I did some graduate research on this recently. It isn't just kids and it isn't just smartphones. Above a certain threshold of moderate usage, time spent using electronics is negatively correlated to well-being for adults as well.
My 11 yr. old grandaughter was pouting and angry at her dad because he wouldn't buy her a smart phone, so she wrote to me wanting me to intercede for her. I wrote back and said that when she could pay the phone bill (she has 3 brothers who also want one) that would be the time to buy a phone. I never heard from her again. The only thing that keeps my 2 adult stepdaughters from scrolling their lives away is that they have to work for a living. Maybe child labor would be a good way to slow down the scrolling generation; Gen S. The one week that I owned a "smart phone" was more than enough for me. The computer takes up too much time too. The curse of the retired.
Appreciate Ted for pointing out all the warning signs.
But this is nothing like tobacco.
I've been saying for years- we are utterly doomed.
The current generation of youngsters ain't saving anything. Quite the opposite, they have no idea of how ignorant they are. Their thumbs are in great shape from all the texting, in fact some genius should invent a new musical instrument for them that resembles a dumbphone. Their brains? Not so much. They read nothing- slew of college professors responding to shall I say recent events on our campuses have confirmed that. Anna Karenina? You can't even expect them to read a novella like the Death of Ivan Ilych. AI does their homework for them. You don't want to know how bad the grade inflation truly is, average GPA at Harvard went from 2.4 (40 years ago when a C truly meant average) to 3.8 now (yeah they're all geniuses getting nothing but As). The standardized tests have been dumbed down, that's the answer to all these teenagers who never read getting SAT scores that would have been 99th percentile 40 years ago.
Something terrible is heading our way that will make everything in modern history look like a joke in comparison, say Ebola versus Covid. I can't say when it's happening, just that like climate change the target date seems to be accelerating towards us at warp speed.
And all the very serious people care about are their billion dollar valuations on Wall Street. Fuckerberg has built a survival bunker that costs a mere 500 million. These sociopaths think they're going to wait out the Apocalypse, like they're the good ones in a zombie movie.
We sent our kids to the local Catholic school. Things were fine until third grade. That is when kids started standing on desks in the middle of class screaming out Tiktok and YouTube short stuff.
Our kids don't have tablets - at all - and they weren't just left out of social life, but out of academic stuff as well.
Because schools now literally *assume* every kid has their own tablet and has screen time at home.
Homework? Play this "educational" game!
Summer work? No more paper packet! Do 45 minutes a day on a learning app.
Snow day? Every child in the house get on your personal screen for Zoom School at the same time (because every household has a device for every person, of course.)
This was CATHOLIC school.
We are just pulling our kids out and doing a classical hybrid going forward. It's impossible to raise kids in a conventional school or social setting anymore if you aren't doing screens. Just impossible. Even the schools undermine you.
This terrifies me. I have a 9- and a 6-year old. They are allowed 2 hours or less of screen time outside of school a day. We have frequent "screen-detox" days with no electronics at all. I am definitely making every effort to keep it this way moving forward. Thank you!!
It’s not just correlation studies, as Jonathan Haidt points out in his new book The Anxious Generation, there are loads of interventional trials at this point, which *are* designed to show causation, and unsurprisingly they pretty much all agree: loads of screen time and social media is bad for your mental health. Data was murkier 5-10 years ago, but that anyone can claim otherwise in 2024 is mind boggling
Good article, but I'm surprised not to find any mention of Jonathan Haidt's extensive writing on this topic from his substacks (afterbabel.com), Atlantic articles (theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-haidt), and new bestselling book The Anxious Generation). These are well worth digging in to. One example is Haidt's views on the roles of parental overprotection, and of community ties, in mediating the effects of smartphone and social media use.
Social media addiction has gotten a lot of attention lately, and rightfully so, but what most forget is all these devices emit carcinogenic wireless radiation, along with blue light that destroys dopamine:
The iPad was introduced in 2010 which accelerated the tablet culture and made it easy entertainment for everyone to put in front of them or their children’s faces.
Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation explains it all. It has already inspired a grass-root movement of parents in both US and UK. It is a calamity on a mass scale, really difficult to stop, and it will only be stopped if parents wake up. Also, we honestly need to stop making stupid people famous - dumb vacuous celebrities feeding on youngster's attention in exchange for unrealistic, lofty expectations sold as a marketing product.
Another angle is that American parents spend less time with their kids because of work demands, so the new babysitter in town is Tiktok, which will now battle it out with gaming et al.
The average here is 37 hours a week. 5-6 weeks paid vacation + 10 public holidays. In the end, parents have a lot more time to spend with their kids, mental health problems are low, the family is still the center of society.
Yes, we have the dopamine loop problem here, especially among the 18-34 demographic, but so far most children have managed to avoid it. Maybe it's only a matter of time, but at least the subject now is a major talking point.
since Johnathan Haidt’s new book came out, I’ve been seeing many criticisms from other academics, especially ones from Haidt’s former school, UVA. their criticism is the standard causation/correlation that keeps getting trotted out. they then offer several counter arguments about the causes of teen anxiety/depression as being caused by climate change, school shootings, racism, disinformation and economic fallout from 2008. yet they fall into the same exact trap of confusing causation with correlation but with much less evidence than Haidt!
of course this only betrays their real concerns about smart phones and social media: mainly that they have both eroded the monopoly on information that used to belong to academic elites and mainstream media. if you scratch just beneath the surface of their arguments, it’s really the content of what kids and adults see on social media, not the technology that they really want to control. they all support more draconian measurements to censor speech or ‘disinformation’. in their minds they have the ultimate tool for progressive propaganda and they won’t go down without a fight, hence the Tik-Tok ban. it’s about brining that app under control of the Censorship Industrial Complex in the West…
I did some graduate research on this recently. It isn't just kids and it isn't just smartphones. Above a certain threshold of moderate usage, time spent using electronics is negatively correlated to well-being for adults as well.
Pretty sad. In that graph for that girl nowhere did I see reading as an activity.
My 11 yr. old grandaughter was pouting and angry at her dad because he wouldn't buy her a smart phone, so she wrote to me wanting me to intercede for her. I wrote back and said that when she could pay the phone bill (she has 3 brothers who also want one) that would be the time to buy a phone. I never heard from her again. The only thing that keeps my 2 adult stepdaughters from scrolling their lives away is that they have to work for a living. Maybe child labor would be a good way to slow down the scrolling generation; Gen S. The one week that I owned a "smart phone" was more than enough for me. The computer takes up too much time too. The curse of the retired.
Appreciate Ted for pointing out all the warning signs.
But this is nothing like tobacco.
I've been saying for years- we are utterly doomed.
The current generation of youngsters ain't saving anything. Quite the opposite, they have no idea of how ignorant they are. Their thumbs are in great shape from all the texting, in fact some genius should invent a new musical instrument for them that resembles a dumbphone. Their brains? Not so much. They read nothing- slew of college professors responding to shall I say recent events on our campuses have confirmed that. Anna Karenina? You can't even expect them to read a novella like the Death of Ivan Ilych. AI does their homework for them. You don't want to know how bad the grade inflation truly is, average GPA at Harvard went from 2.4 (40 years ago when a C truly meant average) to 3.8 now (yeah they're all geniuses getting nothing but As). The standardized tests have been dumbed down, that's the answer to all these teenagers who never read getting SAT scores that would have been 99th percentile 40 years ago.
Something terrible is heading our way that will make everything in modern history look like a joke in comparison, say Ebola versus Covid. I can't say when it's happening, just that like climate change the target date seems to be accelerating towards us at warp speed.
And all the very serious people care about are their billion dollar valuations on Wall Street. Fuckerberg has built a survival bunker that costs a mere 500 million. These sociopaths think they're going to wait out the Apocalypse, like they're the good ones in a zombie movie.
We sent our kids to the local Catholic school. Things were fine until third grade. That is when kids started standing on desks in the middle of class screaming out Tiktok and YouTube short stuff.
