Aside from the physical/chemical damage alcohol does to developing brains, alcohol addiction is bad for adults too. We just concede that after childhood you can make your own choice to ruin your life.
Phone addiction is harmful to everyone at all age groups. It's not really the individuals to blame through. The tech companies have broken human psychology and developed something more addictive than drugs.
“Relatively safe to” is a very official sounding rubric. I guess tell him that and see if you agree on the timing of when that safety threshold has been met.
Telling your kid to not drink beer is giving them the courage to say no to drinking beer. I personally don’t just bark out rules with no context. I also have discussions with my kid about why drinking beer can go awry. We all expect that they will, likely before we’d feel it’s relatively safe. So I want him to at least know what’s in store and how to not make compounding mistakes.
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own. parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.
Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.
Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.
It's not impossible,but on top of all the other stresses in life you need to sit down and figure out this new problem too? You have got to at least sympathize with the situation. I know I've regressed on phone use since my child was born.
it's like a variation of the principle of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
I would expect anxious/insecure parents to use placating behaviours (like device use) themselves, and I would expect their children to be anxious/insecure too.
So I would expect the study to find that the children of phone-overusers were more likely to be anxious/insecure.
Still, I would also expect that less phone use (subbed with more attention to kid) would help the kid with this.
This can be tricky. I know my mother loves me unconditionally, but I also have strong memories of her shutting herself inside her study to read textbooks and journals, and children were not allowed to disturb unless she was strictly needed to handle an accident.
I have the same need for cognition as my mother, but I opt not to lock myself in my office. Instead I tell my kids, "I'm around if you need me and I'll keep an eye on you but I'm not currently a playmate; I'll be here reading on my phone."
The difference is my mother clearly separated relationship-building from study. I don't. This probably means I'm available more often, but with lower quality? I'm not sure. What is better? No idea.
Your kids don’t know the difference. To them, you’re picking your phone over them. Just like your mom picked her books over you. Their strong memories will be of you sitting right there in the same room completely disengaged and actively unwilling to be a playmate. Which, tbh, might feel worse.
Also the fact you’re reading and have a need for cognition is meaningless. To them, you may as well be scrolling TikTok and crushing candy.
Sorry to be harsh, it sounds like you’re proud of yourself for handling it better than your mom but I’m not convinced.
+1 as adults we intellectualize way too much what kids are reasoning… they aren’t reasoning! they aren’t fully developed. it’s literally not that deep to them.
every year that passes, the idea of the only personal time one has is in the bathroom on the toilet hits harder and harder. there’s a whole back catalog of jokes about this; hiding in the bathroom, talking extra long. yep, checks out.
My mom was always distracted so that's mostly how I remember her. We have all kinds of wonderful memories together but, what I think of her, the first thing that comes her mind is, her being in the same room as me but ignoring me.
I don't have kids but I've been thinking about how, I would probably need some kind of office separate from the house.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
This is a weak study that is exemplary of psychology's weak experimentation culture and correlation/causation laundering, especially with regard to self-report.
The heavily hinted implication is that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:
"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)
And then also ask them to answer questions like:
"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)
And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.
A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.
I forget the terminology but I read something recently about how people are paying too much attention to their kids and it's making their kids neurotic.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
There is always a question of whether a bad study is better than no study.
I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".
A better version of this study would be to run an experiment where you take away (or heavily restrict) parental phone access over a month or two and measure the parent-child relationship vs. a control group.
> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.
And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.
So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.
You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.
IMO this isn't necessarily bad (it's one way to get data), but the numbers are meaningless without a control. Unfortunately, I think we missed that bus by ~20 years. Had the same study been conducted every few years over the last two decades, I think it would have been valuable. Maybe it is still valuable to do this once every few years? (I think that everyone in 2026 is maximally addicted to mobile phones, but maybe I'm wrong and it can get worse).
My dude, I don’t know how to explain this to you but phones and computers are addictive for people. They get hooked on them to feed the lizard brain with digital junk food engineered for engagement.
Manipulating "studies" doesn't help reveal how true this is (or even if it is, do we perhaps have an inherent level of addiction and phones are just an easy target?), nor help find effective ways to reduce it.
I often wonder why even today with falling birthrates so many people have kids. It's a personal decision, so not something you would randomly bring up with strangers and not something one really thinks to discuss with friends until someone has a kid. Once they are on the path to question it would be rude.
But it strikes me that many parents don't really think about it that much, as in the original rationale. I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this. What choice could be more significant? Then again, maybe the personal nature of it means one is simply not aware of what other people are going through. Maybe everyone is really thinking it through. I am led to doubt it though. I'm curious if other people have had the chance to ask their own parents and felt satisfied by the results. That might be one of the few occasions you might have hope for a somewhat revealing answer.
There are so many reasons it's hard to be exhaustive.
Selfishly, nobody will love me like my children, at least in their early years. They're also amazing playmates and students. And they give me social permission to do silly things like climb on playground structures. They're also a great excuse to get out of stuff.
Selflessly, I believe me and the mother of our children are sensible people and the world needs more sensible people. Plus someone needs to maintain the replacement rate. And it's a weird, warm, fuzzy feeling to care for one's children at one's own expense.
In the intersection, it's a fun challenge to try to achieve balance in life, work, and family. I also really appreciate the chance to get a do-over of everything my parents did, keeping the good stuff and improving on the bad.
Sounds like an answer from a non-parent, honestly. There's a lot more to it than that, and virtually every couple I know with children thought about it a lot before going ahead.
The number one reason is because they see other families and the love and joy that their children bring into their lives. This is inspiring, and brings people around to making the decision, even if they know the sacrifices they will have to make.
