Jacob Ward's Warning | Are Smartphones Bad For Kids?!
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Are smartphones alone to blame for kids' mental health problems?
Are smartphones bad for kids? This is the question that's been bothering parents like me for a long time, ever since we've had kids or ever since they've been smartphones. And a new study out of the University of South Florida has a lot of people talking, and they're especially talking about the possibility that perhaps it's not as bad as we think, that we don't actually have to be as worried about smartphones or keep kids away from them as much as we thought we did. So that study, I want to talk about it and the sort of general difficulty we have in figuring things out about this and the general scientific takeaway that we have so far. So this study in particular is out of the University of South Florida.
It was a study of 1,500 kids in Florida who were asked a bunch of questions on a survey about how they experience life and how they experience life through social media and through their smartphone. And the takeaways, which have been in a lot of interviews and in a lot of media, are generally speaking that the ownership of a smartphone itself may not actually be an indicator of trouble. And if anything, the one thing that a lot of people are sort of reaching out on and focusing on is the idea that kids with their own smartphones tend to report greater well-being than kids that don't have a smartphone. So that's a thing you're going to hear a lot about. And here's how I would invite you to think about it.
So Think first of all about this study. This is a study of just kids in Florida. It's 1,500 kids. And in looking at the methodology, about 1,100 of those kids have a smartphone. Only about 300-some kids don't in that study. These are kids from 11 to 13. So, the vast majority of those kids have a smartphone and are in a social setting in which it is clearly normal to have a smartphone. More kids have them than don't. These are public school kids. They tend to be kids from across the socioeconomic spectrum. They are mostly white kids, but the researchers have made a good faith effort to try to make them as representative of the nation as possible. But here's the difficulty with studying smartphones. There are so many of them now out in the world that it is very, very difficult to find a group of people, a group of kids, certainly anyone older than 11 to 13, that don't have one.
And as a result, the classic control group study in which you would study one group of people who has a thing and one group of people that does not... That doesn't really work in this case when so many people have one and so many people are, of course, affected by the expectation they should have one, which has its own sort of effects. But if we take on face value, the smartphone itself may not be problematic. What this study does find, however, is that the tiniest little amounts of, for instance, cyberbullying that might come at you through a smartphone have incredibly adverse outcomes. And what really seems to make the difference is whether kids are using social media or not. Those kids who post a great deal, the study found, are much more likely to have anxiety, depression, general mental health difficulty.
And even kids who don't post very often but just consume a ton of social media, go on it several times a day, also report all kinds of adverse outcomes. And it's really important to think about this in the context of the idea that it's very unusual in this day and age to find someone who's using social media not on a smartphone because, of course, smartphones are what made ubiquitous social media possible. It was the rise and the invention of the iPhone that made Facebook truly take off the way it did from being just kind of a browser experience for college kids to being a international way of communicating with one another. I once was interviewing a series of people who were struggling with their addiction to sports gambling, sports book.
What did the University of South Florida study of 1,500 kids actually find?
And they complained that one of the difficulties right now as sports gambling is being made legal on your phone in state after state, more than 30 states have legalized it right now.
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