Is Not Giving Your Kid a Smartphone Feasible?

mailbag #3, 03.27.2024

In response to Clinton Ignatov’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation:

As a parent, it's very difficult to not have your kid have a smartphone.

My oldest child almost FAILED a class last year because the teacher assumed that all kids would have one and had an in class multiday project that required the use of smartphones. They were in SIXTH GRADE.

Plus all her different school activities share updates and times and other important info via various apps and group chats that they expect the students to have access to. "You should know that, we posted it on the app." We caved and bought her a phone (and highly limited her ability to use most of it -- she doesn't have any social media at all. I don't mind being able to contact her easily about picking her up from activities but the fact that she HAD to have a smart phone because of school really frustrated me.)

But leaving aside the school system, overall screen usage would be a lot easier to reduce or eliminate if more people worked in the community they lived in. It's very difficult to get my kids together with friends because they may not live far away, but trying to get anywhere after school is a freaking nightmare because there's just so. much. commuter. traffic. One of my kids is lucky because our neighbors have sons around his age and they can just get together and run around outside, but the other two are SOL on that front. And even in our neighborhood, there's a lot of traffic and no sidewalks so the neighbors ACROSS the street also have kids my sons age, but he's too young to just go over there. It still has to be something the adults coordinate. And I hate that for the kids, I wish it was safer for them to just be neighborhood kids together without worrying about the bazillion cars.

They complain, complain, complain that they want more time for video games or TV, but when they're able to get together with friends they'll spend hours doing anything else and not even think about it. So I think a lot of kids would naturally and without complaint reduce their screen time usage if it were easier for them to get together with friends...not all of them would, but a lot.

---

In response to Lesbians Who Only Date Men:

In the object case, the big thing to note about those studies [of Gen Z queerness] is: are they actually true? That is, do they describe reality, are people answering honestly on them? Because they usually aren't! "Mischievous responding", i.e. "just making shit up because you don't take the questionnaire seriously and want to troll the researchers", is a *huge* problem when studying adolescents:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6215371/

A large share of all teenagers who answer in public health surveys that they're gay, or trans, or disabled, or adopted, or parents, or any other demographically unusual characteristic, are lying. The famous case of this is a massive (15k participants) study, where out of data concerns, the researchers did in-person follow-ups on every participant who said they were missing a limb. 99% were lying:

"The third group of inaccurate responders was composed of those answering questions in the SAQ and the in-home interview about whether they had an artificial limb. Of the 15,356 SAQ sample members included in the Wave I in-home interview sample, 253 respondents stated that they had used an artificial limb (hand, arm, leg, or foot) for the past year or more, indicating a permanent physical disability. However, when interviewed later in the Wave I in-home interview, only 2 of these 253 adolescents reported using an artificial limb; the overwhelming majority (248) reported not using any artificial limb, and 3 did not answer this question."

People who treat one question as a joke are generally treating the whole survey as a joke, and intentionally putting weird answers. This is why gay kids are "more likely to be" teen parents, why self-reported trans teenagers are often unusually short or tall, etc. There are so few kids actually in the demographics that get mischievously responded that the joke answers seriously skew the results. It's a huge problem for health research on LGBT youth -- how do you find things like the real HIV rates for gay teenagers when the proportion who will jokingly answer "oh yeah, I'm gay and have AIDS" outnumbers the actual expected prevalence?

That's not to say there isn't a real fluidity/affinity orientation we can see, but it's important to avoid constructing too much of a societal revolution out of these questionnaires. In particular, it's really easy to overstate the extent if you take all numbers at face value.