Children, especially girls, who use smartphones before they are 13 years old may have worse mental health outcomes when they’re older, a new study suggests.
About 48% of young women who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts, compared to 28% of females who had smartphones by 13 or older.
In young men, 31% of those who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts and 20% of males who had smartphones by 13 or older reported having severe suicidal thoughts.
Damn, smart phones need to be a controlled substance.
Parental controls really do seem like an impossible tight rope to walk for parents too strict and the kid willvjust figure out a way around them defeating the point entirely. Too lax and they might as well not be there.
I got way too much unrestricted access to the internet and I know it fucked me up. I was already genetically predisposed to having bad mental health but basically unrestricted internet access from the age of 8 did not help.
The days of dial up were the wild west online. Waiting sometimes hours for your music and porn to download through Kazaa or Limewire. And inevitably getting something totally unrelated just to troll you.
Damn, smart phones need to be a controlled substance.
Damn, that’s not a small sample
I bet you 90% of those didn’t have any parental controls or even parents monitoring their usage after the fact.
Parental controls really do seem like an impossible tight rope to walk for parents too strict and the kid willvjust figure out a way around them defeating the point entirely. Too lax and they might as well not be there.
Yeah it’s really more about monitoring usage and educating them. The tablet/phone is not a babysitter, but many parents seem to treat it like one.
I got way too much unrestricted access to the internet and I know it fucked me up. I was already genetically predisposed to having bad mental health but basically unrestricted internet access from the age of 8 did not help.
The days of dial up were the wild west online. Waiting sometimes hours for your music and porn to download through Kazaa or Limewire. And inevitably getting something totally unrelated just to troll you.