Yeah “smartphones” are the issue here…
The study’s authors recommended restricting smartphone and social media access
This comes out of nowhere in the article. It is not smartphones per se. It is the social media kids access that does it, and no wonder, we all know how insane that is for an adult mind.
While probably not possible on this scale of a study, they should have looked how much % of phone use was social media, and I am sure they’d have found a correlation between all the negatives they listed and the amount of social media they consumed.
That also means taking away smartphones is no use here if kids can access the same social media via computers.
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.
The study…analyzed self-reported questionnaire results from more than 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24.
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.
Really, I think that headline applies to anyone, not just kids.
… he says, posting from a smartphone.
That constant feed of notifications and prompts to partake in the daily/hourly event/contest/whatever from a bunch of apps is enough to make the most resilient mind kinda twitchy and anxious. This isn’t surprising in the least.
