Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health | Hacker News Reader

Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health

ft.com

214 pointsmzs189 comments

I'll say it again, and I'll take the downvotes: in the future we will look back on allowing children access to social media and smart phones the way that today we look back at smoking ads targeted at children.

Maybe even more incredulously.

And the adults' access to the phone. It's made it incredibly easy and low-effort to snitch out any kids actually independently outside no matter where they are. People would shit bricks to see the freedom I had as a kid, to roam the countryside alone with a rifle shooting rabbits. Or going miles out from age 7 up snake infested creeks. The average fat American is way too lazy to walk all the way home to snitch a kid out, but with a cell phone they can call the cops immediately.

It's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.

How about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?

We decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.

What if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone?

What of people have, like, free time?

For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.

Internet of today has nothing to do with 1990/2000 internet in term of content and especially in term of things competing for your attention, and spread of misinformation

The problem isn't necessarily the device, but the content

Kids spend up to 10 hours per day on screen, most of it on smartphones [0], and they're not reading encyclopedias

Average tiktok user screen time is over 25 hours per months: https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-...

[0] https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/upl...

I understand all that but you really want to keep that baby while throwing the water off.

For starters, the 1.5 hours ot TV may go.

I'd much rather put my 8 years old in front of some cartoon than god knows where on the internet. Content wise it's much less risky

smartphone != internet

Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.

... and not the good parts of it.

My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.

Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.

> My kingdom for the ability

Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...

Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it.

My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse.

I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.

Yep, noticed the same pattern. Starts with some really interesting and educational videos and then eventually degenerates to gunfights, loud yelling and needless violence videos for kids.

To clarify: If all smartphones were basically just an encyclopedia, instant messenging and music device I think they would be much better for people. Currently, most time on a smartphone is spent engaging with the attention economy, which I think is where most of the real poison lies.

I think even if you got rid of the attention economy though, smartphones would still have negative consequences. A smartphone will help you kill some time, even if you're just browsing wikipedia. I think sometimes it's good to be bored, it can spur you into doing something new. Now we don't get bored, we get placated.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I'm pretty down on social media. But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

Part of raising a child in the modern era needs to be teaching how to manage and handle the use of these things. Hell, online games are a great example of a social platform where kids are often in the majority.

> But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

That might be true now, but it could always change. Don't forget that we all used to think smoking was perfectly healthy.

I'm hoping that movies/shows in the future show how we currently use social media and it shocks people the same way media made now does with cigarettes because we realized how unhealthy it is.

I would argue the effect of smoking was also a lot longer to see the effect. I've been to countries where kids smoke (middle east) and there's no apparent effect on the smoking kids. You'd probably have to wait until their 30s to really see the damage.

Watching a kid watch TV there is almost an immediate feeling of unhealthiness that isn't as apparent from watching a kid smoke. The smoking kid will keep on playing soccer, the kid on the TV is sucked into the sedentary low-thought activity like they're in a trance.

No, it will not change.

Humans are social animals. We depend heavily on each other. Perhaps, we will rebrand social media... but the underlying fundamental issues will persist. Even if the next wave of tech is called Group Links, people will still need to learn how to navigate the noise.

I suppose I could be wrong. If we abandon the internet, disband the newspapers and the post, and generally give up on democracy entirely. But I don't like the sounds of that either.

Smoking is simply a bad comparison, though it's true, both are currently harmful. One however needs to be addressed in a way that promotes healthy use, the other pretty much falls under the umbrella of adults can choose to make their own choices.

Now before I go off down the "but think of the children" path too much further... I'll reiterate; this all falls primarily on better education, not stricter laws and enforcement. Censorship is a double edge sword and implementing it above the scale of the household is very dubious. There's a reason minors are admitted to rated R movies with their parents, for example. Even drinking ages are sometimes flexible.

Anyways, I feel like I could rant about this topic forever right now, but I'm just stop here.

I'm not sure that a majority of adults are actually capable of using social media responsibly. How do we teach kids to use social media when it seems like our entire society is incapable of handling it?

Its not that society is incapable. Its more that Social Media went viral before we even had a chance to digest "this is social media", this is how you operate it.

The lava from the explosion is now cooling, the dust is settling; and we are now starting to see is the newly formed dystopian world that has been created from.

As unlike cigs, that have been around longer than the internet. We've known for a long time they're bad.

We can learn from history. The invention of the printing press comes to mind.

But yea, it's hard to pass good practice on to future generations when the current ones don't have a clue what they are doing.

If you put me in front of someone on an operating table and ask me to operate on them I would be incapable of doing it.

That's not to say I don't have the capacity for it. I just got put in front of a patient before I had the chance to digest any medical studies.

at what age do you think most children would be capable of being taught how to manage/handle these things?

> But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media".

Oh, I think one can so argue. Social media as in "public or broadcast-to-all-'friends' style posting, that pushes content at you in a way designed to maximize engagement above all other concerns", yeah, that stuff's digital asbestos. I'm not gonna take my kids gambling, either, and certainly not going to let them do it on a regular basis. Social media's just as low-value and dangerous.

Texting and equivalents, sure, not so much.

We might even look at all social media by all participants the same way we now look at smoking. It is isn't healthy for the adults either.

The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad (excluding a brief period of being more alert) - social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun and exciting to catch up with people I'd moved away from. And then it became a vile sludge of toxic positivity mixed with outrage.

Smoking reduces your chances of getting Parkinson’s disease so it is probably less than 100% bad.

Yeah the problem with smoking is mostly self control. It's clearly not a good habit but you can probably smoke a cigar a month for social or even personal enjoyment reasons and get more good than bad out of it.

Oof, that is not true and frankly terrible advice. Most people who quit smoking try the 'just sometimes' approach and it leads back to the original smoking habit.

Framing it as self control problems is also a non starter. That shit is skillfully made addictive - if your outcomes are a high chance of chronic use and related illness or a low chance of occasional use and questionable benefits then the overall expected value is still deeply negative.