Our kids don't have tablets - at all - and they weren't just left out of social life, but out of academic stuff as well.
Because schools now literally *assume* every kid has their own tablet and has screen time at home.
Homework? Play this "educational" game!
Summer work? No more paper packet! Do 45 minutes a day on a learning app.
Snow day? Every child in the house get on your personal screen for Zoom School at the same time (because every household has a device for every person, of course.)
This was CATHOLIC school.
We are just pulling our kids out and doing a classical hybrid going forward. It's impossible to raise kids in a conventional school or social setting anymore if you aren't doing screens. Just impossible. Even the schools undermine you.
This terrifies me. I have a 9- and a 6-year old. They are allowed 2 hours or less of screen time outside of school a day. We have frequent "screen-detox" days with no electronics at all. I am definitely making every effort to keep it this way moving forward. Thank you!!
It’s not just correlation studies, as Jonathan Haidt points out in his new book The Anxious Generation, there are loads of interventional trials at this point, which *are* designed to show causation, and unsurprisingly they pretty much all agree: loads of screen time and social media is bad for your mental health. Data was murkier 5-10 years ago, but that anyone can claim otherwise in 2024 is mind boggling
Good article, but I'm surprised not to find any mention of Jonathan Haidt's extensive writing on this topic from his substacks (afterbabel.com), Atlantic articles (theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-haidt), and new bestselling book The Anxious Generation). These are well worth digging in to. One example is Haidt's views on the roles of parental overprotection, and of community ties, in mediating the effects of smartphone and social media use.
Who is paying for these smart phones and the data plans that go with them? There can’t be many 5-7 year olds with their own source of income.
Social media addiction has gotten a lot of attention lately, and rightfully so, but what most forget is all these devices emit carcinogenic wireless radiation, along with blue light that destroys dopamine:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/techmyth
The iPad was introduced in 2010 which accelerated the tablet culture and made it easy entertainment for everyone to put in front of them or their children’s faces.
Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation explains it all. It has already inspired a grass-root movement of parents in both US and UK. It is a calamity on a mass scale, really difficult to stop, and it will only be stopped if parents wake up. Also, we honestly need to stop making stupid people famous - dumb vacuous celebrities feeding on youngster's attention in exchange for unrealistic, lofty expectations sold as a marketing product.
Another angle is that American parents spend less time with their kids because of work demands, so the new babysitter in town is Tiktok, which will now battle it out with gaming et al.
Over here in Norway, we work far less than Americans and are far more productive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity
The average here is 37 hours a week. 5-6 weeks paid vacation + 10 public holidays. In the end, parents have a lot more time to spend with their kids, mental health problems are low, the family is still the center of society.
Yes, we have the dopamine loop problem here, especially among the 18-34 demographic, but so far most children have managed to avoid it. Maybe it's only a matter of time, but at least the subject now is a major talking point.
www.jim-frazee.com
You see it in every restaurant- young kids on iPads or phones, trained to not engage with their parents or the world around them.
Fast forward ten more years and we’ll see you adults that look like what “Children of Men” predicted in 2006: https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU
So what happens if parents don't allow their children to participate....?
since Johnathan Haidt’s new book came out, I’ve been seeing many criticisms from other academics, especially ones from Haidt’s former school, UVA. their criticism is the standard causation/correlation that keeps getting trotted out. they then offer several counter arguments about the causes of teen anxiety/depression as being caused by climate change, school shootings, racism, disinformation and economic fallout from 2008. yet they fall into the same exact trap of confusing causation with correlation but with much less evidence than Haidt!
of course this only betrays their real concerns about smart phones and social media: mainly that they have both eroded the monopoly on information that used to belong to academic elites and mainstream media. if you scratch just beneath the surface of their arguments, it’s really the content of what kids and adults see on social media, not the technology that they really want to control. they all support more draconian measurements to censor speech or ‘disinformation’. in their minds they have the ultimate tool for progressive propaganda and they won’t go down without a fight, hence the Tik-Tok ban. it’s about brining that app under control of the Censorship Industrial Complex in the West…