Frequent Social Networking Associated with Poor Functioning Among Children [pdf]

Frequent Social Networking Associated with Poor Functioning Among Children [pdf](online.liebertpub.com)

91 points by redgrange 10 years ago | 30 comments

cyanbane 10 years ago |

When I read the title I thought "Association" could mean potential causation, but I think the 2nd to the last sentence in the Abstract helps clarify:

"The findings suggest that students with poor mental health may be greater users of SNSs."

danharaj 10 years ago | |

It's not surprising. Who remembers what being a teenager is like? My 'favorite' aspect of growing up is how stringently regulated waking/sleeping hours are while one's circadian clock is fluctuating wildly. I am pretty sure I did not get any good nights of sleep in high school, and that made me miserable. I self medicated with a lot of things. A lot of them were garbage, like junk food or Internet forums. Some of them were good for me, like an obsessive reading habit. How much of 'successfully' growing up is just having the 'right' escapes from oppressive school and family structures?

Being a teenager is like being extruded out of a rigid nozzle into the mold of what dysfunctional adults think a functional adult is like. The process itself compromises the child's development.

This study will be used as fodder to make the nozzle more rigid, the mold more byzantine. Give the child no escape. They must become a proper adult.

MichaelGG 10 years ago | | |

It's idiotic how early schools start. Some places wanted to start at 7am, bus at 6am, so kids would need to be up at 5am. Ended up hiring a teacher directly (early grade school so still feasible[1]) and starting at 9am. Works great. Plus my daughter and I can stay up "late" (10pm) playing games whenever we feel like it.

I understand some people want schools as daycare, but separate that out.

Also:

>2015

>MySpace

Hmm?

1: Cost of tuition for 2 kids covers teacher's salary, and other parents are interested enough I could easily turn a profit if desired

someone7x 10 years ago | | |

Add to that how poor the feedback mechanisms are; by the time a parent sees a child become an adult it may be too late to apply that learning to another child.

Child-rearing is a hard problem.

cbhl 10 years ago | | |

In Ontario, a lot of effort (TV ads, billboards, etc.) goes into Kids Help Phone (kidshelpphone.ca), which is a call center staffed with counsellors to help kids and teens. But kids and teens are moving away from having a landline telephone in their bedroom, and towards smartphones and iPods and Internet connected devices. If this study helps make those services easier for the current generation of kids and teens to access, then that's worthwhile.

What I find concerning is that overall Internet/computer use isn't a measure in the study. The conclusion ("health service providers should monitor SNSs more to provide support to youth") seems reasonable, but it isn't going to be enough to cover all the ways a kid could demonstrate a cry for help (e.g. tumblr blogs, fanfic involving people from school).

redblacktree 10 years ago | | |

Something like this?

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zosQ90T3srs/UeqiEbif-kI/AAAAAAAAB...

anon4 10 years ago | | |

I do. I didn't have much trouble with waking up on time, actually. Though by the time I was 18 my sleep time gradually got later and later, until I was actually missing sleep for real. Then again, my school was about half an hour away by bus, so I'd wake up at 6:30 and be there by 7:30 and very rarely classes started at 7:30.

madaxe_again 10 years ago | |

Right. As their own statistics show, the average age in the groups from least to most use increases from 13.8 to 15.8, and there's a big separation by grade level in terms of use that supports that observation, too. That's a pretty big gap in terms of developmental status and, bluntly, levels of teenage angst, so perhaps while there is clear correlation here, there is not causation. I think this is the clincher - "Conversely, studies conducted among university students found no such relationship [between mental health and SNS use]." What's the main difference? Lack of the steep developmental range seen in early teens. They also openly state this:

"The cross-sectional nature of the data precludes evaluation of temporality and causality of the observed relationship between use of SNSs and mental health problems."

So, when the press run with "Social media causes brain damage in children, think of the children!", remember what the paper actually says.

Personally, I think from anecdotal experience that heavy SN use fucks you up no end, but these findings don't prove this.

outofcuriosity 10 years ago | | |

There've been other studies to this effect, though, and not just for adolescents. Papers often attribute the effects to a combination of lifestyle comparison, echo chambers, and emotional contagion. Check this one out: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pd

Now imagine your entire friend network is nonstop angst. I'd go mad, too.