>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Bad FOR you, yes; bad as an experience, no. It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

>social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun

Again, this speaks more to the experience than the health effects. Note that you said ‘it was fun’ in the same way that I can say the cigs I’ve smoked were fun.

I don’t think the comparisons are too wrong to be honest. They are both activities that can facilitate ‘fun’ social interactions but with a deleterious effect on one’s health (cardiovascular and mental)

> It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

Or it tastes like shit and facilitates people running away from the stink of your poison. Maybe they'll socialize over it.

I think it depends on the people and on the cigarettes. I actually like the taste of one specific cigarette brand. I very rarely smoke, less than a packet a year, if that (0 during 2020 - 2022). I do hate the smell, though.

That's subjective. I quit smoking 30 years ago and, unless someone smokes directly into my face, I still like the smell of tobacco.

I think the issue with the comparison is that cigarettes are much worse.

Like the original comment, I won’t be surprised if social media becomes stigmatized as people continue to realize more negative effects, but I doubt any of the effects are going to be as serious as cigarettes.

It’s hard to compare the data, but I’m pretty sure smoking is much worse for you. A bad smoking habit is likely to kill you. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely to be the reason you die than anything else. Social media just makes you miserable.

I think it’s too early in social media’s life to distinctly say it’s worse than smoking. Not enough time has passed to allow for a long-term longitudinal study on the long-term effects on social media use.

While tobacco might be a first-order cause of its ills (cancer, etc), the second order effects of social media might have cascading effects that is too early to tell on a long time frame.

I’d be intrigued to read any decade long studies looking at the well-being of users of MySpace and the early adopters of Facebook.

There are analogues to social media use in every generation. They are problems we’re already familiar with, they’ve just been amplified.

I highly doubt we’ll ever see anything even remotely akin to the risks of tobacco. Tobacco is a medical nightmare. The problems that would likely be caused by social media can be treated and reversed. It’s night and day between the two.

As the commenter stated, it’s an unpopular opinion that social media is as bad as cigarettes.

Tldr: -Problem were here before, but not on such a massive scale -No safe place -Parents have way less influence on their children -Younger people are influenced way more by external factors, than more mature people

How can you be so sure, that we will never see anything as bad / risky as tabacco? Sure, we do know a lot about the physical consequences to our body, but there is so much more to it than just that. Getting cancer, any other illness or damage to our body sucks, however these are consequences we do know exist. Do you consider, that you probably will hang out with different kind of people and as a consequent develop differently? Do you consider the addiction, not beeing able to concentrate for a long time without a breake, because you are longing for the next cigarette? Do u consider ...

This list could go on and on and each of these aspects gets worse the younger you are. Of course I can't tell if these example truely have a big negativ effect on you, but I am sure, that these and other factors shape you as a person.

Now we look at social media, which tend to have not that many physical consequences for your body. However there are so many more psychological factors shaping your brain, behavior and habits. Addiction, false role model, always having social pressure just to name a few. You are rigth, these factors did exist before, but in a much smaller scale. Furthermore a parent can only raise and help his children grow and develop as much, as they are spending time together. Nowadays kids spend a lot of time on the internet / social media, which it used to spend with other children playing and while playing with other kids, learning how to behave in a society. Of course we didn't always do as our parent told us, but we never even come close to the f*cked up stuff we see on the internet daily. We never had a million eyes watching every step and be judged by them. Home was a safe place.

I spent quit a lot of time on this comment, way too much to be honest, but what I am trying to say is:

-These 'normal' factors are on a massive scale and the impact they have, direct or indirect, shouldn't be taken lightly -There is no safe place anymore. If you are not on social media, you are 'different' / 'weird' -Parents have way less influence on the development of their children

There’s no likely avenue through which social media leads to death. It’s that simple. Tobacco products kill a lot of people.

The problems you list are significant and bad, but many of them will improve as society as a whole learns to parent in an age of social media. Not just this, but as people grow to see how negatively social media affects you, the public attitudes toward it will change and adapt. At no point in this process is social media going to be killing people.

I’m not saying that social media doesn’t cause the very negative things you outline. I’m just pointing out that it’s not as bad as smoking.

That being said, I’m all for legislation that stops young people from using social media. I think it would be totally reasonable to make it illegal under a certain age.

Social media and cyberbullying leads to suicide and has and does kill people. This is particularly bad when those alt-f4’ing their life are adolescents and not post-midlife when smoking will kill.

It seems like it’s too early to tell how severe the second and third order effects of social media are on one’s own well-being and the well-being of society.

My language allowed for the acknowledgement of few and far between cases of suicide. It’s not a fair comparison to smoking deaths. Social media suicides get a lot of attention because, like you said, adolescent suicide is particularly sad. The numbers, however, are completely different orders of magnitudes; deaths by social media are insignificant when compared to smoking.

Smoking also has a strong social component. Smokers socialize around the ashcan. It's fun and exciting to catch up with the other smokers in your building or at your work.

It does become a vile sludge, you're not wrong about that.

That aspect at least is easy to solve by drawing a stronger line between public content and stuff seen by people you actually know. This would be more of a social change than technical of course.

The harder part is figuring out how to handle public content, because there are still innocuous or positive uses for it as well.

I wonder if there's a way to model this as a simple Lottery trade off. Imagine a lot of game that has 100 times better odds of winning a Powerball sized multi-million jackpot, but every hundredth winner of this jackpot, (distributed randomly with a probability of 1/100) is arrested and publicly fed to lions. Would ticket sales increase or decrease versus the current scenario?

> social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away.

Sure, but there are numerous other ways of doing that without bringing in the problems of social media.

>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Smoking has far more benefits than social media, especially social benefits.

If you have a pack of 20 cigarettes at a bar, you have 20 new friends you haven't even met yet. Smokers stick together. Sharing a cigarette is a bonding moment for a lot of people.

I could go on. Fuck social media. I don't want to see underage girls whoring themselves out. I don't want to see man children acting cringe for likes. If I WANT to keep up with my family, I'll call them on the phone.

Social media is one part.

Manufacturing behaviour through creating habit loops from notifications and scrolling for dopamine hits is an issue beyond social media.

