Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health

There is so much instant dismissal of this entire idea that smartphones are harmful in this thread, most of which is just &quot;correlation is not causation&quot;. Yes, correlation does not equal causation. But when it makes logical sense why there would be correlation, there is no way to actually measure causation (we can&#x27;t exactly give kids placebo phones), we keep seeing the same correlation over and over again, why is it being written off so immediately?<p>Smartphones give children the ability to bully eachother at a scale unlike any other. Smartphones give children the ability to see everyone who is smarter than they are, prettier than they are, and so on. Smartphones give children a new avenue for social exclusion. Smartphones make every single child afraid that what they are doing is being recorded by someone else. Smartphones make every child hungry for validation from strangers, and makes them do crazy things to get said validation.<p>Writing off all of this and boldly claiming that smartphones aren&#x27;t the problem, it&#x27;s all just coincedental correlation, makes no sense.

This is one of those obvious correlations that for some reason everyone needs to question.<p>It&#x27;s not the cellphone itself that&#x27;s the problem, it&#x27;s the addictive content readily accessible therein. I&#x27;m no luddite, but it&#x27;s pretty obvious that humans aren&#x27;t meant to be bent over little black rectangles all day, addicted to our own insecurities.

I&#x27;m not sure how you would control for this. I was born in 1981, not long after the Vietnam war ended, and my Dad was a veteran with PTSD who never went to a therapist. My home life sucked and I came out of it with pretty severe depression. I became addicted to computers as a means of escape, and thankfully -- luckily -- it turned into a lucrative career.<p>However, even though my home life sucked, society as a whole felt much better than it does currently and I still wanted nothing to do with it.<p>Is it possible these kids now just have a front row seat to witness their generation being systematically torn down in front of them before they even have a chance to get a footing? My parents sucked. Their whole world sucks.<p>I have my doubts that it&#x27;s about the phones. It seems more likely that their adult problems are the student loans, the cost of rent, the lack of jobs, the corporate greed, and on, and on.

After moving back to Finland from the US, I noticed that seemingly everybody gives their kid a SIM-equipped phone at age 7. That&#x27;s the age when school starts (a year later than in most other countries), and a lot of children become fairly independent quickly, e.g. walking or biking to school on their own. It&#x27;s just too convenient to be able to call and track the child by the phone.<p>In America, the smartphone seems to come several years later. The article here mentions that some parents want to hold it off until 8th grade!<p>The overall cultural difference is so great that this probably won&#x27;t make for a valid experiment on mental health impact — but maybe there&#x27;s something American parents will be able to learn from Finnish-style phone parenting practice eventually.<p>(Edit — a small observation from the Finnish kids. Their leading social media is WhatsApp Stories because everything else requires you to be 13+. A surprising data point in favor of Meta potentially capturing a chunk of the next generation.)

I have no problem admitting this as an adult that I was addicted to the internet. My free and near unlimited access as a kid to the early internet, addicting online video games, and newfound smartphones apps like social media definitely led to mental health challenges in my late 20s and early 30s that were hard to overcome.<p>I even wrote a 200+ page book on this whole topic where I had &quot;Enough&quot; and wanted less in my life now that I&#x27;m a parent of two young kids.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0B9NZ1T8C" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0B9NZ1T8C</a><p>(If anyone else is struggling and wants a free copy, send me an email and I&#x27;d gladly send you one)<p>Also more thoughts on this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jondouglas.dev&#x2F;entertained-from-disappointment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jondouglas.dev&#x2F;entertained-from-disappointment&#x2F;</a>

Phones make the bad situations worse. If your parents are bullies, it&#x27;s worse to have a phone. If your peers are bullies, it&#x27;s worse to have a phone.<p>If a kid is in one of these situations, it&#x27;s a little ridiculous to consider the phone the problem. It&#x27;s like identifying belts as a big harm to kids last century because you don&#x27;t want to deal with the actual problem of people hitting their kids with belts.

This is only tangentially related to the main point of this piece, but it&#x27;s a bit concerning that the average 18-24 yo of both genders has a mental health quotient somewhere between struggling, managing, and enduring, as opposed to succeeding and thriving.

