The Problem with Teens Isn't Smartphones–It's Their Families(grimoiremanor.substack.com) |
The Problem with Teens Isn't Smartphones–It's Their Families(grimoiremanor.substack.com) |
Ironically, the whole thing reads like someone did all the research and writing on a smartphone and didn't take the time to really construct an argument.
I don't disagree with the title—my assumption is also that parenting would have the largest impact—but the article does a very bad job justifying it and the conclusion that therefore technology isn't worth talking about is absurd. We do a lot of research that is aimed at helping out with marginal gains because marginal gains matter! The entire field of K-12 education exists to be a marginal improvement on top of what parents are already offering. Should we stop researching that field because there's evidence that parents are the single biggest factor in educational outcomes?
Most of our policy choices surrounding children are there explicitly to be a safety net for children whose parents can't provide the environment that they need.
Everyone knows phones are a net negative for most children. You really don't need a study. Just go check out a local bus stop and see kids staring at their phones.
> The median amount of time a teenager in the US spends on their phone each week is estimated to be around 31 to 32 hours.
Do we think this is good? How confident are you that this is not harmful? Would you be willing to bet your kids development on it?
Couldn't this just be a sign of overmedication? I can't see a clear cut causal relationship here.
transfer of learning is a scientific fact but what are the applications of a bunch of stuff we need to learn as teens? Linus Pauling's thesis that won a Nobel? again, transfer of learning isn't a magic bullet that its effects spans across everything you do in your life, nor it's an easy concept to explain to children and get them convinced that learning stuff that you'll forget in some months or years is actually good!
then we have the amount of stuff parsed to children. take a look at data showing the amount of subjects of science taught on North Americans schools and Japanese; now take a look which culture has a better understanding of science!
etc.
schools needs to grow on other areas than parsing knowledge of the natural world, like emotional resilience, collaboration skills, how to deal with grief, not increasing score metrics that also has a problem on its own, like letting behind some districts (thus making it worse) that don't have resources to keep with advancement; and to make a counterpoint with the website OP, i strongly believe and trust professionals teaching children these skills than a bunch of unprepared parents that i have my doubts even half of them actually spend any time reading evidence based tips on how to grow children, let alone meta-thinking about their relationship with them
I too support more investment in good old fashioned sports and arts.
It's an article of writing the way that a shirt is an article of clothing.
Look, I don't have any answers here. I'm not involved with teens. I don't really know much about this and maybe the author is correct. But I can spot a bad argument, and fixating only on suicide data and dismissing everything else as "unreliable" (based on a single small study) doesn't seem the right approach.
In addition "mental health" is complex and most people suffering from poor mental health don't commit suicide. There are different types of "mental heath" problems one can have, and it seems entirely plausible that some lead to relatively high rates of suicide and others have much lower rates.
For example, one possibility is that we DO have mental health crisis in young population, but availability and proficiency of mental health today avoids the suicide scenario. Plus there are tremendous number of significant mental issues which might not result in that most drastic of outcomes. Not claiming that's the case, just that the very first paragraph of data selection feels massively arbitrary and hand-waved.
Of course I am not arguing that kegger parties and smoking weed were positive things for kids, and certainly some small % of these kids were doing worse drugs, but I am quite certain from my own (fairly broad) annecdata that the root cause of these kids' self destructive behavior was their fucked up families.
And now parents can point their fingers at social media. History repeats, but the difference this time is that kids aren't put into rehabs away from the family dysfunction and in an environment where some degree of self examination and self work is promoted.
When I was very young, I thought that my family dysfunction was an outlier, but my experiences in life lead me to believe that it is the norm and that healthy families are the outlier. Of course, that's my own experience, but I am a greybeard now and have interacted with a large number of individuals across the full spectrum of social strata so the assessment of my anecdata sure seems more poignant with each passing year...
For sake of argument, let’s say the issue is their families. Why are so many families turning out to be harmful environments?
