This is one of those things that should be so obvious - but because of the overwhelming use of that thing, nobody will admit it. We spent decades listening to big tobacco insisting that cigarettes were healthy and cool despite the fact that the science was clear and it should have been obvious that inhaling burning shit into your lungs was bad.
Having unceasing ubiquitous access to all the toxic shit that the internet serves up via a phone should be obvious.
What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships?
The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.
1. Encourage education. Explain to young people early and often through a number of avenues that phone use can cause anxiety, depression, etc. Knowledge is power and all that. Will it solve the problem? No. But it might move the needle and save some lives.
2. Fund further and more detailed studies. Are there critical periods of child development where phone use is more likely to lead to suicide? Are there particular patterns of usage? Narrowing down the hypothesis space makes it much easier to develop more nuanced studies and more targeted interventions.
This! You don’t need laws for this, the solution starts with you. Then more people like you, then you’re the majority and the schools ban phones just like they did in that one school in Ireland recently.
Parenting is hard, and just like in the 90s, it’s easier to blame the technology than assume responsibility.
"It's not our fault that people became addicted to our product via darkpatterns, addictive chemicals, misleading marketing, corruption, and suppression."
I'm all for individual responsibility but like cigarettes on the plane, this product creates irreparable harm to children.
You clearly have no idea how cigarettes were marketed.
"there are some benefits to being connected"
Define 'being connected' because we're not talking about kids calling each other on a party line right now.
smoking has no benefits, regardless what marketing says.
being connected means the ability of my kids to talk to their friends.
we have no landline anymore. there are also no more payphones if you are outside. a computer or a mobile phone and online messaging are now the only way that my kids can communicate with others.
taking away that tool would be worse than the time when landlines were still common and kids could call their friends at home.
so simply banning social media is not going to work.
what we need is kid friendly communication tools that do not try to drive engagement but just let them send messages and call.
Sounds like you figured out the solution on your own.
this isn't hard
besides you have to consider that all the other kids will not be limited to such a phone.
we need to create communication tools that are "safe" but that kids actually like to use too.
a voip phone won't solve that either.
How does your theory of it being “the phones” make sense when boys and girls pretty much have equal access to phone?
If it’s phones, you would expect male suicides to be up as well.
And if it’s how girls react to phones, then isn’t the cause that more specific thing than just “phones”.
> Since 2010, rates of self-harm episodes have increased for adolescents in the Anglosphere countries, especially for girls
Also, I would not expect male and female rates to be the same if it were to do with phones. The two sexes have very different experiences online, just as they do in real life.