As an adult I recognize now I was hopelessly addicted to computers as a child, and I wasn’t just playing games and talking to friends on AIM or ICQ, I was figuring out how things worked, experimenting with viruses, trying to understand HTML source code, even trying to make my own games.<p>As a result, I didn’t really develop like a normal child. I developed little to no empathy, and a worldview where I considered almost everyone around me some kind of moron. My estimation of a person’s worth became directly correlated to how much they knew about technology. Most computer laws were written by idiots and had no good reason to exist, etc…<p>The difference between me and these social media addicted kids today is that my addiction never led me spiralling into a mentally unhealthy depression – it led me head first into an extremely lucrative career that made me incredible amounts of money and reaffirmed my beliefs in myself and the world.<p>For most of these kids today though, social media will never lead them to fame and riches, they will never look in the mirror and see themselves look better than what they see in filtered photos of their life. They will spend all their life chasing some ideal that can never be reached, and by the time they realize that, they will look back on all the shallow wasted years of their life and become depressed, they will have no choice but to resign themselves to a shittier life than they imagined.

The study itself notes that gender differences between boys and girls seem robust, with consistently worse outcomes for girls, and this points to social media use being the more fundamental problematic issue:<p>&gt; &quot;...differences in relation to mental health and digital media use have been reported by others, and may be due to activities carried out online (e.g. boys do more gaming, girls do more social media)...&quot;<p>(pdf) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sapienlabs.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;Sapien-Labs-Age-of-First-Smartphone-and-Mental-Wellbeing-Outcomes.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sapienlabs.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;Sapien-Lab...</a>

When I was a teenager, my mother, family and friends tried to lure into using a cellphone. They said that it would help them to contact me whenever they wanted and that it would help me to go out with them and have a good time and some fun.<p>I knew my helicopter mother well enough and knew that the only functions a cell phone would get was to call me to tell me it was time to go home, ask where I was, what I was doing, who I was with... I then, consciously, refused to get one.<p>That probably saved my younger self from getting addicted to smartphone and social networks. Smartphones are addicting to a young audience because they work like drugs: the more you use it, the more you need it. If you make something less attractive it will probably be less addictive.<p>I&#x27;m not a parent and not planning to become one anytime soon, but maybe a way to get teenagers not wanting a smartphone is to make it not a instrument of dopamine rush but a bringer of sadness that at any moment you may receive a call from your parent telling you it is time to go home or asking inconvenient questions.

It&#x27;s the social media, like everyone here is saying, however the missing point around here is that it&#x27;s hard to be happy and have great mental health when you have to struggle and hustle everyday to earn enough to live. Not to mention in America if you lose a job you lose health insurance. To me it&#x27;s pretty clear that the real problem is the world sliding into a new &quot;gilded age&quot; and everyone can see it in real-time because of social media, and we&#x27;re all fucking depressed about it. I&#x27;ve been using computers quite significantly since I was about 8 in the Prodigy-then-AOL era; probably several hours a day or more and at least as much as I look at my phone today. I wasn&#x27;t really depressed until things started to become clear that I had a lesser future than my parents had, and I learned that primarily from social media. Shutting down social media would just mask the problem somewhat, not eliminate it, in my view.

OP here. Parent of 3, ages 12, 15 and 18 navigating this issue irl. Although I believe good parents aren&#x27;t super rigid on any issue, I feel pretty strongly on this one. It&#x27;s the parents responsibility and it&#x27;s hard since it requires your good example. No phone, age 0 to 10-12, to the Lightphone (absolutely love this product) age 13 to 16-18, to a smart phone. I believe the progression is pushed off as long as possible and allows for a manageable transition to responsible use of a necessary evil. To restrictive and your kid goes off the rails at 18 or earlier. Too permissive...pretty obvious what happens.

So many comments here are of the belief that &quot;it&#x27;s not the phones, it&#x27;s the doom of the real world! Climate change, inflation, recession -- this is all bad for mental health of our kids.&quot;<p>And I just want to ask if any of these people every met any real child.<p>Imagine you are 14. You hear the climate isn&#x27;t doing too hot, but then you pull out your phone and see your classmate getting tons of attention for some post he made on social media. Meanwhile, your own post has barely any likes.<p>Which is going to bother you more? Climate change, or the social media sadness?