My pet theory is that this erosion of social contact and propagation of toxicity is affecting all of us, so it seems natural that many family environments will suffer.
I think it’s too simplistic to conclude that “teens using phones” is the whole issue, but do think that phones and the underlying tech they currently represent is responsible for causing major systemic issues that in turn tend to effect teens more.
Singling out the suicide rate as a proxy for mental health seems like a major problem.
SPOILER ALERT BELOW.
The comic is a criticism of surveillance devices on children and the smartphone addiction of adults. (Even the adults were zombified in their interactions with each other.) Tommy's solution was to rally the babies to drown all devices in water -- and to continue breaking them until their parents gave up buying new ones.
I am also curious about the mentioning of Indian males in the text alongside native American women, with the chart excluding Indian males, this is also somewhat confusing.
It is hard to get a sense of the actual data supporting the claims in the article.
I also found this confusing at first, but I realized that the author uses "American Indian" and "Native American" interchangeably. In the chart, this group is labeled "Native American Men".
The biggest mental health effect is the ADHD epidemic it's bringing on.
It is well known that nicotine, as a stimulant, improves several ADHD symptoms (ex. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009130570...). It also improves negative symptoms in schizophrenia which is why they tend to smoke much more than the average population. Since smoking is very uncommon nowadays I feel like the people who would have self-medicated (i.e. a pack of cigs a day) in the past don't exist anymore. How many high schoolers have you met who smoke a pack of cigs?
The only time I have ever seen Tiktok videos is from dating someone younger and watching them engage with Tiktok over their shoulder out of curiosity.
To me, it felt like my brain was being scrambled. The worst part was I could tell they were addicted to that same feeling.
It is not really fair if a person is addicted to having their brain scrambled while I found the experience absolutely horrendous.
If I engage with Tolstoy/Dostoevsky audiobooks in my free time instead of having my brain scrambled, there is obviously going to be huge carry over to all sorts of other activities. Focusing at work is just one of them.
Even the suicide data that they decide is the proper measure of mental health, and according to them proves that teens don't have a problem, shows a 2x increase in teen girl suicide.
I'm going to so something I almost never do, and flag, since this is just bait. I would love to read a case for this with a better argument however.
That said I have little doubt that less aware families are not enforcing sleep times as much as they used to. The moral panics on TVs and video games came with the advent of the tech then hung around for decades. People knew that kids awake late at night was bad for them. With phones, how many high schoolers have them in their rooms next to their beds? How many of us do?
There's plenty of evidence, but Europe is not US. US is federated, but has single entity that gather information in one language. Europe is much more fragmented and outside of some EU stats (that are sometimes incomplete) there isn't a single source of truth to get.
The reality is simple: it's a little bit of everything. Parents are busting their ass to pay for expensive housing and overall high costs of living. Attention is grabbed by greedy corps that don't care if you get depressed about your situation as long as they get their euro/dollar/whatever and kids are neck deep in illusion of great created by influencers.
These issues are too subtle, complicated, and distributed for current social science tools. I kind of think the whole idea of science being able to improve societal well-being beyond the basics is misguided at this point.
Bullying via social media and group chats is endemic, and phones function as a massive signal amplifier in this regard.
Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence which link early smartphone use to poor outcomes in social skills, degraded critical thinking ability, and elevated rates of depression.
This feels very much like someone picking data to fit their hypothesis.
> "What you do speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
For example, I know that I can get fairly cranky about ageism in tech, but I also understand where some of it comes from. My generation has been a pretty big dumpster fire, when it comes to examples. We're the Gordon Gecko "Greed is Good" generation. Our kids kind of took the brunt of it, and, in my opinion, the world is on fire, basically due to our generation's selfishness (and we're not done, yet).
While there are always greedy and selfish people, celebrating greed was new.
I don't know about suicide rates but let's look at antidepressants. From 2016 to 2022, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate among U.S. adolescents increased by 66.3%. This has been a steady increase, not just covid.
