Posted on 01/03/2025 4:58:14 AM PST by Cronos
Smartphone use among children has reached a critical moment. Many of us in the UK are increasingly aware of the dangers associated with them. I am witnessing at first hand the sheer devastation that smartphone use is wreaking on our young people’s mental health. The majority of children over 10 I see at my NHS clinic now have a smartphone. An increasingly large proportion of patients have difficulties that are related to, or exacerbated by, their use of technology.
We are seeing profound mental illness stemming from excessive social media use, online bullying, screen addiction, or falling prey to online child sexual exploitation. We are seeing children who are disappearing into online worlds, who are unable to sleep, who are increasingly inattentive and impulsive, emotionally dysregulated and aggressive. Children crippled by anxiety or a fear of missing out.
..Children’s self-esteem and self-image is also at an all-time low, and levels of depression and suicidal thoughts have never been higher. It is no secret among mental health professionals that there is a direct link between smartphone use and real-world harms.
...The average UK 12-year-old now spends 29 hours a week – equivalent to a part-time job – on their smartphone. To have access to the amount of information they do at such a young age is having a profound impact on their neurological development. Where in the past we might have received a handful of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) referrals each week, we are now inundated. Parents can’t get their children to sleep or sit still. They struggle to concentrate in school and education has taken an all-time hit.
...In my own family, I hope I’ll be able to keep my children away from smartphones and social media until they are at least 16.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Sounds to me like there’s a child psychiatrist who is reaching for control, perhaps even a cry for help.
It has to do with several influencing factors.
The phone creates a dependency addiction that undermines the healthy dependency upon parent/family.
The friends on the phone creates a peer group identity with dependency that is difficult to monitor. We want healthy peer groups with good values and morals.
The ease and temptation for young males to get into porn is destructive.
The phone allows a person to create a facade or false personna of who they really are. This leads to great psychological difficulties in self actualization later in life.
In many ways, the television did the same for previous generations.
Mediocre Britian suffers from diversity, not smart phones
The UK is no longer Great
Once you’ve had a marshmallow it’s impossible to give up on the sugar.
My children grew up without TV. Gave them books instead.
I work professionally with the downstream impacts from all of this. It’s very real.
The communist indoctrination going on through smart phones is unreal, a lot of them weren't around when the Clinton crime family was in power in the 1990s when we had the endless scandals/gates which directly led to 911 and 3000 people murdered yet because of leftist indoctrination through the net, they were acting like something worse than 911 happened when Satans daughter lost.
15 year old was born in 2010, these parents would be around 40-45, cell phones were around in the early 1980s about the time those parents were born. They have grown up with cells phones, their kids having them is not a surprise especially when for saftey you want to be able to stay in thouch with your children. I agree, high school would be about the earliest time you would want them to have one.
People are not crippled by anxiety. They become obsessed with “mental health” and imagine all kinds of maladies to virtue signal to the world. Autism rates have skyrocketed among women, which used to be a primarily male issue. This due to the Internet
They can’t see what the problem is because they’re too close to it. Tik Tok and Facebook might be cool places to visit but nobody should want to live there.
Life was better without smart phones. Plain old cell phones were okay because they were a great emergency tool.
The problem is that those weak, weeping morons are now upper level managers in many corporations (particularly in HR departments). Bitter feminazis obsessed with gender and the “male patriarchy”. They are poison to a healthy society.
You don’t get it......
Smart phones are actually a computer with a phone ap.
I Agree...
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You have some Highlights?
That’s an interesting insight. A hallmark of autism is information overload. Autistic people get overwhelmed just by the information they have to deal with in the real world. It’s plausible that an overstimulating Internet would put a lot more people over the edge.
There is an enormous difference between a "cell phone" (e.g. the 1995 Motorola StarTac), and a "smart phone". One was a phone, the other is a handheld, Internet-connected computer (and tracking/monitoring device). Social media did not exist in the 1980's, or most of the 1990's.
I agree with her that kids' overuse of smartphones is a problem (which should be dealt with by parents). But the problems she mentions have more to do with what our PC liberal society tells kids than their use of smartphones. "Self-esteem" culture started back in the 1990s and has been a cancer on child development ever since.
I’ve seen groups of teens on cellphones.
They look like the 21st century version of zombies, shuffling along with their noses in their phones, eyes glazed over.
I always think, “I hope they don’t drive like that.” But many do.
“Screenagers”
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