This push for tech abstinence will end much like sex abstinence. Instead of "wait until you're an adult" we should instead be teaching our child good habits. The issue is of course that most adults don't have good habits for children to modle either.
My daughter has had access to a tablet since she was 12 months old. She's 5 currently, but she's not a tablet zombie as I so commonly see reported of toddlers with free access to phones. Just yesterday, my daughter freely, without my intervention, put away her tablet to play with a child who happened into the room we were in. She never touched it again until we were bad into the car and begged me to leave and play with her new friend outside instead of ask for another set of headphones for the friend.
This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. As someone who grew up with the internet in elementary school, I feel extremely confident, I can keep this up even as my preschooler turns into a kid into a teen.
I just think it's a shame that I'm surrounded by parents with intention of teaching her kids about how to responsibly use their devices or they want to deny their kid access at all like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal with infinite stroll once they turn 18.
Hadiat's views aren't as different as you might think. He distinguishes between tech and social media specifically. He thinks tech and the internet are great for kids. However, he thinks that social media before developing meatspace social skills is very damaging, especially for teen girls.
He actually says what you're arguing for is akin to saying we should give kids a bit of nicotine earlier on so they know how to smoke before they're adults and won't be as affected by it then.
That’s why I remain in favor of the 21 drinking age. By the time you turn 21 you’ve had several years of drinking experience and can handle it responsibly
If you switch nicotine out for a different socially acceptable drug – alcohol – and suddenly that's not so unreasonable. It's long been argued that the US model of "no alcohol until you're 21" followed by full (and largely unsupervised) access to as much alcohol as you can afford leads to more young adult problems with alcohol than something more akin to various western European cultures where some small degree of supervised alcohol consumption before being legally allowed to buy and consume unlimited amounts.
I see this a lot where "${thing} is bad" leads to people saying "we should stop letting people have ${thing}" and trying to raise kids as if ${thing} doesn't exist or as if they can choose to not be addicted / influenced by ${thing}, regardless of how realistic that is. Pick your vice, sex, drugs, guns, rock and roll, pop music, movies, TV, the internet at large, social media, communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, power tools, knives, etc. And it seems to me, more often than not, heavily "abstinence only" treatment of ${thing} results in far more harm than in trying to model ways to healthily deal with the fact that ${thing} exists and may vary well be something you have to deal with.
I think of it like an immune system response. Your body needs to encounter pathogens in order to learn how to deal with them. Sure it would be ideal if you never ever got sick at all. But since that's basically impossible, and we know that trying to do that often results in unintended side effects, it's better instead to teach people (and their immune systems) how to deal with things. People get taught to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and immune systems get vaccines, and exposure to pathogens by not keeping our kids in hermetically sealed environments. Should you go out an intentionally get your kid sick? No, generally speaking you shouldn't. But that's exactly the goal of a vaccine. Get your body a little sick, so that it's better prepared to deal with the real thing when it gets there. Or see also chicken pox parties (though I don't know if that's still a thing or even recommended anymore)
I didn't find anything in the article about nicotine, but that sounds like a ridiculous comparison. Nicotine-processing skills aren't generally required for a successful life these days and in the future.
I was very much going to take a similar approach to help train a child to know what the right behavior is. I have four children and it turns out they're all very different in terms of varying amounts of self control. I can definitely with my second one to use it at appropriate times but my oldest is way too impulsive and doesn't have the self control to exercise good behaviors (this isn't just a smartphone problem).
I'm in the same boat...2 kids. The one who always wants a tablet also always want snacks and candy. Any good resources on curbing this before it gets worse?
It's still about good habits and modelling good behavior.
Millions of dollars of research goes into making Doritos and Coca Cola hyper palatable yet it's been 5 years since I tasted either of them.
It's more holistic than just telling your kids to not eat Doritos. You have to inculcate skills and decision making. Such as the ability to cook delicious food. The ability to meal plan and shop accordingly. If you have no idea how to cook, no cultural norms about eating out only once in a while as a treat rather than a habit, then when you're hungry you'll jump for the packet of chips.
Unfortunately not only are we slowly forgetting these skills, we also come up with galaxy brained theories about why that's a good thing.
This is a key part. As a parent it’s hard to distinguish between parent guidance and the way the kid would be even without our intervention. In any case, Haidt’s argument is one of public health. The claim is that many/most parents don’t know how to provide that teaching even if they were of a mind to be intentional about parenting.
> like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal . . . once they turn 18
There are so many things like this. Fortunately one’s offspring need not get cut off at 18. The challenge is progressively cutting apron strings so any particular threshold isn’t a cliff.