I wonder, if it&#x27;s possible to test the hypothesis that smartphone (or whatever internet connected device) allows one to learn more about the world without the filter

The causation could easily run the other way. In particular kids that have worse mental health use phones as a coping mechanism. What kind of kid can resist the lure of a phone until she 18? Only one with very strong mental fortitude.

&gt; Wait Until 8th asks parents to sign a pledge, when their children are in elementary school, that they will wait until 8th grade to give them a smartphone. The pledge only takes effect once ten families in that child’s grade have signed the pledge so that the child will have a community of peers and will not feel so isolated before 8th grade.<p>&gt; We think this is a great idea, we just suggest that the pledge should be: Wait Until 9th. Or Wait Until High School. Children are usually 12 or 13 at the start of 8th grade; that is still within the period of early puberty.<p>I&#x27;m going to contact the Wait Until 8th people and ask them if they&#x27;d consider adding a &quot;I&#x27;m willing to wait until &lt;grade&gt; before giving my kids a phone&quot; field. Maybe there are enough people in a given community who would be glad to wait until 12th grade, but just &quot;wait until 8th&quot; doesn&#x27;t let them discover each other.<p>&gt; Plus, if 8th graders have smartphones, that means that smartphones will be everywhere in middle schools, increasing the desire of 7th graders to get them.<p>A while back I was considering a school system for my kids where the grades are split up into a K-5th campus and a 6th-12th campus, but they didn&#x27;t have any policy about cell phone usage at either campus. I guessed that every 6th grader was going to feel pressure to have a cell phone by Christmas of their first year on the upper campus, and this was my top issue with this school system.<p>They&#x27;re now in a school where students have to turn in phones into a phone bucket in the office before the school day starts, and have to pick them up after school. I&#x27;ve seen the bucket in the middle of the day and there&#x27;s only like 6 phones in there, so (it seems) there&#x27;s very low rates of phone ownership for kids at the school.

Only now do I realize what absolute paradise my 80s childhood was.<p>Zero supervision, I could go wherever I want.<p>No need to organize anything, go to any playground and there&#x27;s armies of friends (and foes). No way to communicate other than to simply show up.<p>No wealth to flex, less tech and toys. Far more physical play where you make your world and adventures by making it up.<p>A socially coherent authority where parents, neighborhoods, teachers where not at odds with each other, instead they aligned to correct your shitty behavior, which is good and needed.<p>Nothing about it is recorded. Nothing. Like it didn&#x27;t happen.<p>Not a care in the world about larger issues in life. We didn&#x27;t know about anything, or care about anything. Mental health? Never heard of it, what&#x27;s that?

Anecdotally, I remember that the kids who got smartphones the earliest were already &quot;bad kids&quot;. Their parents let them watch explicit movies and TV shows, party unsupervised, and slack off with their grades. (This goes for low- and high-income students both).<p>I think smartphones do accelerate poor mental health. If I&#x27;d been given a smartphone earlier than I was (as a sophomore in college), I definitely would have seen a deterioration in my own self-esteem. However, I also think that permissive parenting that fails to set moral and behavioral boundaries early on in life is a confounding factor in terms of why giving smartphones early leads to worse outcomes.

From my experience on this, the single biggest determining factor on one&#x27;s opinion is whether you have kids (I have elementary-age kids). We have to work like mad to limit screens, but it is an uphill battle. Their schools use them, their music teachers use them, their after-school tutoring (Kumon) uses them, and so on.<p>I have a vivid memory of my son&#x27;s 6th birthday. At his school, kids would sit in a circle and get to ask questions to the birthday kid. One of the questions he got was: &quot;Who is your favorite Youtuber?&quot; His heart sank when he said he wasn&#x27;t allowed to watch it, and the other kids were kind of shocked.

