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Childhood disrupted: is the internet damaging young people’s development?
(yorkshirebylines.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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I dunno, I have a teenager, and they have friends. I have a teenage niece, plus dozens of little cousins with devices.
While it can seem like that constant access is a negative, and I've seen a study somewhere about it being really bad for vision over time, what I don't see is anything worse than what TV, gaming, hobbies, or phone calls did to my generation.
The key difference is that the kids can do all of that with one thing, from the couch. So, with a bit of willpower to enforce exercise, and limits on time to allow for family time, I think all claims about harm (unless there's good data the back up a claim) are no better than the bullshit about gaming, or arcades, or heavy metal, or d&d, or any of the other stupidity that has been claimed to be ruining kids over the years.
Kids, teenagers in specific, can require a bit more effort to shift their attention when they have a device in hand, this is true. But people don't remember how damn pissy teenagers got when being pried away from a TV. If my grandparents stories about my parent's generation are true, even before TV was everywhere, teenagers were assholes about shifting attention from their focus of the moment.
From what the one great grandparent I grew up with said, my grandparents' generation was different only in access to distractions. And, for the most part, for a kid back before TV existed at all, radio and books were just as difficult to pry an ear or nose out of.
Now, I will say that most teenagers can end up boring as fuck because they get lazy about using/doing non device things. When every interest is tied to absorbing entertainment in some form, you end up with monomanias in cycles that I don't recall from being a teenager among teenagers. Not that they didn't exist, but you'd see more diversity in interests on average. But, have you seen fucking adults now? It's getting harder and harder to find adults that aren't locked into their device in one way or another. Adults are boring as fuck too, just in different ways, and often were in the past.
Anyway, point is that until there's good data compiled, the whole "kids these days" is just as bullshit as it always has been.
I don't have kids. And I respect the Kids These Days perspective...
But aren't you concerned about how quickly YouTube and Facebook are known to show new users radical content? Have you read studies about how social media may be related to unprecedented mental illness in kids?
Aren't algorithms and social media at least a little different than books and television? Aren't they razor focused on making us sad and addicted?
I'd like to see those studies.
If I post some links you will probably decide that they aren't satisfactory. You could just look into it yourself, or perhaps provide the reason you don't like those studies generally.
There is lots of research looking at mental health affects of social media.
"no, I won't provide a source for my claim, because my source is not good/non-existent"
FTFY
They didn't say they don't "like" the studies though, in fact they actively said they were interested in seeing them. What's the point of asking someone to explain why they don't like something that they haven't even seen yet. Sure they could go find some random related studies and then critique those but that seems pretty pointless.
Edit: since I'm whining about lack of sources, I should probably give some myself
Here's a paper investigating the correlation (or more specifically, lack of correlation) between social media usage and mental health outcomes for young adults:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-017-9535-6
Yes I'm being a little lazy, but I'm not a research scientist. Gooogling some thing like "mental illness social media" is pretty easy. There's lots of studies finding at least a little corelation.
I'm not shocked your linked study says that there is very little evidence of social media causing mental health issues. I wouldn't even be shocked if it's true.
It still doesn't mean that good parenting and social media access go hand in hand.
Just trying to have a conversation and not get a PhD in the process.
I am interested in the methodologies. I would like to see what studies use for a baseline in comparisons, whether they are comparing data collected today to data collected in the past, who is making the determination about whether a child has a mental illness or not, what role parents play in these sorts of studies, what sort of mental illnesses the studies look for or find, and the magnitude of the impact found by the studies.
I would also like to see exactly what you referred to as "unprecedented mental illness in kids."