Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health

[Josh]

Jonathan Haidt reports how detrimental smartphones are to the mental health of developing children, leaving scars that will last into adulthood.

When parents are asked to identify their top fears about the safety of their children, what do you think tops the list? According to a survey last year by Safehome.org, it’s not cars, strangers, or any other physical threat; it’s “internet/social media.” That’s not just for parents of teenagers and pre-teens, whose lives seem to revolve around their phones. It’s even true for parents of younger kids, ages 7-9 because every parent sees it coming and few know what to do about it. Parents don’t want their children to disappear into phones, as so many of their friends' children have; some resolve to wait until 8th grade, or later. Then their child hits them with the main argument that makes parents buckle: “But everyone else has a phone, so I’m being left out.”

It's been well known for a while that mental health is deteriorating precipitously:



Is it due to smartphones? The data says it is.



That's a pretty whopping impact, and makes a solid case that no one should use a smartphone until they are at least 18. The impact to mental health and stability for the rest of adult life is not worth it.

Young people are really suffering, and it's time that adults, parents, and responsible authorities stand up to what is destroying young lives.



Translation: If you want to see fewer school shootings, perhaps what's needed is fewer smartphones. If gun control is a good idea, then smartphone control is an even better idea. Keep these dangerous devices out of the hands of young impressionable children.

[Franklin]

I think this is the most important issue. I believe that children raised with smartphones will become horrible adults. So this is the main criteria that I now use to judge religions. Do members of a religion allow their children to use smartphones? This is how I judge how good a religion is.

[JimFoxvog]

Translation: If you want to see fewer school shootings, perhaps what's needed is fewer smartphones. If gun control is a good idea, then smartphone control is an even better idea. Keep these dangerous devices out of the hands of young impressionable children.

Yes, both would be helpful. Teenagers should be able to have some kind of supervised internet access at home or school and maybe allowed to use a gun with a responsible adult present also.

[Ken]

Translation: If you want to see fewer school shootings, perhaps what's needed is fewer smartphones. If gun control is a good idea, then smartphone control is an even better idea. Keep these dangerous devices out of the hands of young impressionable children.

Funny how German, Swedish, Swiss, Norwegian, Dutch, Japanese, Singaporean, and Korean kids have just as many cell phones as American kids and aren't shooting up their schools.

In 1999 when Columbine happened, cell phones looked like this, Mark Zuckerberg was 15 years old, and the founding of Facebook was still 5 years into the future.

[Josh]

Ken,

So you're saying mental health isn't behind the rise in school shootings?

Then what do you think is causing it? (Reminder: gun laws now are stricter than they used to be, and much stricter than before 1968 or 1934, so it's not because of the current state of gun laws.)

[Sliceitup]

Ken,

So you're saying mental health isn't behind the rise in school shootings?

Then what do you think is causing it? (Reminder: gun laws now are stricter than they used to be, and much stricter than before 1968 or 1934, so it's not because of the current state of gun laws.)

According to all your charts the male population has not had a significant rise in mental health issues like the females have. Yet males are fairly consistently the ones who are committing mass shootings. Perhaps men need to have more mental health issues, if more mental health issues means fewer school shootings.

[Josh]

Ken,

So you're saying mental health isn't behind the rise in school shootings?

Then what do you think is causing it? (Reminder: gun laws now are stricter than they used to be, and much stricter than before 1968 or 1934, so it's not because of the current state of gun laws.)

According to all your charts the male population has not had a significant rise in mental health issues like the females have. Yet males are fairly consistently the ones who are committing mass shootings. Perhaps men need to have more mental health issues, if more mental health issues means fewer school shootings.

Females always commit a lot less violence than males.

Yet recently we had a female conduct a mass shooting, which hasn’t really ever happened before.

[Ken]

Ken,

So you're saying mental health isn't behind the rise in school shootings?

Then what do you think is causing it? (Reminder: gun laws now are stricter than they used to be, and much stricter than before 1968 or 1934, so it's not because of the current state of gun laws.)

Oh, I fully agree that cell phones (or more specifically social media) are problematic for the mental health of teens. It isn't so much the actual cell phones as the social media. If kids were getting all their social media on laptop computers that would be equally problematic

But I disagree that there is a link between cell phones and teen gun violence. If that were actually the case we would see violent mass shootings in all the modern countries where cell phones are prevalent and we obviously do not.

But secondly, "mental health" is a vastly broad term that encompasses thousands of different conditions. There isn't just one thing we call mental health or mental illness any more than there is one definition of physical health and physical illness. And the sorts of mental health issues that social media contributes to such as depression are not the same as the mental health pathologies like psychopathy that lead to shootings.

In other words, there is lots of evidence that cell phones make youth depressed (especially girls) but there is no evidence that they create violent psychopaths that become school shooters.

[Josh]

So does poorer mental health cause more shootings or not?

I already established that more younger smartphone use equals poorer mental health.

(And other countries have mass violence problems too.)

[Ken]

So does poorer mental health cause more shootings or not?

I already established that more younger smartphone use equals poorer mental health.

(And other countries have mass violence problems too.)

"Mental Health" is a far to vast of a topic to be able to make the sort of generalization that you are trying to make.

In point of fact, the vast majority of mental health problems do not lead to violence and the mentally ill are no more violent than anyone else. My daughter suffered from depression during the pandemic. It meant she wanted to stay in bed not go out and shoot up a school.

I am not aware of any studies which suggest that cell phones turn teens into psychopathic killers. If you have some, cite them. Otherwise you are making a leap that is completely unsupported by the evidence.