What qualifies as good habits for a tween using TikTok or instagram, and is it actually reasonable to expect their developing brains to be able to carry out instructions regarding limiting their usage of highly-addictive platforms?
I guess my observation is that most parents, even competent ones, fail to get this right and end up with phone or tablet addicted children. Maybe there is some approach that teaches them a better way, but I wonder if avoiding devices entirely is a less risky path if you aren’t confident in your ability to teach them how to use devices.
> This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices.
Do you mean like exposure to how different cultures live with technology?
There's an assumption lurking here that I feel needs to be dragged out into the open. This entire line of reasoning assumes that there is something teachable that would circumvent screen addiction, with a secondary assumption that kids are programmable and will accept whatever instruction is provided regardless of competing inputs. This seems questionable that a child can be armed to compete against a couple decades of psyops research by some of the best funded private organizations on the planet.
I don't see anything good coming from depriving teens of their freedom of speech as a scapegoat for mental health problems that are caused by other factors in the first place.
The problem is with a society where we deprive minors of their freedom and independence because we refuse to pay for basic public safety and basic public transportation. Instead, we make helicopter parenting into the norm and then blame the one domain (the internet) where they are capable of experiencing some freedom for the problems caused by a lack of freedom. If we actually want to fix the youth mental health problem, we need to ensure that kids can safely go outside and play or go places without parents having to follow them 24/7 like they could in past generations.
> we need to ensure that kids can safely go outside and play or go places without parents having to follow them 24/7 like they could in past generations.
Where in the world is it unsafe for children to play outside? As far as I can see children don't play outside simply because they are not encouraged to.
>This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices.
No. It's the result of you having time to spend with her instead of working 2 or 3 back-breaking jobs like many parents have to, and her having a safe and stable material livelihood so she doesn't constantly desire escape.
They could just be lucky, and have a kid with that kind of attitude (on top of the things you mentioned). I've seen a number of stable families (at least outwardly) around school/work whose kids are glued to the damn things.
What really makes me sad is when I'm at a restaurant or shop or similar and there is a parent with a small child getting restless and they pacify them by sticking a phone with Youtube in their face.
You need a support system to be able to model good behavior. If you barely have energy to make it to bed at night then you definitely won't have energy to entertain a hyperactive toddler. Things like having grandparents help raise kids and spend time with them instead of turning on YouTube can help.
The only problem is that his methodology is no better than lining up time-series data and finding spurious correlations[1]. If we did this with any other problem, we would be happy to point out the problem with this approach.
Nutritional studies have more scientific rigor than what Haidt is hocking and we're happy to point out standards of evidence. All I'm asking is that we don't alter our standard of evidence simply because we agree with the conclusion. It's bad science and a bad way of making decisions.
One of the points he makes -- and that I don't see much discussed when it comes to Haidt's work -- is that Haidt's prescriptions for a solution are dangerous. If Haidt is wrong, one of the most unsettling consequences of relying on his solutions is that we stop looking for the real causes of any degradation in childhood mental health. Even if he's right, his solutions will have all sorts of unintended consequences, including loss of privacy on the internet, lack of access by children to resources that are in fact helpful to their mental health, and violations of various legal and constitutional human rights frameworks.
It's not possible to blind the experiment's test subjects. Again, all I'm asking for is the level of critique to be comparable to the strength of the claims. We are eager to critique lower stakes claims, but for some reason Haidt typically gets a pass here. All I'm asking for is consistency.
I'm not sure how to put this, but effect size and causation are different things. It's a category mistake to compare.
Risks have to be based in reality. Our greatest reality check is the scientific process.
We can make up risks endlessly, see the AI-as-an-existential-threat debate. It simply is not grounded in reality. All I'm asking is transparency. People make non-scientific claims and conclusions all the time. Folks just need to be honest that this is what they're doing so they aren't fooling themselves and others.
> Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults.
I stopped there. We're talking specifically about teenage depression and the cited study is adults. If Haidt wants us to take results from one subgroup and apply it to another, he has to provide evidence. That's how this process works.
I tend to think that these are more symptoms than causes. And the disease is that we just put way too much pressure on youth. You need to work hard for your whole youth to get into a good school, then work hard there to get a good job, then work hard for the rest of your life. One serious mistake (these days this might just be the wrong comment) and it's all over. A subset of your peers will take great pleasure in cancelling you for clout points. You also need to have great extracurriculars in order to get into the good school, you need to have a fulfilling social life, you need to be good at relationships and get experience while you're young. You need to stay fit and active, yet also pick a lucrative field that generally ends up with you sitting in a chair all day. All this while evidently the world is ending in a few years due to climate, you're constantly being told that one of the political parties seeks to destroy the world, you're constantly being shat on due to your skin color no matter who you are, housing is completely out of reach, enemy nations constantly circle the west looking for blood, etc.