People are working for companies for free to be their valued and attentive audience to resell to the highest bidder.

With small kids of my own I am finding it important to talk to them about things they don't understand, such as being careful of screens and smartphones. They have their own fear of google home as boogie man, which was unintended since we tried it out as a simple way to play whitenoise.

As much as I will worry and take the precautions I can, I also see how kids being born today are so much smarter. Just ahve to make sure to unlock their enjoyment of the real world first, whether its sensory play, the outdoors, etc.

So far, the smile from a screened expreience doesn't compare to being outside.

> Manufacturing behaviour through creating habit loops from notifications and scrolling for dopamine hits is an issue beyond social media.

I agree, but they are mostly intrinsically linked.

> So far, the smile from a screened expreience doesn't compare to being outside.

Yes, this is wisdom. It also reflects that beyond the manipulative algorithms, there still remains unfavorable outcomes of living life online.

The kids beig born today arent any smarter IMO, just more tuned to operate the technology by virtue of being native, just because someone can speak english, french, chinese, german, etc... does not grant the ability to utilize those skills to say something meaningful or having literacy in media using that language.

Agreed 100%. I've said this for a while as well. I can see lawsuits too because Social media companies are doing the same as tobacco, making changes to make the product more addictive and they also have the information to show that it is bad for health. I don't know to what level they are suppressing that information, but it seems likely.

We got a glimpse of that in the documentary Social Dilemma.

I expect it is going to get substantially worse. With the power of AI, data mining behavior for attention is going to surpass anything we have likely seen before.

It is worth pointing out that pre-2010, the internet and social media was a nice place to be. Even if myspace was kind of ugly, social media did not drive negative mental health outcomes until upvotes/downvotes and dark pattern engagements were applied to everyone.

I think we had different places. I remember the first teenager who was driven to suicide from social media way before 2010. Just googling showed me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier who died in 2006 from cyberbullying.

That's also around the time when smartphones started to see huge adoption. It became something you'd never be able to get away from.

Disagree with this. Even myspace sowed a bit of discontent with it's "top friends" feature, with some people getting into arguments about being left out of the "top 8" or where they had been placed in the ordering.

When Facebook came around people had already cottoned on to trying to shape their presence a bit better but then shit really hit the fan when Instagram came around and everyone started curating a completely fake presentation of what their life was like.

Before Instagram there were no influencers. There were influential bloggers like Tim Ferris but 'influencer' and 'content creators' weren't job titles. To this day, I'm wary of anyone who isn't a photographer that says that Instagram is/was their favourite social media platform.

they say on social media, lol. also, adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.

> they say on social media, lol

hn hasn't much in common with tiktok &co

> adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.

Children are more malleable in every aspect, there is a reason why we call the "formative years" formative

Have you never seen an adult addict? Because social media is addiction, nothing else.

Well yes, I tried weed in my 20s and I'm glad I didn't do that at 13

You're making my point

Not really. Weed isn't very addictive, and for every 20 year old that tries and quits weed, there are dozens that try alcohol, smoking, or coke and have a hard time quitting. Now, those can be expensive addictions, whereas a social media addiction is free, so it won't force you to rehab.

Unencumbered consuming is a big problem.

Children seem to do better when creating instead of consuming on screens. Except they almost always like creating more in real life (painting, piano) vs the app.

My take is that playing minecraft or such is fine. Instagram is not. Playing with blocks in real life is probably better (but I appreciate you can't build moats in real life so easily).

Creating = building with blocks, interacting, using imagination, creating.

Consuming = passive watching and input only. Watching someone play video games is consuming.

More like alcohol, it's not for children and for adults it's nice if consumed sporadically and in small quantities.

"Smoking kills" is a proven scientific fact, known for a very long time (since the 1940s https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/i....)

Smartphone doesn't kill (and no one is arguing about this) and actually it's arguable whether it has really more cons than pros...

I can well understand that smartphones may cause some issues to children (and others), but that's never going to be seen as dangerous as smoking is

The parents of children who have died of suicide due to cyber bullying would disagree. As would the parents of children suffering from eating disorders, self-harm, and numerous other mental conditions induced, at least in part, by social media.

The link between physical health and phone use is less direct than to cigarette smoking, but is still present.

I'm one of these (step) parents. I've long held that social media is a cancer and tried to model and promote responsible usage.

I've failed totally, and two of my children have had horrible mental health,with suicide attempts and ongoing issues to this day. Another had long struggles with drugs and has a pretty fragile mental situation even though he is mostly out the other side of that now, and on a better path.

I'm sure the anecdotal defense will be used, but I'm convinced that being exposed to all of the ills of the world via social media has been in part to blame for this, and this despite what I hoped were worthwhile attempts to demonstrate restraint in use of phones and social media, and educate my kids.

Them smoking (without social media existing) would have been better, imo.

What about all the kids that get shot trying to steal food from a drive thru because it's a TikTok Prank?

Smartphone usage increases facebook usage. There is a causal relationship between social media usage[0] and loneliness and depression, which kills.

In other words, social media kills in the same way cigarettes kills.

Smartphones without social media do not kill.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328838624_No_More_F...

Your basic Jurassic Park story where corporate robots will keep acting like they are in control of what they have built, till the very end.

Or we might look back fondly at a time where we only had to deal with addictive social media sites and your kids' friend groups weren't 50% AI bots yet.

Especially teens. The most vulnerable target age group for anything that gets projected to them as being "cool". Unfortunately the responsibility to steer them in the right direction only lies in the hands of their parents.

Apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do an incredible job of wooing kids into a void of delusion that would slowly deflect them away from things that matter (education, relationships, socializing etc.) to things that push them into continuous, useless loop of validation and security (think about all the underage suggestive content on those platforms, simply disgusting)

I don't know... Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

We do not vilify smoking because we realized it kills but because smoking has been regulated out of society (because of its cost) and part of this regulation was to change the public perception of it. I don't see in the west a similar regulation targeting social media any more than I've seen one targeting stupid TV programs that were probably also damaging children mental health. Unfortunately.