DUH. The tech&#x2F;software industry is literally destroying humanity, and will rot the mind of the current generation of children. Most kids wanna be youtubers or influencers. I&#x27;m quite frankly embarrassed to be part of it. I cringe when someone asks me what I do. I&#x27;d have more pride in digging holes at this point.<p>We were promised space travel to mars and flying cars, but instead we got hate filled and vain social media, political corruption and manipulation, and so, so much more.<p>Once shit like Neuralink becomes mainstream, we&#x27;re going to see a whole ton of people just clock TF out.

The findings conform to my existing suspicions and biases, but it’s not peer reviewed and is a single data point. Unfortunately I can’t put much stock in it scientifically.

There are a lot of things going on in the world at the same time.<p>Family size has trended down in developed countries. This has a significant impact on social fabric.<p>My father was one of five kids. My mother was one of twelve. I was one of three and had an aunt with four children who lived nearby.<p>So I had many, many aunts, uncles and cousins. In contrast, me and my siblings all have only one or two kids apiece and it does not provide the same social fabric.<p>Women in particular are facing radically different roles in life and often have relatively few good role models for the kind of life they need to somehow create for themselves.<p>I find their tactic of talking about <i>preponderance of the evidence</i> versus <i>beyond a shadow of a doubt</i> annoying. It&#x27;s a strong arm tactic trying to force their position on other people and I find that objectionable on the face of it.<p>Having said that, when they were adolescents my sons inherited an old phone of mine when I upgraded. It had one use: to let them go where they wanted at the mall and I could call them and say &quot;Hey, I&#x27;m ready to go now&quot; or whatever.<p>They might want to beef up their investigation into &quot;Why girls?&quot; rather than harp so much on &quot;We should be allowed to cram our policies down your throats with merely <i>the preponderance of the evidence</i>. It&#x27;s not like this is a criminal trial.&quot;<p>Yeah, buddy, you want to dictate to me how to raise my kids, you better have more compelling evidence than a criminal trial.<p>Provide better info and best practices, not a desperate plea to be allowed to &quot;win&quot; this argument with a less stringent standard of evidence. Geez.

I&#x27;m not sure it even really matters if you give kids a smartphone or not. The schools give them chromebooks, which basically allows the same problematic social media access. Sure, they try to put filters in place, but kids are resourceful. I hear regularly from my daughter about the things she does on that chromebook in class that I don&#x27;t really permit (except in small doses) at home.

I&#x27;ve thought about this a fair bit over the last decade. Full disclosure: I&#x27;m a smartphone minimalist. I use so little data on my phone I don&#x27;t know how much I have, it was 100M per month but I think the telco increased it because it didn&#x27;t fit their plans. I spend $9.99&#x2F;mth for my phone service.<p>We evolved to live in the plains of Africa. We evolved to live is small bands of hunter-gatherers who occasionally got together to have huge parties.<p>Our senses have enough bandwidth to enjoy special mushrooms and to avoid predators. But smartphones can throw far more information at us than that. And for some reason I can&#x27;t fathom, when your phone chirps or shakes you MUST check it NOW.<p>I believe that we should look deeper at how these things might affect young brains. Just as THC is mostly harmless for adults, but royally fucks up children&#x27;s brain development.<p>Not being a psychologist&#x2F;neuroscientist I have no idea how to test this hypothesis.

they say that celebrities stop maturing at the age they become famous.<p>Having too large a group of people know you is terrible for your ability to reinvent yourself as needed. You can&#x27;t change who you are or even change your mind if your previous identity is recorded and attached to you. People need to be forgotten, and this is especially true of children.

Giving children and teens unfettered access to social media and the internet seems to be more of a problem to me than any particular piece of hardware. The cell phone I had access to as a teen was a flip phone from Virgin Mobile that ran on &quot;minutes&quot;. There was no web browser, no apps. I used it for texting and calling.<p>It&#x27;s up to parents to control access to the content (unfortunately, the tools and hardware that exist for this sucks, which is unfortunate). So if you&#x27;re dropping an unlocked iphone into your kids lap and walking away, well then maybe you&#x27;re putting them at risk and neglecting them (which might be further causing mental health issues.)<p>My daughter is young now, but I will eventually run into this as she gets older. I&#x27;ve thought about this issue and I plan to lock down the content (either via software or targeted hardware) until she&#x27;s an adult.