There's too much stuff and for me personally, the only solution has been to let most of it go, to try to care about as little of it as possible. I'm happier now than I've ever been. But students often have no choice but to care since this stuff affects their futures so much, and it results in insane amounts of depression and anxiety, the same sort I certainly experienced before I had a plan more figured out.
> We expect market mechanisms to matter. So if you hurt your customers, they’re not likely to come back. But this is a market failure because the kids are not the customers. The kids aren’t giving Facebook money. The kids are the product. Their attention is the product. The customers are the advertisers. So we have a market failure.
I’m not for more regulation or big government. But I find this difficult to argue with.
Their customers do not care about damage done, and the people being damaged mostly have no idea.
This is the problem that often gets overlooked in these "tech is bad" discussions. It's not the tech itself. It's not the concept of social media.
The problem is when every aspect of tech is corrupted to maximize ad impressions (and this goes beyond social media - the vast majority of consumer technology is chasing "engagement").
Regulating away this disgrace of a business model and tech will become much more sane & safe, including for children.
Not just ads, the whole model is rotten! It should cause bankruptcy through fines to run a company which harvests your data and piecemeals features at tiered pricing (and worse: subscription) to maximize yield from you like you're a soybean plant in a crop! This is a game of brinksmanship between companies and [apparent] customers these days!
We fix this by mandating all subscription services at least show you the Present Value of a perpetuity at the cashflow of the subscription on checkout (discounted at the highest US bond yield); ideally they must also offer to the customer the option to instead pay that Present Value in lieu of the recurring subscription charge (but also, when the customer quits the company must return the difference of the perpetuity and the annuity representing the whole period in the subscription).
The social media I use today is primarily content oriented (reddit for entertainment, HN for eng news, occasional tiktok for funny videos with my wife). I left Facebook behind about 10 years ago, and left Twitter when it was morphed into whatever it is now.
As a parent of two children, we will hold off on social networking media for a long time most likely. Content can be valuable, and our children largely use their devices for content interests (YouTube) and creation (various apps and games like Minecraft).
I would love to see studies that better explain the effects of these habits as they relate to the "networking" part of social networks and media. I'd argue right now that my LinkedIn consumption is probably more harmful than my TikTok consumption, in terms of depression.
Let them have old Nokias. Calls and texts only. Inexpensive (not a theft magnet), durable, long battery life.
No social media (or online gaming even?) until at least 16, if not 18 or 21, seems entirely reasonable given how much it messes with the heads of full-grown adults.
We’re finally about to the point that our kids kinda need something. Payphones don’t exist anymore, after all.
We’re planing on a shared Nokia at first, maybe separate ones as they get older.
We figure if they want a smartphone, they can have one when they can pay for both the phone and the data line themselves. If they can hold down a part-time job they might be responsible enough for it. If it matters that much to them, they’ll do what they need to get it. If not… guess it wasn’t that important.
A cellular Apple Watch seems like a decent possibility. Has anyone tried this?
Has phone, messages, weather, location sharing, ability to google basic stuff. But very, very hard to use compulsively. You can even add things such as instagram apps but they're just not that compelling in a small format.
The problem with older phones is an interminable deluge of fake robocalls and soliciting text messages which make them practically unusable. Smart phones can filter these out but come with a different flavors of cancer
I know a couple who are teachers, elementary and high school. They said the students are always on their phones, with earbuds, but trying to get them to stop can be dangerous. Students get aggressive and sometimes violent when teachers try to enforce decorum and attention.
I think banning phones in schools is an urgent need, at the very least.
It’s deeply weird to me that we couldn’t have a Walkman, pager, game boy, portable tv, or small camera in class without it getting taken away if it was spotted, but now we’re like “yeah sure they can have a combo device that’s all of those, why not?”
Students have always done whatever they could to get their own way. Once we took away basically all the power that teachers had, the students just had to put their foot down to get their own way.
I get that a lot of the "power" that teachers had was inappropriate, just as spanking, but now they often can't even call the parents and have the child sent home. If you can't do anything about a student disobeying the rules, what can you do?
It's not the teachers' fault, and expecting them to fix the situation is pointless.
Around a century ago, after a lot of pressure due to people hurting themselves and their families by over-consuming liquor, the USA passed the 18th amendment.
I'm told that at least some of the campaigners were originally aiming for just liquor, not all alcohol.
I won't be surprised if history repeats, and some chunk of the world bans all social media (including forums like this one) despite the majority of the harm being concentrated into specific social networks and the strong drive that led to it being a thing in the first place.