In some spaces - yes. We are looking back in a similar manner.

Limited TV screen time is strongly encouraged in basically all the literature for new parents (under 2 hours).

Gaming is seeing a strong push against some of the most egregious abuses targeted at children (micro-transactions and loot box gambling).

>Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

TV and games "back in my days" had no personalized tracking and targeting. They could only try to target the wider audience, not you specifically by mining all your private info and use dark patterns to manipulate you. Modern social media apps know everything about you and will not hesitate to weaponize it against you for ads if it makes them money.

Also, "back then", parents could look at the TV shows or your video games and see the kind of stuff you were exposed to and limit it or complain to the authorities to ban it. Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone.

Big, big, difference between then and now.

> Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone.

I’m not sure about teens. But I’m present when my kid plays games and he despises ads and micro transactions as much as I do. He’s also not allowed to buy anything so he’s more selective about what games to play (a few ones that we have subscriptions for)

Sure but for everyone like you there's 100 parents who leave their kids unsupervised with tablets and phones.

> Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet?

I know a lot of people who do.

Possibly, but I do not believe that it only impact children. Is there a benefit aspect of smoking ads targeted at adults?

100% agree. Have an upvote.

It's not even only children, it's literally everyone. Who thought it would be a good idea to put a screen in everyone's hand with infinite content that's engineered to be highly addictive. It's a fucking no-brainer.

Whoa! I've been saying the same thing for the past couple years. Glad I'm not alone.

Cigarettes are so very bad for you that I don’t think this will ever be the case. I remember working on the administration side of cancer treatments, and half of all of the insurance codes were variants of lung cancer from smoking. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely than anything else to kill you.

Your point is valid that today’s smart-phone-social-media is as young as cigarettes were in the 1920’s, but the general problems have been around forever. Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. They’ve just been magnified. Smoking introduced a new problem.

It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large.

Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM.

Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models.

> Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example.

In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...

Teen nicotine use is still common, but tobacco is on its way out thankfully. While vape has its own problems, and may have others that emerge over time, they’re nothing compared to tobacco. And this is the point I was trying to make. Tobacco is a lot worse than social media.

We won't, because we will be the children who grew up on social media, and our thoughts will be controlled by the people in charge of the straw from which we sucked. "Meta? How could Meta be bad? Meta is our friend!"

Some anecdata: My wife, a 25+-year middle school teacher, agrees. And so does just about every other teacher we know.

In the past 10-15 years, teachers have seen a startling shift in children's health overall, but especially mental health. Attention span is out the window. Prying away devices is like pulling a toy from a toddler, often with the accompanying screams and wails (and occasionally violence). Kids have always mocked and gossiped and bullied, but devices and media have turned it beyond 11. Some kids (says my wife and others) seem in a constant state of fight-or-flight, unable to deal with the stress.

Also: it's not just phones; at my wife's school, Chromebooks are prevalent and kids carry them everywhere, often open in the hallways as they walk, using them like phones. Side note: maintaining boundaries with Chromebooks is an even worse nightmare at some schools than smartphones. Google's hard push into K-12 education has been wildly successful; 'Google Classroom' and other tools are adopted by districts and create a hellscape of maintenance, security, and privacy concerns. For both staff and students.

OTOH, how do you defend yourself/your child from smartphone frenzy, when every other kid at school has one? Are you forcing your kid into (virtual) isolation from other friends or give it up?

Just say no. If you want a reason, phones and data plans are expensive. They can see their friends in person.

You've never had children, have you?)

If the kid is old enough to need a phone, they're old enough to be a caddy or babysitter or something legal for kids to do and buy it themselves. You don't have to facilitate the purchase.

You do realize that nearly every single person at a middle school has a phone? They are about 10 when they start where I live.

I think there's a strong class component to it, too.

I've got kids in public schools and one in a slightly-fancy private school.

The public school kids all get phones super-early and are prone to mocking kids for "being poor" over stupid shit like not having a phone (one of mine was so-mocked for "only having one backpack"—JFC, was Fussell ever right to shit on the class-anxious, pitiful, absurd Middle, give me "High Prole" over that crap any day).

Meanwhile, the private school kids whose parents are doctors and attorneys and VPs and related to major local politicians, get phones later and don't regard them as a status symbol. Phone ownership rate is maybe 50% by 7th grade, while I'd say it's that high (maybe higher?) by 4th or 5th in the public schools, and more like 95% by 7th. The private school also has much stricter rules about phone use during school (I gather all the area public schools have totally given up on stopping all but the most egregious use of them in class, as the parents who gave the kids the phones won't back them on enforcing anti-phone rules, and will in fact throw tantrums over any such enforcement)

At the current prices (and climbing up), good luck with it.

Actually I have 3 children from elementary to high school age. Only my eldest has a phone. We got it for her for our convenience as she is often participating in activities with unknown end times.

Well, huge respect for raising reasonable and well behaved kids. What makes it hard, imo, is that kids chase status and conformity (social school dynamics, probably). What could be worse than seeing everybody in class with a shiny new smartphone and not having one? Also, them being precisely engineered addiction machines doesn't really help. Which makes me curious, how did you manage to pull it off?

My daughter started asking for a phone at 9. After just saying no a few time she stopped asking. Before we got her a phone she realize why we had been saying no. Her friends that had phones younger were already addicted to them to the degree that the phone was more important than friends that were physically present. It is my job to protect my children from danger. I see device addiction to be as dangerous as drugs. Peer pressure is tough to deal with but that affects all aspect of growing up. Not just keeping up with the Jones. It takes help to navigate that feeling of missing out.

Why it is not expensive for their peers though? Are they piss poor?

What if they have no friends and nobody want to be friends anywhere but Snapchat, etc?

I can see you are using 4 yo arguments for 13 yo teenagers, perhaps you do not have any children and are wasting our time.

This is epitome between theory and practice.

My oldest just went to middle school this year. He has always had his own computer at home since young, so he's not new to technology. Personally I have not wanted to get him a phone mostly because mobile gaming is basically the worst thing ever invented. But I digress.