Its not smartphones its just constant access to social media

This situation has been well known for <i>years</i>. It isn&#x27;t news to any of us.<p>So why aren&#x27;t we learning <i>more</i> about the problem? Why are we just beating the same dead horse instead of investigating further?<p>There is no way you could just convince the majority of children (or their parents) to just stop using mobile computers. Is there a more direct approach that could be taken?<p>Most of the comments here can tell you from experience: a computer is no more or less than a tool. It is what you do with it that matters.<p>Most of us here are critical of commonly proposed solutions to this problem, because they are so broad that they would disallow the <i>beneficial</i> activities that any motivated person can pursue with this tool.<p>If my parents had arbitrarily limited the time I was allowed to use a computer, I would not have learned even a tiny percentage of what I did.<p>If my parents had obsessively watched over my shoulder or limited my DNS access to exclude sites like Reddit, then I would have gotten repeatedly stuck early on, and probably given up on the very exploration that made computing a healthy part of my life.<p>We aren&#x27;t talking about real computers, though. This is the brave new world of &quot;smart phones&quot;. 30% of that market are Apple&#x27;s walled-garden pretends-it-isn&#x27;t-a-computer bricks. An unknown but significant percentage of Android bricks have permanently locked bootloaders. Even if a child is motivated to explore the subtleties of computing, chances are <i>their device won&#x27;t allow them to</i>.<p>What if we put more effort into <i>positive change</i>? What if instead of trying to <i>restrict</i> a child&#x27;s behavior, we did the opposite? What kind of opportunities are missed by the average child-available computing device? What opportunities should be made more approachable to an uneducated explorer? When I think about this problem from this perspective, I am overwhelmed with potential solutions. I would rather start trying those out than keep whining about the same old unsolvable problem domain.

Every child needs guardrails before they are given extra, extra features. This article seems to stress that point. The title is just hype.<p>Lots of people are commenting here without reading the article.<p>Edit: the main line here is<p>&gt; We cannot be certain that the correlations shown in the data are evidence of causality

first smart phone (iphone): 2007<p>2023-2007 = 16 years<p>Personally I don&#x27;t thikn Smart phones haven&#x27;t been out long enough to make such claim. That said, I don&#x27;t think the claim is off track. Makes sense to me.<p>Using screens in general result in less social time -&gt; isolation -&gt; mental health concerns

I can only urge everyone to watch this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ma4VZ7rxGOw">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ma4VZ7rxGOw</a><p>It&#x27;s not only kids. It&#x27;s everyone.

My sub 10 years old kid has a smartphone, but it has no sim card and runs a Google child account, so nothing can be installed without me approving, and it only knows about the home wi-fi. We also control how much it is used and it is not left in the bedroom at night. Previously it was actually locked into kiosk mode with Spotify Kids being the only accessible app. Great way to use an old phone. It even has a broken screen but we&#x27;ve now had 3 years extra use (Galaxy S7).

I attended a very informative lecture by Dr. Leonard Sax a number of years ago, when it was at the cusp of the social media explosion we see today, and he brought up studies that showed similar dangerous effects on young boys and girls, especially girls, and then he went on to discuss why that was. It&#x27;s clear that social media is extremely toxic, I felt a big quality of life improvement when I abandoned FB, and I don&#x27;t use instagram or tictoc or what have you.

What I would like to see is the YEAR the person got the smart phone (as opposed to age). It&#x27;d be interesting to see if there&#x27;s a correlation of more recent people getting smartphones and how difficult life is becoming (large student debt, stagnant wages, hard to buy a house, etc.)<p>I&#x27;m absolutely trying to avoid social media at all cost, but I want to see if the age of the first phone is an artifact of the current stresses of our youngest generations.

I&#x27;m still trying to read it in depth but I skimmed and didn&#x27;t see anything about controlling for wealth. I&#x27;ve heard many people talk about when a family isn&#x27;t well off and both parents need to work, there&#x27;s a trend to give them a device because it makes for a cheap babysitter. We also know poverty has a big connection with mental health in adults.

I have zero doubt about that.