It could be a just-so story, but I think overuse of SNSs allows our social skills to atrophy. The brain repurposes structures that go underused, and the structures that maintain one's face-to-face social functioning are no different.

Maintaining relationships in realspace is different than maintaining them in the async-y & memetic environment of cyberspace. Of course there is granularity--one can have a healthy analog&digital relationship, but if a SNS connection is a part of an individual's requirement for a friendship, then there is probably some deficit the individual is unaware of.

I'd also argue that this is symptomatic of the growing pains heavy internet users experience in their adolescence-to-young-adult stage. The group self-selects for introverts who have a preexisting difficulty with social interaction. However, we all require some social interaction (analog or digital), to greater and lesser extents, and so it perpetuates.

Books and art end up being a better outlet, but in my experience that's a discovery which people can only make for themselves.

xixi77 10 years ago |

Now, let's see how long it takes until we see until someone cites this as evidence that social networking cause poor functioning :)

TeMPOraL 10 years ago | |

I'm bookmarking this thread for exactly that purpose.

My bet: before the end of next month someone will cite it on HN as evidence that social network cause poor functioning.

mrdrozdov 10 years ago | |

To clarify, this document's argument is actually that poor functioning is associated with higher levels of social networking?

Cakez0r 10 years ago | | |

The point is that 'associated with' definitely does not mean 'causes'. But somebody will probably try to use this paper as evidence of a causal link.

schmidtc 10 years ago |

Is frequent HN consumption associated with poor functioning among programmers?

_lce0 10 years ago | |

In the past I joked that whenever I'm coding something really really fun, I missed a couple of days of HN, as always YMMV

swalsh 10 years ago | | |

It's really true though, i've also found my online consumption is inversely correlated with the level of motivation I have for the project i'm working on.

The social media we consume has been very precisely tuned for our consumption preferences. If you're not particularly motivated, you might be inclined to gravitate towards easy to consume media. Social media would likely be near the top of that list. So heavy users, would likely also be the lowly motivated producers.

jsprogrammer 10 years ago | | |

Amdahl's law pretty much guarantees this will always be the case. There is a fixed time resource and all the work needs to be done in it.

cmollis 10 years ago | |

My hn fix goes unfulfilled when I'm building something interesting.

lordCarbonFiber 10 years ago |

I think leveraging virtual spaces to provide greater access mental health support is a great step forward to improve outcomes for troubled adolescents. This definitely opens interesting avenues for future research.

joezydeco 10 years ago |

How about second-hand social networking? Parents that are constantly glued to their phones instead of interacting with their children?

FussyZeus 10 years ago | |

Not to mention the kids who grow up thinking that's just normal to constantly have your phone in your face.

birbal 10 years ago | | |

My kids don't think its normal. They actually complain when i have the phone stuck to my ear. Our assumptions on what and how kids learn from us are over-simplified.

09bjb 10 years ago |

Interesting to see how instant-gratification-type habits like endlessly browsing your news feed are the new low-grade drug habits. I'm just waiting for the study that finally proves that surfing twitter for more than 60 minutes causes a 300% higher likelihood that you'll visit a porn site in the next five.

Raphmedia 10 years ago | |

I've taken on myself to customize my social network experience using injected CSS with extensions such as Stylish or Greasemonkey.

Simply adding a noisy background to my Facebook feed (a sunset, really) made it so I spent about half the time I used to there. I also changed all the hues of blue to be red.

I don't seem to mindlessly surf Facebook now.

They tailor those internet "drugs" very well and messing with a few values will remove a lot of the addiction. It's some pretty interesting psychology that is going on and social media won't hesitate to manipulate us in order to get more ads view.

mailslot 10 years ago |

One thing that isn't accounted for is a drastic change toward an indoor culture. Kids are often forbidden to leave their home and socialize in a normal context. If the only option available to interact with friends are social networking sites, then it's the parents that are damaging their own offspring.

coldtea 10 years ago |

We can just change the definition of "proper functioning" so that all is well again. That's how we tackle most things anyway...