Anyone with teenagers in their home knows that a lot of kids are medicated and have high level of angst. Everyone knows that social media is almost always a net negative on their self image and overall well being. That's not to mention the sexualization of children on TikTok and Instagram and the perverse incentive now that only fans is an option and increasingly normalized.
Children on phones are distracted. I'm even distracted and I have pretty high self control. They don't belong anywhere near a school. Maybe they're neutral, but are we really willing to bet your children's well-being on that? Shouldn't we try to have them live a life more similar to that of every other teenager born before 1990?
Parents experience similar negative consequences of social media doom-scrolling. I don't need a study to tell me whats right in front of my eyes.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e20230...
I also was thrown off by the use of the word "Indian". I know "American Indian" is still used by the US government and in many circles, but it is jarring to see it like this. Literally thought it was actual transplants from India that were the subject, and was confused why the chart was showing "Native American" instead.
And FWIW, I don't think smartphones are the cause of mental health issues, even if it's an easy target. And bullying was prevalent long before we had social media. Just on the theme of speculating, I think the ennui of youth comes from the wider world. AGW, the growing political divide, the tendency of everyone to catastrophize and fear monger about literally everything -- if you slightly disagree with a choice, hold it as guaranteeing the end of humanity (see Elon Musk as a hilarious proto-example of this) -- to the point where everything feels broken and dire. And more recently teens live in a world where there aren't even really career hopes because everything, we are told, is going to be done by robots and AI.
Kids - even 17 year olds - are infantalized and treated as if they don't have anything to contribute. They are "supposed" to just do what they are told and follow a "normal" path of going to school and then getting a job and working. A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge. A job that will force them to wake up early and commute late and leave them with no time or energy to engage in the hobbies that they never actually cultivated because doing metalworking is too loud and doing programming is wasting time on a computer and flight training is too expensive and, and, and, and...
The amount of success I've had just VALIDATING kids is fucking incredible. Talk to them as if their idea is worth hearing, and then ask them questions that make them challenge their own ideas. Whether it's about a project they think would be cool, or about how they feel about something that happened with their parents. When they can devote time to think about it, without feeling like discussing it is an attack on anyone or an imposition to the listener - they sort shit out just like anyone else.
And whenever I find myself kind of marveling at - say - an 11 year old speaking with what feels like emotional intelligence beyond their years, I remember that in the early 1900s, 11 year old's might have been fucking floor managers at a textile industry, or pickaxe-swinging coal miners. Kids are entirely capable at 11 years old and it only comes out if you engage them in ways that hone that capability. Which should obviously NEVER be forced or coerced labor. But you can talk to them like they are adults.
In any case, I've been mentoring kids since before cell phones and not a damn thing has changed. If the kid's distracted, you don't need to worry about what is able to distract them - you need to worry about why they were bored enough (or preoccupied) to get distracted in the first place. And that's really the heart of the whole thing: people really want for the kids or the "mentally infirm" or the OTHER to have to do better when the simple truth is that the person needs to be doing better. The parent, the teacher, the mentor, the friend; they have to be meeting the HUMAN BEING (who happens to be a child) at their level rather than feeling disappointed that the kid didn't meet them at some other level.
> A school where they aren't allowed to learn about what they are interested in, and can only learn the government-mandated testable knowledge
We need to be careful here. While kids should have some opportunities for what they are interested in, the world doesn't need many professional video game or sport players. We need to force kids who are really interested in some things to learn skills that the world will need once they grow up. We are not in a "post scarcity" world, and there is no reason to think we will be, so they need to learn useful skills to contribute to society. It doesn't take long to teach someone to run a pick-axe (assuming they are physically able and we don't care much about safety) - but glad the world needs skills that are much harder to learn.
Some things today are simply more addictive than others—and often deliberately designed that way by large corporations. More importantly, they’re everywhere and carry intense peer pressure. I never experienced that with the things people used to worry about. I listened to a lot of so-called “devil’s music” and played plenty of first-person shooters, and it was never quite the same.
