age we crave male attention and validation, especially from older men, like a dried out sponge and when we don't get it or enough from dad we find it other places and I'm so sure that's what happened here. I didn't know there was anything wrong with the photos I was sending, I was just following the attention and praise and knew they liked them.
Free range parenting, by the way, don’t necessarily advocate letting a child wander off with zero awareness on the part of the parent. There are often environmental rail guards invisible to the child — neighbors that know the child and the parents, for example, or in the case of Japan, a culture and social order where this is pervasive.
My view is that parents curate environments, and change the possibility space in which catastrophic mistakes can be avoided. This isn’t a question of “sheltering” or “exposure”, but whether or not posting up naked under aged pictures of yourself on the internet is a catastrophic mistake.
Thirteen is about the age where you lose control of what they're doing all the time and there's no way to afford them the necessary independence to actually grow up that they can't do catastrophically stupid things with. Best you can do is prepare them, have a relationship with them so they tell you things and you can smell when the vibes are off, and hope they took some of the bigger lessons to heart.
I feel like you're not gonna believe me but it's the truth. I stopped being a menace when my parents loosened their grip. To this day I still have no idea why they completely changed their approach, probably just apathy, but without this looming oppressive authority to fight against there was just I don't know -- no point. All the twisted satisfaction I got from pissing them off or getting away with stuff just got sucked out of the air. I mean I still did things my parents didn't approve of like going to Forest without telling them, and getting my nose pierced but like I was more responsible about it when it wasn't an act of defiance.
There are a lot of factors at play in all of this. For one, in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have the internet as you know it. I also enjoyed a lot more freedom, as many folks who grew up in that time will remember.
These days, as parents, we can get arrested for neglect because we want the child to be able to walk home from school with their friends school. The laws were put on the books due to fear of child trafficking — little do they know what kids are doing on the internet.
My wife and I now have a under-2 child and another on the way. I can tell you that for me, allowing the child independence forms a crucial part of the parenting, but independence for its own sake is not the whole thing. The key missing piece is somehow teaching the child to _voluntarily_ contribute something greater than themselves. There is freedom, yes, but also responsibility. One chosen by the person.
Without that “contribute something greater than yourself”, independence for its own sake is meaningless. So is forcing the person to take on a responsibility.
I’m not aiming for control of the internet for my child. I’m aiming for raising someone who can discover their own inner purpose and then can grow into someone capable of contributing that. The next generation will have to take care of the world long after my cold body is food for the worms.
I don't think that's what you actually mean to say, so when we're talking about larger the group, this specific situation won't lead you to the same conclusion.
> Sleep quality and depression are no where near my concerns.
There aren't many ways to study things at scale. This is 250 participants tracked over 5 years. That alone is hard enough.
In the end, I think that you're agreeing with the study - parents involvement and parenting matter.
Why are they not though? After all harm is not in what was done to you but how it impacted you. And bad quality of sleep and depression are signs that you've been wrecked.
I would seriously contest the pattern they found here. It does not match other statistics of mental health and increasing screentime.
This was my immediate thought. Self-selection (and other forms of non-random selection) is the bane of psychology studies. One cannot draw as broad a conclusion from this study as the title would imply. It has the important qualification that these were children that the parents deemed ready.
It is still a nice study to see, and may be rightfully reassuring to parents.
It may not be an ideal study (a few hundred kids, 5 years, whatever else people are identifying) but it’s far better than random anecdotes from people who have their own biases as to what age is good/bad.
I'm not religious, but I often feel like this is a huge hole in the modern landscape, there's no sense of whether anything can be good or bad outside of "outcomes". It's like, if it doesn't cause some sort of obvious malady, that's just fine then.
Quality surely exists as a concept regardless of how much philosophical warbling we could do on the subject.
Imagine the theoretical study that shows that "having/not having children by age 40 is not linked to female well-being". For the sake of argument let's say this is factual, that happiness, rates of mental illness, physical illness etc are the same in both childless and mothering groups.
So should someone who wants to have children ignore their desires because "science" told them that they'll be fine either way? Should someone who doesn't want to have children ignore their desires?
I'm ranting now, but I guess my point is that this isn't really actionable in any way.
I mean it makes sense. I used to run around outside and play sports through my vacations. Current generation for the majority are looking at screens and are indoors.
Isn't that an disadvantage for the kid and hence linked to their well being?
I am not sure if everyone will do the same. The whole reason behind dark themes and working at night and why they are also popular paints a good picture or hind on how serious people are about lighting. :/
I've seen a number of Hispanic people get irritated that people are trying to take away from their culture and language, and others that say they don't care.
And this is not meant to be a political rant - no one could ever call me right wing - but a major reason that Democrats are starting to lose the Hispanic vote is because they are seen as to pandering with crap like this. For context, I’m a minority.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin...
I like to think I'm doing my small part by not going back and renaming branches in all my old repos despite github prodding me to.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
But then what we did is see phones as a means of 2 way connectivity between us and our kids - not something to just pacify them.
Its as stupid as the famously flawed "Danish Cohort" cellphone/cancer study that used subscription duration as a surrogate for actual phone use. And at a time when phones and talk-time was very expensive.
I feel that reading a book and enjoying reading books is very important. And I also understand that, for a child, once they get that dopamine from mobile phones, almost any non-comic book will be boring.
I feel there's only a realistic progression path, first books, then phones. It just doesn't work the other way around.
Presumably we shouldn't draw too many conclusions until a broader study is done. Latino probably doesn't matter but low income and limited geography do.
reminds me of the scene in the most recent yellowstone episode, the scientist stridently insisting destroying 7000 acres of sage brush couldn't possibly hurt sage grouse.
But there's really no reason, in absence of research, to expect that phones will be exceptionally damaging to kids that survived just fine such technological banes as books, radio and tv. Last two not only captivating their attention for hours but borderline immobilizing them in one physical spot.
That took less time and effort than it took to type "that's an important question".
>This research was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number U01HL103629, and the Stanford Data Science Scholarship, Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute and the Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University. The content expressed in this paper is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Government. We thank the Stanford GOALS research staff, including health educators, coaches, data collectors, community advisors, community partner organizations; and the children and families who participated in the Stanford GOALS trial. The data and code necessary to reproduce the analyses presented here are publicly accessible, as are the materials necessary to attempt to replicate the findings. Data, code, and materials are available from the first author upon reasonable request. Analyses were pre-registered and are available at the following URL: https://osf.io/hukfd.
It also tests for the wrong "symptoms" like depression, since the actual major factor here is the how their brain developed in terms of moral, sociality, POV's and a lot more.
They're checking grades but grades don't say anything about how they studied for the test. Did they have to sacrifice because of bad behavior to the test (not studying in time, losing friends activities, etc)? Did they cheat? Or were they lucky? Grades don't say any meaningful thing about the brain, it's a wrong "symptom" to check for grades.
Edit: typo
The investigators, hooked to polygraphs, will swear with complete sincerity that they designed this rigorously for all the right reasons. The selection occurred with the admissions and faculty interview processes. It’s like a political party choosing candidates.