Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults with Worse Mental Health (2023)

Every time Haidt comes up, I do go through the post and do another literature search on social media effects.

The most notable thing about this post is the MHQ figures. However, you might note that the difference in age of smartphone use moves a person by at most one bucket. Given that he is suggesting a ban on smartphones and/or social media, I would expect some more catastrophic effect.

In terms of the literature review, this time I read through [0]. It also finds small but significant effects on anxiety and depression, but finds no significant effects on overall measures of well-being. This is because social media also seems to have some positive effects on some other measures of well-being. This meta analysis also finds that age does not seem to change the effects of social media. On longitudinal studies, it seems like social well-being does decrease social media use, but anxiety and depression to not increase social media use. Also, social media use doesn't seem to cause anxiety and depression here, so there is probably some third factor causing anxiety, depression, and social media use which causes this correlation.

Also interesting is that internationally the effects are neutral, and in the US, the effects are neutral, but in Europe they are negative, while in Asia they are positive. IDK why, but it doesn't really support his hypothesis that social media has some sort of catastrophic impact worth banning.

[0]: https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/technology/2022-hancock.pdf

>The most mentally healthy respondents are those who did not get a phone until their late teens.

The first graph also shows that the oldest people score the best on their mental health test in general.

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They note that their Mental Health Quotient figure has been decreasing over the years.

They also note that in the age range of 18-24 the earlier that the people were given a smartphone the worse the MHQ figure is. But did they control for age here?

Because 18-24 is a 7 year duration. Their first graph shows that in a 7 year timeframe their MHQ graph drops 25%. We could be seeing an effect that the older part of the range got their smartphones at a later age (because it's new technology) and the correlated MHQ drop by year creates the drop off by age of first smartphone.

Was this accounted for because I couldn't find it on a quick read.

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You might also be measuring the effect of better mental health awareness. Ie kids who got smartphones earlier might be more aware of mental health issues and are more likely to notice and bring it up.

The concern about the impact of internet and social media (and consequently smartphones) on children’s safety is well-founded. Increased anxiety and depression, reduced attention span, sleep disruption...

It's not the phone, it's the fact that parents let their kids on social media.

The age limit is 13 on ALL social media platforms. Including Discord (which is a bummer, it's handy for voice chat when playing Minecraft).

I've seen friends of my kids have Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok accounts at 9 or 10 years old. Unless they get complete unfettered access with no parental controls the parents have installed them on their devices and created an account.

We're currently at the stage of denying that social networks have negative mental and social effects. As more evidence is collected, we're shading toward fatalistic acceptance. But, even then, I suspect not much will change: we'll acknowledge that we have a problem, but we won't do anything about it for a long time yet. There are too many sources that enable this kind of addiction for it to just get dropped.

Seems to me earlier access to smartphones would also be detrimental to tech expertise. Teach your kids right, teach them unix first :)

Mental health research feels silly to me. When humans are put to live in small apartments and pushed their entire lives to obey the BUY and VOTE commands, they will of course go insane. It's questionable whether anything can be done about this but those who live in the illusion that there was no complete behavioural control of the average homo sapiens and use false models of the causes of the mental issue problems, that somehow do not go after the socio-political root causes IE judge the abusers, not only betray themselves but those who they seek to help the most.

To englighten: Smartphone could be the most useful cognitively beneficial, amazing tool a children can have. Your own photography, recordings, books, and all your friends available to call on a single device is plain wonderful. But the smartphone, the PDA, has been made a tool of surveillance and manipulation. The average parent does not comprehend the problem or have any technical capability. Children usually are directed to fitting in socially. If nothing else, the children will watch Youtube videos on their friends phone and soon start to idealize them, else you will not know what the other children even speak about, when they have been manipulated to worship a brand or to support some political agenda indirectly. They will not be able to cut all the harms out of it.

World has three classes: owners, hermits and pets. Because majority homo sapiens belongs to the lowest class, the species tolerates most animal abuse out of primates.

This is well known fact by now I would say. The social dilemma docu shows some pretty interesting data - The Social Dilemma - Influence of Social Media on Teen Depression and Behavior

They were showing some pretty concerning data of the first generation that grew up with smartphones in school.

I can only imagine in time what will be the picture of the first generation that is growing up now with LLM models everywhere around them.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui0UNXsEGJ8

Causation or correlation? Rarely do parents force phones on their kids; they give in to their kids asking. This could say something about those kids, or perhaps about parents who give their kids what they ask.

The problem I see with the study is that smartphones are so new to society that the younger children in the US have seen a lot more chaos in formally stable society.

Smartphone "with Internet access that you could carry with you?”

I'd say the free and unsupervised internet access is the problem. Not the device.

Old Haidt piece. Wonder why it's getting traction this year.

It’s interesting but doesn’t seem to address the correlation / causation thing. It may be that other attributes of the kids, parents, family, or socioeconomic context lead to earlier smartphone use and also worse mental health / happiness later in life.

You all miss the obvious correlations.

A society with prosperity but lacking athletic, artistic and intellectual pursuits will devolve into a crowd of purposeless humans living for the pleasures of the moment.

That's what current generations are. 90% of people have enough to meet needs, and no meaningful purpose in life apart from scrolling tiktok, constant stream of sexualized and otherwise glorified (money, aesthetics) material. The popular culture also glorifies temporary pleasures (drugs, drinking, sexual promiscuity).

Just look at average teenager, their lives revolve around celebrities and these habits. They're lookist, superficial and shallow AF. Of course they will lose mental health thinking about looks and comparing with some photoshopped instagram celebrity.

No wonder they don't have enough stability to sustain ups and downs in life when they lack a purpose, and centered their lives around these hedonistic pleasures.

Could it also be sign of unhealthy parenting? Parents who are not good at parenting give a smart phone to kids earlier?

It's funny how predictable all these comments are. It doesn't seem to matter how many studies say the same thing.

"It's probably not the smartphone; they're probably not considering [age, parental competence, socioeconomic variables, literally-anything-that-lets-me-pretend-my-beloved-smartphone-doesnt-hurt-my-mental-health]"

Y'all can't help but upvote the skeptical comments.

I wish I'd been saving all the articles I've read about this over the last several years. These studies are not rare and they don't disagree. Seriously. Go look right now and find a single study that says folks' mental health is improved by smartphones.

Here's a post on HN I saved a while back, check out its top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222

top two comments:

> Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment[...]

> Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem[...]

The first one I read was one back in 2017 by Jean Twenge that documented a cliff-face-leap of depression, loneliness, and anxiety and correlated it to the release of the first smartphone.

Ask yourselves - why are you all so desperate to deny this research?