Also, sadly, psychology is hyper relativistic.. the same person with a different psychological education can become suicidal or give zero damn about the same situation.
Or even like it. Reminds me of a quote about solitude: "I live on what others die of." (Michelangelo)
Gay people existed well before smartphones, you don't think sexuality anxiety might've been a significant issue for people in less tolerant societies?
Yes, most of us have a gut instinct that no harm was done, but that's likely down to presentism and selective perception.
When was it decided that it's not true that popular culture and technology can have a destructive influence on people? This was decided before I was born, so why should it be my duty to accept it as true?
The more I notice this, the more crazy it seems. When was it decided that the TV should be center in every home and treated like the most important thing in life? Those are just people in a studio, yet most people and especially old people consider those people to be gods, deserving the greatest reverence. Who told them to buy a TV and put it into their homes? How could that become normal?
Popular music is just that: popular, and since people like to appear distinct from the masses, some do it via music.
I don't disagree with the rest, but 'rap music has a negative influence' is extremely reactionary.
At the same time, society tends to blame the shiny new thing for all that ails it. And there's always a shiny new thing.
Get the fuck out with that nonsense.
I understand the instinct to be concerned about prescribing indefinite, powerful, psychoactive substances to teenagers, but just because it's understandable doesn't mean it's necessarily correct.
I won't belabor the point, but while I will always provide for bias in my consideration, my sample subjects are the absolute least of my concerns. It was a wide enough variety, and I've compared it to enough adult-oriented psychoanalytical literature, that I feel comfortable speaking confidently about it.
As far as needing to be careful, I agree! We should ALWAYS be careful when doing things in the interest of other people and children especially. I fully support mandatory learning because even aside from practical skills, an ignorant populace is empirically more likely to foment and tolerate a fascist government. I think kids should be forced to learn all kinds of things, and a much wider variety of things than we currently teach. Where I make the distinction is that I think they should also be ALLOWED to learn the things they WANT to learn. By which I mean we shouldn't just tolerate it, we should make explicit space for it. Whatever it is. And that can be distasteful to a lot of people, but the situation - now - is that a kid CAN learn about anything they want to learn about, via the internet, so your option is to facilitate that curiosity into either satisfied disinterest or an upstanding pursuit, or to calcify it as a taboo.
It may be audacious to talk to kids in graphic or sensational terms about violence, but when their school getting shot up is a real daily possibility, it's disingenuous to NOT talk about it. THEY will be talking about it. So when YOU don't talk about it, they can feel how artificial it seems, just like anyone else.
So, yes: learn arithmetic, so you can learn algebra, so you can learn geometry, so you can learn physics. But if we have to cut chemistry to make room for some individual learning time, let's do it. Shove the practical parts of it into a cooking class and leave anything more complex to higher or elective ed.
But, that aside, it's an odd thing to try to contextualize. Do I THINK that there were more kids that were "troubled"? No, anecdotally, I don't think I saw anything that I would consider alarming. But I never really saw any kid as "troubled". Just "focusing on the wrong thing" or "thinking about it in a confusing way", or "trying to reconcile two incompatible ideas/philosophies", etc.
Meanwhile, my peers would complain about things being "worse" or specific kids being "unable to work with" or whatever. But when the kids were shuffled and it was my time to work with them, I didn't really have any issues. There were kids trying to tear down the walls, sure, but that's a lot of fun if you chase it. And, more importantly, it's physically exhausting. So sooner than later, all of the kids just want to chill. And once they're chill, they like to discuss all kinds of things. Especially if they can be related to the physical activities they were just doing. And since kids are generally ignorant, you can take all kinds of winding paths of rhetoric to link one idea to another, and they tend to stay excited to chase the logic (learning is fun; it's part of why we play video games).
So, answering your question is kind of odd because while I would say "no", that may not be your standard of measurement and I'm just one anecdote anyway. If the statistics say it's getting "worse", I can trust that, personally. Just - like you said - I tend to think of the "worse" as describing the cause, not the symptom.