Anna Lembke discusses how the nine criteria used to demonstrate causality in the Surgeon General's 1964 advisory on smoking can improve our thinking about the effects of social media
Brilliant article, and yet here we are again using scientific criteria to establish a link between social media use and mental health, all while simple observation and common sense tell us without any doubt that kids with smart phones are much more likely to be detached from their families, isolated, and prone to depression and other mental health disorders. If we continue this level of insistence on proving the obvious, perhaps we need a study to establish whether infants are more or less healthy when they are fed grass clippings instead of formula.
Before the existence of smartphones and social media, is there any doubt whatever that the single factor most important in establishing the mental health and “success” of children was the physical, emotional, and moral environment created by parents? No, and yet now, since the introduction of phones, we have somehow dismissed this central role of parents?
The simple truth is that minor children living at home—who depend on the care of their parents—do not need phones at all. They’ve lived without them for thousands of years, and the past dozen years have not proven that the net value of phones is positive. Sure, children do sometimes need internet connection—notably for school assignments—but they can do that from a home computer or school computer, where their screens can be seen at all times and their internet history examined. And parents must stop their silly attempts to manage phone use and social media—which kids quickly learn to bypass—and go straight for removing smartphones entirely. Millions of children with sensible parents have proven that the policy of no phones actually works, while all the corporate and parental controls in the world are but feeble obstacles for children to dodge.
But simple phone removal is not enough, just as drug treatment centers have proven that withdrawal without support is useless. We can’t just take away the superficial and harmful connection of phones and social media. Children still yearn for the fulfillment of genuine connection, and the obvious and primary answer for that need is parents. And right there is both the real problem and the solution: most parents don’t know how to unconditionally love their children, the kind of love that provides the ultimate connection children need.
The emphasis is on unconditional love, the kind of love without the destructive effects of disappointment, guilt, obligation, and anger. Parents need to learn how to unconditionally love their children. And the course material has already been created and tested for thirty years. Visit the free websites RealLoveParents.com and RealLove.com and learn how to find unconditional love and share it with your children.
Just one problem with your Luddite-adjacent line of reasoning: the smartphone (and phone in general) genie is long since out of the bottle now. And the phone-free childhood train has long since left the station as well. Unless we are planning on banning or phasing phones out for ALL ages, full stop, and quickly (admittedly an unserious argument, of course), all your proposal would really accomplish is to disadvantage young people relative to older generations.
Generation Alpha has already sacrificed so much more than any other generation alive today when they were a similar age. I am talking primarily about the pandemic lockdowns, school closures, forced masking and jabs, and such. Remember those? Because they do, and they will never forget what we did to them. And they are inheriting a MESS of climate change, ecological overshoot, and the rest of the polycrisis as well. Let's NOT demand that they sacrifice any further unnecessarily. And let's hope to God that they forgive us!
> Brilliant article, and yet here we are again using scientific criteria to establish a link between social media use and mental health, all while simple observation and common sense tell us without any doubt that kids with smart phones are much more likely to be detached from their families, isolated, and prone to depression and other mental health disorders. If we continue this level of insistence on proving the obvious, perhaps we need a study to establish whether infants are more or less healthy when they are fed grass clippings instead of formula.
It's a common problem these days, and has been for a few centuries now. Developing science and being able to prove all sorts of new and interesting things is good. The notion that things *must* be proved scientifically in order to be valid, on the other hand, is bad. Very bad. But it's been difficult to get rid of.
I'm constantly surprised at the way efforts to prove social media use is a major, or even small part, of levels or changes in teen mental health wind up showing the opposite. I'll keep this brief.
Under Consistency, Zach Raush cites meta-analyses whose r-values (.10 to .15) show social media use is associated (R-squared value) with 1% of 2% of differences in users' mental health. That's frankly nothing. We'd be better off concentrating on preventing sunburn and sports concussions.
It becomes less than nothing when, under Specificity and other criteria, the fact that ALL of the studies cited throughout this article fail to control for massively important factors like parents' and household adults' high levels of abuse, violence, drug/alcohol problems, depression and suicidality, jailing, and absence -- all of which dramatically affect teens' mental health and also drive greater social media use (see CDC 2023 survey, associating these "adverse experiences" with 67% of teens' poor mental health and 89% of suicide attempts, far beyond social media's effects of 1% and 0%; see https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a5.htm?s_cid=su7304a5_w ).