I&#x27;m not sure if someone has already posted this here, but Cal Newport had a nice presentation summarizing what we know about the effects of social media usage on children.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;VN5lrKMeAOs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;VN5lrKMeAOs</a><p>I showed this to my teenaged daughter and while she was irritated, she reluctantly agreed that it made sense.

How early is too early? Also the phone can be set up for like one hour a day of usage too.

As much as social media companies like to preach about how they are trying to bring the world together, they are under a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize profits by any legal means necessary (including telling the world that their products are good for them to gain users, kind of like what smoking did back in the day).<p>Remember, your usage and engagement is what drives their ad revenues, it drives their product metrics which get reported out at quarterly earnings calls for shareholders.<p>The only incentive they have is to make the product <i>just</i> legal enough to avoid scrutiny and to maximize profits as much as possible.<p>Given this situation (much like we have legislation for smoking advertising, a type of proto-social media, and we have the FDA for pharma) social media absolutely needs to be regulated. It is another form of junk food for the brains and it is visibly damaging our society and our future generations.

I&#x27;m inclined to agree with the obvious conclusions, but there&#x27;s an obvious hidden variable of good parents not giving their children phones, hence those children have a bunch of other good influences.

Main issue here is that parents are allowing kids to use “phone” feature and not as much “smart” features. This is all on parents.<p>If parents only allowed “smart” features of the smartphone to be used…

When I was a kid I knew people addicted to reading as an escape. Unhealthy escapism. Just saying it&#x27;s not always the method of escape that&#x27;s the source of the problem

It&#x27;s not smartphones. It&#x27;s Facebook, twitter, reddit, HN, etc. Yes, even HN.<p>Smartphones simply mean that kids have near constant access to it all.<p>And it&#x27;s just as bad for adults.

Yeah, I&#x27;m not giving my daughter a smart phone or tablet. She might be a weird outcast but oh well, it&#x27;s not worth the possible damage to her mental health.<p>I think in few decades we&#x27;ll look back at this generation of parents who just shoved smart devices in their kids hands with no filter akin to handing kids cigarettes.<p>It turns them into sociopaths. I have some younger Gen Z cousins and it&#x27;s just weird to watch them film everything they do and post it to social media. Oh, I&#x27;m meeting a friend I haven&#x27;t seen in months, let me set up my phone in the driveway and film us hugging like it&#x27;s an all natural reaction that we totally didn&#x27;t film multiple times.

How much of that is correlation vs causation?<p>I don&#x27;t see <i>anything</i> in that article mentioning obvious causes for worse mental health:<p>- employment perspectives - even <i>my</i> generation that graduated right in the financial crisis knew we were in for rough, low-pay and crap job years, kids graduating these days have even worse perspectives<p>- the looming climate crisis - everyone paying attention in a school that teaches fact-based education knows humanity is in for a rough ride with climate change threatening to make wide swaths of the world basically unable to support human life during their expected life time<p>- politics actually regressing worldwide - with open marches of actual Nazis raising their arm to the well-known salute, dictators and authoritarians worldwide getting and staying in power, politicians hell-bent on erasing all social progress of the last decades, and no one doing anything about that, it paints a pretty depressing view.<p>The earlier kids get smartphones, the earlier they see that the promise of &quot;work hard, have a good life&quot;, &quot;everyone can start a dishwasher and die a millionaire&quot; and &quot;your future will be better than your parents&#x27;&quot; is bullshit. Facts don&#x27;t lie, facts are not political, and children and adolescents <i>are not dumb</i>. They know they are being lied to, and they see that lies have absolutely zero consequences.

Did the kids respond to this survey on their smartphones? Does the brand of the smartphone matter?

Unpopular opinion:<p>Life was better before smartphones. I wish they&#x27;d never been invented.

This doesn&#x27;t feel like any news to me, I thought this was well known?

Aren&#x27;t there &quot;parental controls&quot; to limit access?

Someone tell the local high school here please, they definitely won&#x27;t listen to me and <i>require</i> that every student have a smartphone.

is it smart phones or specific applications on smart phones, i.e social media?

Be careful about applying the strongest skepticism to studies with conclusions you disagree with.