Do you know what happens in middle school? The teacher will give you time to do some assignment, and then you know what they let you do when you are done? Play on your phone. You know what nearly all kids are doing at lunch? Playing on their phones and chatting with their friends about it.

Now what happens if you don't have a phone? You get to sit there like the idiot without a phone. In middle school. Where kids are already learning just how much of little jerks they can be.

It would be glorious if the school had a no-phone policy. But they don't. So you want me to say "no" to my son so he can be the one that gets to twiddle his thumbs while every other single person around is playing on their phone and chatting? Yeah, makes sense.

Not to mention- the main reason we also had to get him a phone was for communication. That was our idea before we even realized how much they let kids use the phone at school.

Also without even the above, your idea of "they can see their friends in person!" is really cute. Yeah, because it's that easy. We live in an area that you can't walk to anyones house. So your brilliant idea is they can't communicate with friends unless they are taken to see their friend? And who does that? What if neither family can make it work?

I guess you don't know until you know.. but you- don't know.

This is exactly what I think about the story. Smartphones are now part of our lives, the only solution would be a global school banning of phones, but it isn't practical.

If you want to give your kid as a present a bad life experience, don't buy a phone, but then live like a person in a cave, while the world goes on.

The real lesson is to be a good parent and define clear screening times, at least at home, where you can, more or less, control it. But a total ban isn't possible IMHO

My teenager bought their phone using gift cards accumulated through Christmas and birthdays. A phone plan through Ting costs them about $20/month.

By the way, do you know what they do with their friends in person? Sit around on their phones watching tiktoks and browsing instagram then making comments to each other about it. They have no idea how to socialize without their phones.

I mean look at the example they have to follow though, it's literally all around them. Adults do the same thing constantly. The social pressure to conform to it is ridiculously high and for an easily influenced teenager, astronomical. A child or teen that's outside of this norm is instantly visible and vulnerable; they are bullied relentlessly.

As someone just out of adolescence and born in the tail-end of the millennial generation it's hard to know how to interpret takes like this.

On one hand, I do think social media is deleterious to mental health - I can vouch, for the positive impact on my own the more I distance myself from it!

On the other hand,

>Sit around on their phones watching tiktoks and browsing instagram then making comments to each other about it. They have no idea how to socialize without their phones.

Sounds so similar to the complaints levered at my friends and I for "not knowing how to play outside" because we wanted to shoot bad guys on the PS2 in the basement on the weekend. Or "not knowing how to socialize normally" because we talked over AIM all the time. When my oldest brother was a little kid, similar complaints for sitting in front of the TV. Or the older TV show trope of the teens tying up the home phone line.

I think there is some unique evil to the algorithm/recommendation driven social media of today, but it's hard not to also see that these criticisms all fit a pattern that seems to have been ongoing for decades, and wonder where on the spectrum the truth lies.

I'm of the "Oregon Trail Generation" and I can relate to the things you said about video games and instant messaging because we had them as kids and into our teens also. I was still able to disconnect from those things and socialize without the devices aka "go outside". In fact my friends and I would get bored after a couple hours of console gaming or instant messaging, so we'd need to disconnect just to keep sane. That aspect of it has changed these days to where if you remove the devices, it's like removing a vital organ and they can no longer function as human beings.

Screen time and don't (let them) create accounts on services with age limits.

You need to get them used to the concept of screen time and the rules by which you get more of it as early as possible in life so it becomes ingrained.

When they're old enough to buy their own phone and pay for their own phone bill, they can have free use of their device.

As someone who was bullied as a child, I'm very thankful that that the bullying was mostly limited to the hours when I was physically at school. I would go home and I had a whole other world I built for myself out of books and my own imagination, and I think that made my bad experience at school tolerable.

I can't imagine if I'd felt like the bullying could always reach me through my smartphone or computer.

I feel very lucky to have grown up on the cusp of all of this. I was born in the early 80s and my dad worked in technology, so I had a computer and a modem back in the BBS days, and got to discover being "online" when most kids weren't. It actually felt like a refuge, and something special. I wonder what feels like that to the weird, outcast kids today.

One a side note, school does not help ones attention (boringness)

I've found the opposite. I can be 100% tuned-in and focused in the classroom because I don't use my phone because it's disrespectful to the speaker.

> Attention span is out the window. Prying away devices is like pulling a toy from a toddler, often with the accompanying screams and wails

Its not just the children though - adults are the same.

This isn't just about the devices. It couldn't possibly be so simple of a problem.

Everyone is approaching this situation as if the status quo of education before computers was perfect. Bullshit! How naive are we?

These children are upset because you are taking something from them that they don't even have the words to ask for: liberation.

Without liberation, school was 8 hours a day of boredom. It was sitting at a cold hard desk waiting for the end. It was prison, and it still is.

Children misbehaving in these circumstances is not new! We talked to each other, passed notes, chiseled the "cool s" into our desks, and brought toys. Did you forget doing these things yourself? Have you really forgotten what it is like to be a child in school?

These behaviors were easy for teachers to manage. Toys can be taken away, and vandalism directly criticized. Loud conversations were competing with lectures, and lectures can win. The rules made sense.

Computers are not so easy. Toys? They are only software. Vandalism? It's a drawing app! Conversations? Silent. What moral ground do you have to stop these behaviors? Kids aren't doing "something wrong" anymore: they are doing "something else". Teachers are fighting them from a totally different position now: vain authoritarianism.

That's the difference: children feel the liberation from prison, and it is arbitrarily taken out of their hands. What value are you giving them in its stead?

It's time to confront the failure of traditional education. No child wants it, and every child has readily available alternatives now; made of flashing lights and tactile switches!

Education is failing to compete with children's attention. Why? Because it could only ever just barely compete against boredom itself. That's gone now. We have been liberated from it. The bar has been raised as it should have been at the very beginning. Wake up and get with the times.

“only software”

facile and reductive.

Are you going to take it away and put it in a drawer? Not without the rest of the computer.

