UK child psychotherapist believes smartphones harm youngsters | Hacker News Reader

UK child psychotherapist believes smartphones harm youngsters

telegraph.co.uk

5 pointsPamar5 comments

Claims of this sort have been made about every communications technology in history. The postal service allows young women to communicate with unsuitable men un-chaperoned. The transistor radio is bringing a tide of filth into the bedrooms of young people. Video games cause violence and impair social skills. In every case, those claims were accompanied by plenty of tragic anecdotes but little evidence; In every case, they were eventually found to be largely baseless.

Without any evidence, it seems perfectly reasonable to categorise this claim with the others. If this psychotherapist has concerns, then the appropriate place to raise them is in a scientific journal, not a national newspaper. Doing so is the only way to constructively address the issue, by providing other mental health practitioners with useful case studies and making a case for a systematic investigation. I have found no such publication, but I have found other articles making the same claim in the same newspaper, dating back over two years:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9637676/The-i... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/10234854/Han...

In general I tend to agree with your points, but we have also to take in account that the "time to market" of technology (in terms of adoption by a large percentage of the population) has decreased dramatically. So to take one of your examples: when radio was introduced, I doubt that 80% of teenagers got their own personal set before they had left home to go to college (or start working).

This meant that parents had some more time to get acquainted with the technology, and either decide it was not dangerous, or they could ban it if they thought it was really devil-spawned.

So while the complaints are probably similar, the actual scenario is different and would merit some consideration. I don't have offspring myself, but in my circle of friends this is something they have to worry about, and they are far from being luddites.

The introduction of the smartphone has changed children for the worse. The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

I don't understand modern children. They're all Greek to me.

Summary: a smartphone means you're always connected. This leaves some teenagers vulnerable to always-on bullying, especially girls.

It's hard to argue that this isn't a problem given the bullying directed at some adult women on the internet. It's also hard to know what to do about it; unilaterally not allowing your child to have a smartphone when it's the means of communication among their friends guarantees social exclusion.

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