Boiling it all down to pure biology is stripping parents of agency to fit your worldview.
So they have kids for their personal joy and completely ignore if their kids even have a chance of a good future, got it. I am sad when I see what kids will be confronted with in the long term. Humans nowadays already cant cope with climate change and wars, this will only be multiplied tenfold for our kids.
> I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this.
Why?
As a human being who was once born, I am extremely grateful for my existence, and how much thought my parents put into it beforehand is of practically no consequence.
You seem to imply that if parents haven't already committed to giving their kids a perfect childhood with perfect parenting then the kids are better off not living at all?
You can browse the Wikipedia article I linked. It offers a few possible answers to this why question.
As for myself I would simply summarize that making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical. One should think before taking an action that has irreversible consequences to anyone. In this case, the person being born. I wouldn't say I'm an antinatalist, I just find it interesting. On a rational level I'm not sure there are many good arguments against some of the conclusions there. If there are I'd be interested in hearing them. The fact that you are personally grateful for your existence is a pretty weak argument imo. If you had never been born you would not be around to know the difference. However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently. Surely your life is not so peachy that a scan of that article will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, perhaps you simply lived a far better life than I.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other. As I said, I just find it interesting.
Group 1: Some people think about it and don’t have kids,
Group 2 some think about it and do,
Group 3 and some don’t think about it much and are (probably) more likely to end up with a kid than group 1 because most people like having sex and this group will be less careful than group 1.
It doesn’t really seem to compute how hypocritical that is.
Phone addiction is harmful to everyone at all age groups. It's not really the individuals to blame through. The tech companies have broken human psychology and developed something more addictive than drugs.
Telling your kid to not drink beer is giving them the courage to say no to drinking beer. I personally don’t just bark out rules with no context. I also have discussions with my kid about why drinking beer can go awry. We all expect that they will, likely before we’d feel it’s relatively safe. So I want him to at least know what’s in store and how to not make compounding mistakes.
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own.parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.
Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.
Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.
I seriously, I feel like so many people just somehow magically forget their entire childhoods, maybe selectively?
I lack the ability to lie to myself like that unfortunately
a solipsistic viewpoint I suppose.
So I would expect the study to find that the children of phone-overusers were more likely to be anxious/insecure.
Still, I would also expect that less phone use (subbed with more attention to kid) would help the kid with this.
I have the same need for cognition as my mother, but I opt not to lock myself in my office. Instead I tell my kids, "I'm around if you need me and I'll keep an eye on you but I'm not currently a playmate; I'll be here reading on my phone."
The difference is my mother clearly separated relationship-building from study. I don't. This probably means I'm available more often, but with lower quality? I'm not sure. What is better? No idea.
Also the fact you’re reading and have a need for cognition is meaningless. To them, you may as well be scrolling TikTok and crushing candy.
Sorry to be harsh, it sounds like you’re proud of yourself for handling it better than your mom but I’m not convinced.
every year that passes, the idea of the only personal time one has is in the bathroom on the toilet hits harder and harder. there’s a whole back catalog of jokes about this; hiding in the bathroom, talking extra long. yep, checks out.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
The heavily hinted implication is that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:
"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)
And then also ask them to answer questions like:
"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)
And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.
A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.
Parent-child interactions, relationships, feelings are probably the hardest thing to quantify at any scale.
In the end, it's really, "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".
> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...
Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.
And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.
So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.
You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.
But it strikes me that many parents don't really think about it that much, as in the original rationale. I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this. What choice could be more significant? Then again, maybe the personal nature of it means one is simply not aware of what other people are going through. Maybe everyone is really thinking it through. I am led to doubt it though. I'm curious if other people have had the chance to ask their own parents and felt satisfied by the results. That might be one of the few occasions you might have hope for a somewhat revealing answer.
I've found this notion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism somewhat interesting in this regard.
Selfishly, nobody will love me like my children, at least in their early years. They're also amazing playmates and students. And they give me social permission to do silly things like climb on playground structures. They're also a great excuse to get out of stuff.
Selflessly, I believe me and the mother of our children are sensible people and the world needs more sensible people. Plus someone needs to maintain the replacement rate. And it's a weird, warm, fuzzy feeling to care for one's children at one's own expense.
In the intersection, it's a fun challenge to try to achieve balance in life, work, and family. I also really appreciate the chance to get a do-over of everything my parents did, keeping the good stuff and improving on the bad.
Biology / evolution. The drive to reproduce is baked in by natural selection. Organisms that didn’t want offspring didn’t pass on genes.
The number one reason is because they see other families and the love and joy that their children bring into their lives. This is inspiring, and brings people around to making the decision, even if they know the sacrifices they will have to make.
Boiling it all down to pure biology is stripping parents of agency to fit your worldview.
Why?
As a human being who was once born, I am extremely grateful for my existence, and how much thought my parents put into it beforehand is of practically no consequence.
You seem to imply that if parents haven't already committed to giving their kids a perfect childhood with perfect parenting then the kids are better off not living at all?
As for myself I would simply summarize that making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical. One should think before taking an action that has irreversible consequences to anyone. In this case, the person being born. I wouldn't say I'm an antinatalist, I just find it interesting. On a rational level I'm not sure there are many good arguments against some of the conclusions there. If there are I'd be interested in hearing them. The fact that you are personally grateful for your existence is a pretty weak argument imo. If you had never been born you would not be around to know the difference. However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently. Surely your life is not so peachy that a scan of that article will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, perhaps you simply lived a far better life than I.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other. As I said, I just find it interesting.
Group 2 some think about it and do,
Group 3 and some don’t think about it much and are (probably) more likely to end up with a kid than group 1 because most people like having sex and this group will be less careful than group 1.