Jean Twenge certainly did not examine all important alternative factors in any kind of comprehensive way. She largely just used superficial measures and claims to dismiss and ignore the most important, especially 25-60-agers' soaring drug/alcohol ER cases, deaths, and teens' reports of widespread addiction and depression among parents correlating far more closely with their poor mental health than anything attributable to social media.
> Unlike cigarettes, in which no amount of tobacco consumption is healthy, a small amount of social media consumption may be neutral or even beneficial, whereas excessive use is likely to be harmful, analogous to the application of the Hill criteria to alcohol and sugar beverage consumption.
>
> For example, alcohol research has shown that the healthiest people drink no more than one to two standard drinks a day, and above that amount, all-cause morbidity and mortality increases. People in this category are also healthier than non-drinkers, not because drinking has any specific salutary effects, but rather because non-drinkers include the sub-group of ‘sick-quitters’ – people who had to stop drinking due to severe illness, often alcohol related.
Wait, isn't that a classic example of "lying with statistics"? It's the exact same problem as the oft-repeated but badly wrong claim that people a few centuries ago only lived to be 40 or so: it mixes two unlike groups with very different characteristics and then takes an average that is representative of neither group.
When the data of actual non-drinkers (people who never started, or who quit long-term for reasons other than health necessity) is segregated from that of the the "sick quitters," what does the picture look like then?
Thank you for being the " gardians" of our kid's welbeing .don t stop ringing the bells of alarm !! It took decades for prooving the biological disaster for tabacco and alcohol..we need to be patient and stubborn and continue to spread the words !! It will take more time and lot of energy to fight against this mondial virtual world , wirder than anything like material stuff ,because it penetrate your home and intimity in very subtile ways like a virus ,like an invisible flow..directly to your brain... bon courage et merci beaucoup pour vôtre engagement !!
Brilliant article, and yet here we are again using scientific criteria to establish a link between social media use and mental health, all while simple observation and common sense tell us without any doubt that kids with smart phones are much more likely to be detached from their families, isolated, and prone to depression and other mental health disorders. If we continue this level of insistence on proving the obvious, perhaps we need a study to establish whether infants are more or less healthy when they are fed grass clippings instead of formula.
Before the existence of smartphones and social media, is there any doubt whatever that the single factor most important in establishing the mental health and “success” of children was the physical, emotional, and moral environment created by parents? No, and yet now, since the introduction of phones, we have somehow dismissed this central role of parents?
The simple truth is that minor children living at home—who depend on the care of their parents—do not need phones at all. They’ve lived without them for thousands of years, and the past dozen years have not proven that the net value of phones is positive. Sure, children do sometimes need internet connection—notably for school assignments—but they can do that from a home computer or school computer, where their screens can be seen at all times and their internet history examined. And parents must stop their silly attempts to manage phone use and social media—which kids quickly learn to bypass—and go straight for removing smartphones entirely. Millions of children with sensible parents have proven that the policy of no phones actually works, while all the corporate and parental controls in the world are but feeble obstacles for children to dodge.
But simple phone removal is not enough, just as drug treatment centers have proven that withdrawal without support is useless. We can’t just take away the superficial and harmful connection of phones and social media. Children still yearn for the fulfillment of genuine connection, and the obvious and primary answer for that need is parents. And right there is both the real problem and the solution: most parents don’t know how to unconditionally love their children, the kind of love that provides the ultimate connection children need.
The emphasis is on unconditional love, the kind of love without the destructive effects of disappointment, guilt, obligation, and anger. Parents need to learn how to unconditionally love their children. And the course material has already been created and tested for thirty years. Visit the free websites RealLoveParents.com and RealLove.com and learn how to find unconditional love and share it with your children.
Just one problem with your Luddite-adjacent line of reasoning: the smartphone (and phone in general) genie is long since out of the bottle now. And the phone-free childhood train has long since left the station as well. Unless we are planning on banning or phasing phones out for ALL ages, full stop, and quickly (admittedly an unserious argument, of course), all your proposal would really accomplish is to disadvantage young people relative to older generations.