Not without breaking several laws, and potentially putting people in danger - how do you call 911 in an emergency if the school is in a signal blackout?
I have long thought that there should be a network protocol that would achieve that in practice, but which would let emergency calls through.
Transponders that could be deployed in settings such as schools, hospitals and movie theatres to tell devices to enter a limited mode. Support for the protocol would be compulsory.
But I would think that the telecom industry does not want that.
Readit News
https://archive.ph/cCpHU
My daughter has had access to a tablet since she was 12 months old. She's 5 currently, but she's not a tablet zombie as I so commonly see reported of toddlers with free access to phones. Just yesterday, my daughter freely, without my intervention, put away her tablet to play with a child who happened into the room we were in. She never touched it again until we were bad into the car and begged me to leave and play with her new friend outside instead of ask for another set of headphones for the friend.
This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices. As someone who grew up with the internet in elementary school, I feel extremely confident, I can keep this up even as my preschooler turns into a kid into a teen.
I just think it's a shame that I'm surrounded by parents with intention of teaching her kids about how to responsibly use their devices or they want to deny their kid access at all like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal with infinite stroll once they turn 18.
I think his takes are pretty accurate.
I see this a lot where "${thing} is bad" leads to people saying "we should stop letting people have ${thing}" and trying to raise kids as if ${thing} doesn't exist or as if they can choose to not be addicted / influenced by ${thing}, regardless of how realistic that is. Pick your vice, sex, drugs, guns, rock and roll, pop music, movies, TV, the internet at large, social media, communism, capitalism, socialism, fascism, power tools, knives, etc. And it seems to me, more often than not, heavily "abstinence only" treatment of ${thing} results in far more harm than in trying to model ways to healthily deal with the fact that ${thing} exists and may vary well be something you have to deal with.
I think of it like an immune system response. Your body needs to encounter pathogens in order to learn how to deal with them. Sure it would be ideal if you never ever got sick at all. But since that's basically impossible, and we know that trying to do that often results in unintended side effects, it's better instead to teach people (and their immune systems) how to deal with things. People get taught to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and immune systems get vaccines, and exposure to pathogens by not keeping our kids in hermetically sealed environments. Should you go out an intentionally get your kid sick? No, generally speaking you shouldn't. But that's exactly the goal of a vaccine. Get your body a little sick, so that it's better prepared to deal with the real thing when it gets there. Or see also chicken pox parties (though I don't know if that's still a thing or even recommended anymore)
If it’s parents and teachers vs legions of well-funded PhDs at Meta and TikTok, I know who I would bet on winning…
Millions of dollars of research goes into making Doritos and Coca Cola hyper palatable yet it's been 5 years since I tasted either of them.
It's more holistic than just telling your kids to not eat Doritos. You have to inculcate skills and decision making. Such as the ability to cook delicious food. The ability to meal plan and shop accordingly. If you have no idea how to cook, no cultural norms about eating out only once in a while as a treat rather than a habit, then when you're hungry you'll jump for the packet of chips.
Unfortunately not only are we slowly forgetting these skills, we also come up with galaxy brained theories about why that's a good thing.
This is a key part. As a parent it’s hard to distinguish between parent guidance and the way the kid would be even without our intervention. In any case, Haidt’s argument is one of public health. The claim is that many/most parents don’t know how to provide that teaching even if they were of a mind to be intentional about parenting.
> like somehow their child will magically manifest all the skills they need to deal . . . once they turn 18
There are so many things like this. Fortunately one’s offspring need not get cut off at 18. The challenge is progressively cutting apron strings so any particular threshold isn’t a cliff.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
> This is the result of my international teaching of my daughter about how we interact with devices.
Do you mean like exposure to how different cultures live with technology?
The problem is with a society where we deprive minors of their freedom and independence because we refuse to pay for basic public safety and basic public transportation. Instead, we make helicopter parenting into the norm and then blame the one domain (the internet) where they are capable of experiencing some freedom for the problems caused by a lack of freedom. If we actually want to fix the youth mental health problem, we need to ensure that kids can safely go outside and play or go places without parents having to follow them 24/7 like they could in past generations.
Where in the world is it unsafe for children to play outside? As far as I can see children don't play outside simply because they are not encouraged to.
No. It's the result of you having time to spend with her instead of working 2 or 3 back-breaking jobs like many parents have to, and her having a safe and stable material livelihood so she doesn't constantly desire escape.
What really makes me sad is when I'm at a restaurant or shop or similar and there is a parent with a small child getting restless and they pacify them by sticking a phone with Youtube in their face.
