The real issue is real life is NOT friendly to teenagers. Theres few activities they can just go off and do on their own. A lot of places ban any unsupervised minors. My son can’t go to the escape room or several movie theaters without an adult.
Add to that helicopter parents over protective of kids, and kids reach to spaces they can feel more free: social media, gaming, etc
I'm curious largely if many teens these days just don't want to go out or like you mentioned, aren't able to. Maybe it's a combo of both.
Just tough for me to imagine being a teen and not wanting to be as far as possible from parents.
It happened to us. We let our kids stay in the car, during COVID, while we quickly shopped.
After we got home, the cops showed up and told us someone reported us for neglecting our kids. My wife just kept asking "did we do anything illegal?" and finally they admitted that no, we didn't. They just said
"it just doesn't look good, with all the crime out there".
I said "what crime?". Then they had to admit that crime is way down over the last 30 years, and is especially low in our area.
They eventually left, but it has a chilling effect on letting our kids be kids for fear that it will happen again.
I bet I can write a study that proves that the aggregate of gardening, yoga and crack cocaine only have limited effect on health.
Very much the same tone as people that disparage children/teens spending time on video games.
Edit: Found an example https://magazine.1000libraries.com/how-fiction-sparked-outra...
> Critics of the time worried that people were slipping into a fantasy realm and losing their grip on reality. Novels were blamed for basically just about everything, from increasing promiscuity in young women to encouraging suicide and self-harm in young men.
One of these critics, Vicesimus Knox, called for the banning of novels altogether, arguing that people should instead read “true histories.” An article in Gentleman’s Magazine put forward the idea of a “sin tax,” with the hopeful notion of dissuading people from wasting their time with frivolous fiction
They aren't. Social media use and gaming were separate measures in the study.
Self-reported? Even if study is accurate its list a lot of credibility through its methods.
https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/
He has compiled reviews over many studies which arguably should carry more weight than any single study.
There is an awful lot of junk in Psychology in general, it has a serious replication issue and bias due to poor methodology resulting in a high chance of fake and biased results. So no you can't assume the accumulation of many studies is better than one, that is not how systemic reviews work.
What is your critique of Haidt's work, specifically?
I wish there were free online resources for adults with remedial math needs…
> remedial
?
Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%
* Teens in Western countries don't wanna study because they wanna be "social media influencer" (whatever that means).
* Students at Uni and schools are using ChatGPT to do the thinking for them meaning, they are getting dumber and dumber.
* if you never watched 2006 Idiocracy movie, it was a warning about the future, not a comedy movie. Strongly recommend you to watch it. DO IT!!!!
* Social media is not affecting just teens metal health but everything, look around us, birthrate is all time low and declining. Women no longer need men they say, marriages all falling apart because of social media, they think they deserve better because neighbors grass is greener. Decades old marriages, gone! Dating?? Non existent and not worth anymore so guys are walking away so birthrates is going worse by the day.
* Hollywood got into some insane plastic surgery epidemic right now, social media is allowing it to spread, teenagers are using cosmetics and surgery to blend into the social media trend, something 40s and above used to do, not 15-20s.
Now with the AI, chatbots, fake accounts, fake videos, fake everything, watch our society doomed. It already started, like I said, birthrates is gone, students cannot read, they cannot do anything without asking ChatGPT. Food is nothing but plastic, chemicals and everything in between.
Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.
> Gaming isn't and never will be an issue in our society, now, social media??? 100%
It's notable to see gaming and social media blended into the same study, but it's even more interesting to see how the study's results are being rejected in favor of everyone's own pre-conceived conclusions anyway.
>Watch 2006 Idiocracy movie, you won't regret.
Having anecdotal evidence, and a fictional film is exactly the issue with the consensus that social media is bad.
It DOES NOT say that social media use is, or isn't, correlated with mental health because it did not track teens who did not have access to social media.
Australia will be an excellent natural experiment/study on this: We'll see if things change after their recent law, you can compare the same kid before and after, and you can compare Australian kids to other kids.
This study is dead in the water. Teens have zero near-term incentives to be honest about any of these events.
For a study with this scope to be effective, parents will have to opt in using existing tracking/monitoring tooling for their child's habits. And even then, you might only be able to establish correlations with events serious enough to warrant mental health medical visits.
Self-reporting is common in studies like this. Everyone knows it's not perfect.
Parental reporting is also heavily flawed. Parents have drastically different ideas about how their own kids are feeling and different children are more or less secretive with their parents. Parental self-reporting would likely be less accurate, not more.
^ No-one can do this kind of comparison anymore because no such population really exists, save for the Amish and extant hunter-gatherers who would have plenty of other confounders contributing their mental health measures. However the upward trend in suicide since the late 2000s pretty well correlates with smartphone usage. As does the drop in fertility rates (which are now showing to not necessarily correlate with the oft-cited suspects like wealth, female educational attainment, etc.)
Technical critique from someone who's done these types of statistical analyses (both the psychometric and SEM components): I'm surprised they didn't include between-person random slopes as well for cross-lagged effects.
It's hard to justify the assumption that gaming/social media has the same effect on mental health between individuals (even within genders, and controlling for their choices demographic factors). I'm not convinced that their set of covariates is enough to capture psychological risk factors.
I would be more comfortable with a model that also lets us ask whether there was significant variation between individuals on the effect on gaming/social media on mental health.
One position I don't see defended as much anymore is an elitist position, i.e. even if social media & games (sm&g) are harmful to a majority of teens, there still might be a minority of teens that thrive with the sm&g and their thriving might be argued to be "worth" the suffering of many (think: geniuses who can make the world much much better)
Another direction to go in is, independent of studies, what kind of world do we want for ourselves and our kids? Do we want them to be able to play some games and access some social media? I could see them for example playing online chess and following chess masters on social media, so these could indeed be a part of something of an ideal vision for our kids. So I guess there isn't often much discussion of trying to pursue the ideals of childhood or adulthood and about crafting that vision of what activities that involves and then connecting our lives to a kind of plan for following such a blueprint. (This requires no social study to establish as far as I can see)
squigz•2w ago