You are the one being reductive. You have lost the context, and that context is the entire point.

There has been a change in social behaviour which I think is obviously linked to electronic media, and probably also the mental health issues. The % of American students who say they meet up physically with friends "almost every day": https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/0265407519836170/as...

It declines slightly through the 70s, 80s, 90s from ~55% to 50% (almost statistically insignificant) and then, starting in the mid-late '00s starts dropping steadily, now down to less than 25%. Half as many teenagers socialize in person with their friends almost every day, as they did in my generation. (And going by the data on "how many parties" attended, my generation in the 90s/00s was still relatively introverted compared to my parents' generation, even though we saw our friends every day.)

source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02654075198361... ( https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0265407519836170 )

Thank you for this. That it corresponds almost exactly to the introduction date of the smartphone, then 4G, and then IG is telling. Maybe it's just correlation, but the feedback loop doesn't look like it.

I think with just the numbers presented it's hard to say if this is actually problematic. It's certainly a shift, but my teen half-sibling is hardly less social than I was at his age. He spends all of his time in discord with 'the boys', socializing on insta, or sending TikToks to girls he wants to flirt with from school. If anything I'd argue that style of teen life is hyper social compared to my time. And it's not like he can't meet physically with his friends or girls either, there's just not usually a reason to since with friends they have the most fun playing videogames and with girls there isn't much of a point unless it can be done outside parental supervision which happens but takes planning.

Assuming, for the moment, that smart phones and social media are bad for these kids, what do we do? We can't raise our kids without exposure to digital technology, but I'm not sure how to keep it at arms length.

I have an almost 5yo who obviously (I hope this is obvious and commonplace) doesn't have their own phone or tablet and has never used social media. But in a few years, they'll have peers that do use these things. Do I not buy them a phone? Do I just get them a cellular-connected watch so that they can call me if needed? Right now, my plan is to build them some kind of simple computer (e.g., Raspberry Pi 400) in a few years (i.e., once they can read and write) that probably doesn't have Internet access (at least at first), but allows use of Scratch Desktop and/or BASIC to learn programming, as well as "harmless" games (e.g., chess, etc.). I might also introduce off-line game systems like SNES and Genesis Classic.

What are people with literate young kids doing to introduce their kids to digital technology in a sane, non/less-addictive way?

I don't know how we will manage it, but it is about to get exponentially worse. With the introduction of AI, kids are going to bond to a fake reality. The manipulative effect is going to be orders of magnitude greater than social media.

I have a very similar plan involving a Raspberry Pi, I agree that it's a great middle ground.

IMO screentime that only involves video calls with family is perfectly fine, especially if it is a group activity. In general (timeboxed) social activities that involve multiple people watching/interacting with a single screen don't seem as potentially consuming (e.g. a Super Bowl party). That's our arms-length strategy at this point. Seems to have worked quite well so far w.r.t. not getting obsessed with electronics. We'll see what happens when peers start getting phones/tablets though...

FWIW we got my 8 year old a smart watch, and it's been great. We can text her and she can text us (and her older cousin) and we can call her and track her. She can't use social media or anything else, and I put one game on there for her (pong).

Both she and her brother have access to our old phones and tablets with a curated list of games that at least vaguely teach you something. They get limited time on the devices.

Rule number one is no screens when the sun is up, except on weekends.

Also sometimes I let them play my S/NES emulators, which obviously have no internet access.

I suspect she'll ask for a phone when she gets to middle school. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

I also have a 5-year old, we've given him an iPad that doesn't allow software to be installed via the app store; doesn't allow any websites to be visited and has a screentime set to an hour a day. If he wants something on the iPad we have to unlock the parent settings and install the specific app they want on it. The iPad has iMessage/iPhoto/Music and everything else turned off. Most of the time he plays angry birds for a an hour or plays the piano on it or some other innocent activity.

As far as giving him a smartphone; both my wife and I have agreed not until he's 16 and no social media until he's 18. We may give him a kids phone when he's older that only allows phone calls to a locked set of people and has no apps on it.

I'm not too concerned about what his peers have or do; him feeling left out is a small price to pay for not having to endure the problems associated with social media.

Question - what are your thoughts on giving an old laptop instead of iPad? Probably 5-year olds are too young for laptops, but in general there could be more a child could do for safe entertainment on a laptop than iPad/smartphone (theoretically atleast - with equivalent restrictions on accessing social media etc.).

Nothing wrong with it I suppose, it's definitely more difficult for them to use but doable. I haven't really had that many issues with locking down an iPad. The settings for it are pretty buried under "Screen Time" but it does allow you to turn off nearly any built-in app on the iPad, restrict content by specific ratings, limit the domains safari is allowed to go to and restrict app installation/upgrades.

most of us here grew up without smartphones, and we are doing pretty well technologically. it is the constant access to it that it is the problem imo, not technology in general. we do not allow kids to gamble, smoke, drink coffee, alcohol or other drugs since their prefrontal cortex is developing, why do we allow them a constantly available dopamine hit similar to, if not worse than the others ?

just ban phones and social media (and any other constantly available, internet connected distracting device) for kids under 20 or something. educate society about the perils of phone usage. let them use desktops and all the rest, I think it should be fine

We obviously need kid friendly phones that can make calls and use useful apps and nothing Else.

Apple and Nintendo universe is your friend (as it allows for very fine grained parental permissions). Basic rules in our house:

- Time limits on all games/apps (Apple/Nintendo settings) - No install of apps without parental consent (needs password) - No digital devices in bedrooms

Initial “phone” will be an Apple Watch which allows calls/gps-apps but can be locked down for other apps 9-3 (calls only)

Nintendo is great because you can have games that avoid the mobile “dopamine hook” feedback loop.

Digital device ban from bedroom encourages accountability (public space usage) + prevents polluting the bedroom from the perspective of sleep hygiene/homework.

Device limits mean digital usage is limited, and the “device” is what stopped the kid, not the parent (somehow they seem much more accepting of this than a parent yelling “put the device away!”)