You need a support system to be able to model good behavior. If you barely have energy to make it to bed at night then you definitely won't have energy to entertain a hyperactive toddler. Things like having grandparents help raise kids and spend time with them instead of turning on YouTube can help.
Dead Comment
Nutritional studies have more scientific rigor than what Haidt is hocking and we're happy to point out standards of evidence. All I'm asking is that we don't alter our standard of evidence simply because we agree with the conclusion. It's bad science and a bad way of making decisions.
RCT advocates should have easy pickings here.
1. http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
1. Haid has evidence from randomized experiments with kids.
2. There are natural experiments caused by different regional adoption rates of high-speed internet.
3. When the effect size of harm correlates with the frequency of use in population, that's more than time series and spurious-correlations.
Social Media and Mental Health: A Collaborative Review https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-coddling-of-the-american-p...
One of the points he makes -- and that I don't see much discussed when it comes to Haidt's work -- is that Haidt's prescriptions for a solution are dangerous. If Haidt is wrong, one of the most unsettling consequences of relying on his solutions is that we stop looking for the real causes of any degradation in childhood mental health. Even if he's right, his solutions will have all sorts of unintended consequences, including loss of privacy on the internet, lack of access by children to resources that are in fact helpful to their mental health, and violations of various legal and constitutional human rights frameworks.
I'm not sure how to put this, but effect size and causation are different things. It's a category mistake to compare.
Also, it's not just about statistics, in this case we have a pretty intuitive grasp on the mechanics at play, they are not far fetched.
We can make up risks endlessly, see the AI-as-an-existential-threat debate. It simply is not grounded in reality. All I'm asking is transparency. People make non-scientific claims and conclusions all the time. Folks just need to be honest that this is what they're doing so they aren't fooling themselves and others.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
I stopped there. We're talking specifically about teenage depression and the cited study is adults. If Haidt wants us to take results from one subgroup and apply it to another, he has to provide evidence. That's how this process works.
There's too much stuff and for me personally, the only solution has been to let most of it go, to try to care about as little of it as possible. I'm happier now than I've ever been. But students often have no choice but to care since this stuff affects their futures so much, and it results in insane amounts of depression and anxiety, the same sort I certainly experienced before I had a plan more figured out.
I’m not for more regulation or big government. But I find this difficult to argue with.
Their customers do not care about damage done, and the people being damaged mostly have no idea.
The problem is when every aspect of tech is corrupted to maximize ad impressions (and this goes beyond social media - the vast majority of consumer technology is chasing "engagement").
Regulating away this disgrace of a business model and tech will become much more sane & safe, including for children.
We fix this by mandating all subscription services at least show you the Present Value of a perpetuity at the cashflow of the subscription on checkout (discounted at the highest US bond yield); ideally they must also offer to the customer the option to instead pay that Present Value in lieu of the recurring subscription charge (but also, when the customer quits the company must return the difference of the perpetuity and the annuity representing the whole period in the subscription).
As a parent of two children, we will hold off on social networking media for a long time most likely. Content can be valuable, and our children largely use their devices for content interests (YouTube) and creation (various apps and games like Minecraft).
I would love to see studies that better explain the effects of these habits as they relate to the "networking" part of social networks and media. I'd argue right now that my LinkedIn consumption is probably more harmful than my TikTok consumption, in terms of depression.
No social media (or online gaming even?) until at least 16, if not 18 or 21, seems entirely reasonable given how much it messes with the heads of full-grown adults.
We’re planing on a shared Nokia at first, maybe separate ones as they get older.
We figure if they want a smartphone, they can have one when they can pay for both the phone and the data line themselves. If they can hold down a part-time job they might be responsible enough for it. If it matters that much to them, they’ll do what they need to get it. If not… guess it wasn’t that important.
Has phone, messages, weather, location sharing, ability to google basic stuff. But very, very hard to use compulsively. You can even add things such as instagram apps but they're just not that compelling in a small format.
You can also set it up so that incoming calls are whitelisted or something like that on just about every phone.
I think banning phones in schools is an urgent need, at the very least.
I get that a lot of the "power" that teachers had was inappropriate, just as spanking, but now they often can't even call the parents and have the child sent home. If you can't do anything about a student disobeying the rules, what can you do?
It's not the teachers' fault, and expecting them to fix the situation is pointless.
I'm told that at least some of the campaigners were originally aiming for just liquor, not all alcohol.
I won't be surprised if history repeats, and some chunk of the world bans all social media (including forums like this one) despite the majority of the harm being concentrated into specific social networks and the strong drive that led to it being a thing in the first place.
But I would think that the telecom industry does not want that.
People adapt