Generation Alpha has already sacrificed so much more than any other generation alive today when they were a similar age. I am talking primarily about the pandemic lockdowns, school closures, forced masking and jabs, and such. Remember those? Because they do, and they will never forget what we did to them. And they are inheriting a MESS of climate change, ecological overshoot, and the rest of the polycrisis as well. Let's NOT demand that they sacrifice any further unnecessarily. And let's hope to God that they forgive us!
(Mic drop)
> Brilliant article, and yet here we are again using scientific criteria to establish a link between social media use and mental health, all while simple observation and common sense tell us without any doubt that kids with smart phones are much more likely to be detached from their families, isolated, and prone to depression and other mental health disorders. If we continue this level of insistence on proving the obvious, perhaps we need a study to establish whether infants are more or less healthy when they are fed grass clippings instead of formula.
It's a common problem these days, and has been for a few centuries now. Developing science and being able to prove all sorts of new and interesting things is good. The notion that things *must* be proved scientifically in order to be valid, on the other hand, is bad. Very bad. But it's been difficult to get rid of.
I wrote about this last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-semmelweis-paradox
Beautiful breakdown. Thank you for banging this drum so clearly.
We all recognize that children are just first right? That adults suffer in these ways too?
Dr Haidt💓: "Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation is the book to read to understand how and why digital activities can become addictive. "
Dr Burns💓:"Placebo Nation "...chapter in WHEN PANIC ATTACKS
I'm constantly surprised at the way efforts to prove social media use is a major, or even small part, of levels or changes in teen mental health wind up showing the opposite. I'll keep this brief.
Under Consistency, Zach Raush cites meta-analyses whose r-values (.10 to .15) show social media use is associated (R-squared value) with 1% of 2% of differences in users' mental health. That's frankly nothing. We'd be better off concentrating on preventing sunburn and sports concussions.
It becomes less than nothing when, under Specificity and other criteria, the fact that ALL of the studies cited throughout this article fail to control for massively important factors like parents' and household adults' high levels of abuse, violence, drug/alcohol problems, depression and suicidality, jailing, and absence -- all of which dramatically affect teens' mental health and also drive greater social media use (see CDC 2023 survey, associating these "adverse experiences" with 67% of teens' poor mental health and 89% of suicide attempts, far beyond social media's effects of 1% and 0%; see https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/su/su7304a5.htm?s_cid=su7304a5_w ).
Jean Twenge certainly did not examine all important alternative factors in any kind of comprehensive way. She largely just used superficial measures and claims to dismiss and ignore the most important, especially 25-60-agers' soaring drug/alcohol ER cases, deaths, and teens' reports of widespread addiction and depression among parents correlating far more closely with their poor mental health than anything attributable to social media.
Well-said as usual, Mike! Once again, you hit it right out of the park!
> Unlike cigarettes, in which no amount of tobacco consumption is healthy, a small amount of social media consumption may be neutral or even beneficial, whereas excessive use is likely to be harmful, analogous to the application of the Hill criteria to alcohol and sugar beverage consumption.
>
> For example, alcohol research has shown that the healthiest people drink no more than one to two standard drinks a day, and above that amount, all-cause morbidity and mortality increases. People in this category are also healthier than non-drinkers, not because drinking has any specific salutary effects, but rather because non-drinkers include the sub-group of ‘sick-quitters’ – people who had to stop drinking due to severe illness, often alcohol related.
Wait, isn't that a classic example of "lying with statistics"? It's the exact same problem as the oft-repeated but badly wrong claim that people a few centuries ago only lived to be 40 or so: it mixes two unlike groups with very different characteristics and then takes an average that is representative of neither group.
When the data of actual non-drinkers (people who never started, or who quit long-term for reasons other than health necessity) is segregated from that of the the "sick quitters," what does the picture look like then?
Brilliant article !!!
Thank you for being the " gardians" of our kid's welbeing .don t stop ringing the bells of alarm !! It took decades for prooving the biological disaster for tabacco and alcohol..we need to be patient and stubborn and continue to spread the words !! It will take more time and lot of energy to fight against this mondial virtual world , wirder than anything like material stuff ,because it penetrate your home and intimity in very subtile ways like a virus ,like an invisible flow..directly to your brain... bon courage et merci beaucoup pour vôtre engagement !!
Once again, the ever-insightful Dr. Mike Males tells the real story:
https://mikemales.substack.com/p/what-is-making-teenagers-more-depressed
Read it and weep!