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.
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 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 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 not simply 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This tracks with my son’s observations on my wife’s phone use. She’ll tell him to stop watching youtube, then go right back to doing so herself.
It doesn’t really seem to compute how hypocritical that is.
About as much as telling your kid to not drink beer while you are doing it yourself.
The phrase "drink beer" could mean anything from 2 beers on a sunny weekend to 6-pack every night. They are not comparable.
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.
Why would I tell my son not to drink beer? He can do so as soon as it’s relatively safe to
Wyh can't it be something like I don't want you to end up like me? I don't think it's hypocritical
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own.parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
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.
this is what naive adults think, don't you remember how it was when you were a kid?
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
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"
a solipsistic viewpoint I suppose.
I have no idea what your trying to say or what point you're trying to make.
ask an LLM or something, they seem to get the point just fine
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 not simply 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.
> why so many people have kids
Biology / evolution. The drive to reproduce is baked in by natural selection. Organisms that didn’t want offspring didn’t pass on genes.
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.
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.
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.
Yes son. Go back to your iPad.
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.
> A much more plausible causal explanation
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.
I largely agree this is a weak study, but it also feels like no matter how you run this study it's going to be flawed.
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.
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.
I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...
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.
That’s irrelevant to the issue with the study that the parent identified.
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.