My eldest is old enough to be using a computer which is again in the shared living space, and has less restrictions by its nature. I track all the usage, and we have occasional chats about what he’s been looking at and whether it’s “healthy” for mind and spirit.

Regular chats about the harms of too much digital, addiction, and the potential harms of social media.

They will get phones as teenagers, and they will be locked down. We aren’t there yet, but the hope is that some restrictions + everything we’ve tried to teach them will minimise the harm. Time will tell.

I have a running thesis that I've been building out in my head for a while, and continue to see more data to support it. Basically - our technology has significantly outgrown our biological and evolutionary roots.

So much of the modern world is unnatural from an evolutionary perspective. One post can reach millions of people, a far cry from how our brain evolved to process social connections. We just don't have the tools to process the modern media and social media landscape. I can't imagine what it's doing to the developing brain.

I see so much of society similar to a deer freezing in headlights. Cars have been around for a while, but only blink of an eye in an evolutionary timescale. Deer haven't been able to catch up. In some ways, I fear our society is quite the same for us.

the deer in headlights, the blink of an eye are interesting representations. You can make that argument of what is deemed unnatural on a lot since industrialization took root (and you did, as in cars). That genie is out of the bottle with world populations raising in lock-step to technology.

Humans continue to live - in mega cities, with mass transportation, mass communication, world wars for more than 100 years. I don't know to what degree we biologically adapt, but most certainly we do adapt. Smartphones are yet another shock to populations that I'm sure we'll absorb.

The web-accessed FT article on youth mental health, this conversation, this message board of worldwide concurrency are all adaptions.

Smartphones and social media are destroying adult's brains, too.

exactly, HN is one of them, even if the content is more elaborated usually

Moderation and self control is the key to a normal life.

Sometimes moderation and self-control means avoiding something entirely if you aren't able to practice moderation and self-control once you start. I could spend more of my finite life trying to practice restraint in the middle of it, but I prefer to do what's actually worked: staying away entirely from any social media platform that I struggle to pull away from.

https://archive.is/6keN4

We got a lot of shit about it at the time from various sources, but I think my wife and I were correct in limiting our son to a flip phone until he was 18. It was very awkward in a lot of ways, because all of his peers had smart phones, and him not having one got in the way of some good things.

However, a couple of years later, now with a smart phone, he seems a lot more grounded than a lot of other young people he interacts with.

Unfortunately, too many parents are either too unaware or apathetic to spend 30 minutes enabling parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them off to their kids. Parental controls are very robust now, and easy to remotely manage from your own device. You can create an app whitelist, or require permission for installs, and limit browser usage. Non-emergency usage duration and time-of-day can be fine-tuned.

The ability is there but sorely lacking wide adoption, and parents instead stick to more confrontational and less effective techniques such as manual snooping and taking of devices after the damage is already done.

Every time I see headlines like this, I think of this clip from True Detective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLZGMcwi758

At some point one change will be more drastic than all the changes before.

First generation to be exclusively raised on social media/smartphones/constant tech engagement is not simply, old man yells at clouds.

Sounds to me very similar to past situations. First generation to be exclusively raised on...

- MTV?

- video games?

- rock and roll?

- ...

They didn't have those things in their pockets 24/7, and the social media apps are designed to be addictive. Not exactly the same scenario

Did you seriously compare constant engagement of phone to occasional MTV or video games?

Read this book, Amusing Ourselves to Death https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0023ZLLH6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b..., but replace the word TV with Internet. You will be surprised how remarkably similar the arguments are.

D&D had way worse reps than either (maybe not rock and roll). People legit thought you were a horrible person if you played and that it warped your mind from day one.

That's false equivalence. Smartphones are much closer to an innate/biological shift than a cultural one.

There's always the risk of it just being "old man yells at clouds"....except in this case it's the kids themselves telling us there's something wrong. Self-reported mental health and suicide rates are trending in a bad direction.

Obviously the leap to causation needs to be taken very carefully, but "kids these days" are definitely a bit more sad and suicidal for some reason.

Self-reported mental issues are kind of like rape and sexual abuse reports in Sweden: when police started to take them seriously, the number exploded, apparently showing things were getting much worse when in fact they were getting better.

There was always a massive disease burden hidden away in the younger generation, schizophrenic and depressive adults don't just spontaneously emerge. It's just that they wouldn't know about it and their family strongly resisted the notion they have the "crazy" kid, because the stigma was unbearable. Those kids would show up as "slow learners", "attention issues", "troubled", "aggressive", in the penal system, addicts etc. and only much later, if they were lucky, get any kind of treatment for the underlying issue.

Remove the stigma and provide resources and many children will use them, perhaps to the point of over-medicalizing normal human variance.

The latest studies have proven the causative link. It’s not just correlation anymore.

Is HN a social media as well? Fortunately I'm not on a smartphone /s

Showing a correlation without investigating the paths of causation is like blaming life for death.

Death is an inevitability for us all. Depressed children is not.

"Correlation is not causation!" is a midwit[0] argument. Not everything can be a RCT. Correlation is where you start, and it doesn't take a ton of imagination to understand how causation might work in this case.

[0]https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

Middlebrow dismissal, as it's often called on hn. ("Shallow dismissal" in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It clarifies the point he's making. It's not the point itself.

Not sure what you mean? I wasn't correcting or disagreeing with anyone if that's what you thought.

> Middlebrow dismissal

...In Argument Theory. Not in the current context though, as the poster (hi there) expressed something quite different. Details around, if the original post does not suffice.

Have you perchance misunderstood my post into that «Correlation is not causation»?

What I meant is there literally: you have to «investigat[e] the paths of causation», which is meant to mean, you cannot (should not) practically fight the full correlated context, but the specific cause.

I.e., in the picked metaphor: "you do not blame life for death" - find specific causes and curb them.

Which, by the way, if the "«midwit»" reference were still applicable, is beyond "IQ", because what was expressed is meant to be "in the set of basics" - yet to appearance absent in the article. I expressed that the article seems to miss that basic point.

I.e., the idea that "smartphones and social media" would be detrimental is extremely cheap, as if saying that "heating is polluting" - yes, and also useful, so you identify the weak parts and try to act on them.

> and it doesn't take a ton of imagination

But the article did not exercise that. And I think it would have been "kind of required". See my other reply nearby, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35102296

You might like to read this if you're looking for causation: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

> looking for

Thanks - but I was actually looking for a constructive article if from the FT, which requires avoiding a cheap early stopping in the class of "entrepreneurs are at risk of distress".

Lack of analytic depth in the identification of strict causes that brings the article author to solutions like "«educate»" (to what?), "fight «addiction»", "pause then just stop", "have an age limit enforced". In the parallel: "entrepreneurs: know the risk, fight your drive to be a workaholic, take a vacation and maybe you will decide that it is a better life". And if you wanted to be on HN - well, let us see your documents (we'll check your age).

...Post naturally related to my other reply nearby.

The users of social media have a LOT of guilt and responsibility that never gets recognized in my opinion. The subtle “I’m hot/smart - sucks to be you” in literally every conceivable topic is so well disguised as being “how everyone else does it” that it goes unnoticed as being vain and narcissistic.

Making video about blue whales? Make sure a quarter of the screen is covered with your filtered, augmented face and better yet your gym body! Making a short about how cute your relationship is? Make sure to make the point somehow in some subtle way that your in the relationship because you physically are more attractive or else it doesn’t “hit” as much. Like be sitting down and then stand up to show you’re tall when the beat drops haha - they get pretty creative and it’s like clockwork.

The subtle nature of it is what’s so damaging to young people in my opinion because its how everyone gets away with being disgusting and vain - it’s actually quite passive aggressive and if you are young you are just absorbing it like someone in an abusive relationship.

I think there's ample lived experience showing that larger groups of adolescent human beings can be hateful towards people who are different in any way.

In the past, young people were unable to escape this while at school, but once the school day was over they at least had a reprieve until the next school day.

With social media, there is no longer any down time. You are vulnerable to harassment all the time.

Phones are just a carcass, it's the content that is being fed to the sheep that is the problem. Not the phones themselves. If you don't police the content providers, banning phones will not have any effect. Just like guns. They don't kill people, people kill people.

I could say the same things about television. Do I really want my daughter watching The real housewives of *bstown. What kind of values does she learn there? Or the camera angles in which women are depicted in the media. Don't get me started on all the commercials.

There is also the influence aspects of our economy and society. Which I will argue is a foundational building block. Bigger and better drives the social media economies piggy backed on click bait and more outlandish claims of achievement.

It's all smoke and mirrors and pyramid schemes. But this is nothing new across history. The phone is just a more direct way of transmission.

You just wait till the Meta verse, chip implants and really immersive IOT. You ain't seen nothing yet!

The frog is boiled across generations, not all at once.

Smartphones and emails, all the apps has already destroyed our lives me and Brandy my golden retriever's lives! AT&T among others that's a huge problem asI don't care what others do but why am I still on this smartphone?

Oddly enough, once the hype machine has moved on to TikTok: Facebook has stayed there. Come at me; I don't care. As long as they don't try to stay "relevant" and keep me "engaged" (I know, that ship has sailed), they're still a way to stay connected to friends & relatives.

Facebook should just settle into a comfortable senescence and die eventually, like any natural organism. Or not die, like everyone's been warning about classical music for 100 years. Unfortunately, MZ doesn't seem inclined to do that.

I never, never got any news from FB, and when someone gets political, or Instagram-ish with their perfect lives, I instantly Unfollow or Unfriend them. I never walked around staring at my smartphone with FB on it and I doubt any of the kids do, either.

I'd held the position for years that social media had demonstrably negative effects on childrens' minds -- and all the while, I was derided, because at the time there was no empirical evidence assembled conclusively stating such, and my inductive reasoning to that end was handwaved away.

I feel vindicated. Technology can be a powerful force for good, but perhaps giving impressionable young minds unrestricted access to the internet is short-sighted and fraught with peril.

Couldn’t there be a common cause, like lost sleep? Considering the role of sleep in washing away the daily damage to the brain.

It can be many things, and sleep certainly is important.

Social media is a lot of things, some of them good, some bad, but young people are not well-suited to handle the bad. Heck, most adults aren't either. You have to be a particular sort of person to handle a couple thousand people all over the world screaming "LOSER!" at you because you said something awkward.

I've seen a lot of "you need to touch grass" comments recently, and it kind of gets to the heart of the problem. We didn't evolve in an environment where every facet of your life is available for inspection from freaking everybody in the world. One can counter that we should train our children to be circumspect in how they manage their online activities--a kind of abstinence education for the digital world--but that is a massive uphill battle.

Digital communications are pretty good overall. I know my kids make use of it to manage homework, keep in touch with friends who are not local, etc. But there is a pretty big difference between texting the folks you met at summer camp and Instagram.

Smartphones and emails already destroyed our lives me and Brandy my golden retriever's lives!

What makes us so sure social media isn't destroying adults' mental health? Adults may have better coping mechanisms but it doesn't mean their mental health is being destroyed all the same.

I think it clearly is, people just care less.

> What makes us so sure

You phrase that question in those terms here, a social platform which is not "mainstream" - but presumably selected?

As a former smartphone-using, social media-ing child, this hurts.

It's definitely not just kids that have a problem

Will someone please think of the children?!

The article is locked behind a paywall.

https://archive.is/6keN4

stop posting this paywall garbage on here.

https://archive.is/6keN4

paywall.

https://archive.is/6keN4

Thanks

I sure am glad there aren't confounding factors like wage stagnation or a global pandemic involved.

There are. It turns out some of these people know fancy stats vocabulary too and have thought about it a bit. https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

The apparent decline in children's mental health seems to have started in late '00s or early '10s. E.g. here's a study from just before the pandemic making the same conclusion - digital media: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190315110908.h...

The decline has occurred in almost all developed countries, as far as I know. This includes countries where wages aren't stagnant and the employment market is solid.

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