[cyanbane]

When I read the title I thought "Association" could mean potential causation, but I think the 2nd to the last sentence in the Abstract helps clarify:

"The findings suggest that students with poor mental health may be greater users of SNSs."

[danharaj]

It's not surprising. Who remembers what being a teenager is like? My 'favorite' aspect of growing up is how stringently regulated waking/sleeping hours are while one's circadian clock is fluctuating wildly. I am pretty sure I did not get any good nights of sleep in high school, and that made me miserable. I self medicated with a lot of things. A lot of them were garbage, like junk food or Internet forums. Some of them were good for me, like an obsessive reading habit. How much of 'successfully' growing up is just having the 'right' escapes from oppressive school and family structures?

Being a teenager is like being extruded out of a rigid nozzle into the mold of what dysfunctional adults think a functional adult is like. The process itself compromises the child's development.

This study will be used as fodder to make the nozzle more rigid, the mold more byzantine. Give the child no escape. They must become a proper adult.

[MichaelGG]

It's idiotic how early schools start. Some places wanted to start at 7am, bus at 6am, so kids would need to be up at 5am. Ended up hiring a teacher directly (early grade school so still feasible[1]) and starting at 9am. Works great. Plus my daughter and I can stay up "late" (10pm) playing games whenever we feel like it.

I understand some people want schools as daycare, but separate that out.

Also:

>2015

>MySpace

Hmm?

1: Cost of tuition for 2 kids covers teacher's salary, and other parents are interested enough I could easily turn a profit if desired

[redblacktree]

Many schools start early in order to accommodate afternoon sports practice.

[sliverstorm]

"Schools as daycare" is a bit of an oversimplification. For starters, many people have rigid work schedules and do not have the luxury of getting their kid to school at an arbitrary time.

[Spivak]

> For starters, many people have rigid work schedules and do not have the luxury of getting their kid to school at an arbitrary time.

Based on this statement alone you can conclude that schools function as daycare. Why can't your nanny take your kids to school? Because you likely don't have a nanny, and don't see the need for one as school is a sufficient substitute. You could also say you can't afford one but then by demanding the school operate during work hours you're passing the cost of daycare onto the school system.

[someone7x]

Add to that how poor the feedback mechanisms are; by the time a parent sees a child become an adult it may be too late to apply that learning to another child.

Child-rearing is a hard problem.

[anon4]

What if we write down that knowledge and pass it to the next generation, letting them iterate and refine the ways of parenting?

[cbhl]

In Ontario, a lot of effort (TV ads, billboards, etc.) goes into Kids Help Phone (kidshelpphone.ca), which is a call center staffed with counsellors to help kids and teens. But kids and teens are moving away from having a landline telephone in their bedroom, and towards smartphones and iPods and Internet connected devices. If this study helps make those services easier for the current generation of kids and teens to access, then that's worthwhile.

What I find concerning is that overall Internet/computer use isn't a measure in the study. The conclusion ("health service providers should monitor SNSs more to provide support to youth") seems reasonable, but it isn't going to be enough to cover all the ways a kid could demonstrate a cry for help (e.g. tumblr blogs, fanfic involving people from school).

[redblacktree]

Something like this?

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zosQ90T3srs/UeqiEbif-kI/AAAAAAAAB...

[anon4]

I do. I didn't have much trouble with waking up on time, actually. Though by the time I was 18 my sleep time gradually got later and later, until I was actually missing sleep for real. Then again, my school was about half an hour away by bus, so I'd wake up at 6:30 and be there by 7:30 and very rarely classes started at 7:30.

[madaxe_again]

Right. As their own statistics show, the average age in the groups from least to most use increases from 13.8 to 15.8, and there's a big separation by grade level in terms of use that supports that observation, too. That's a pretty big gap in terms of developmental status and, bluntly, levels of teenage angst, so perhaps while there is clear correlation here, there is not causation. I think this is the clincher - "Conversely, studies conducted among university students found no such relationship [between mental health and SNS use]." What's the main difference? Lack of the steep developmental range seen in early teens. They also openly state this:

"The cross-sectional nature of the data precludes evaluation of temporality and causality of the observed relationship between use of SNSs and mental health problems."

So, when the press run with "Social media causes brain damage in children, think of the children!", remember what the paper actually says.

Personally, I think from anecdotal experience that heavy SN use fucks you up no end, but these findings don't prove this.

[outofcuriosity]

There've been other studies to this effect, though, and not just for adolescents. Papers often attribute the effects to a combination of lifestyle comparison, echo chambers, and emotional contagion. Check this one out: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pd

Now imagine your entire friend network is nonstop angst. I'd go mad, too.

It could be a just-so story, but I think overuse of SNSs allows our social skills to atrophy. The brain repurposes structures that go underused, and the structures that maintain one's face-to-face social functioning are no different.

Maintaining relationships in realspace is different than maintaining them in the async-y & memetic environment of cyberspace. Of course there is granularity--one can have a healthy analog&digital relationship, but if a SNS connection is a part of an individual's requirement for a friendship, then there is probably some deficit the individual is unaware of.

I'd also argue that this is symptomatic of the growing pains heavy internet users experience in their adolescence-to-young-adult stage. The group self-selects for introverts who have a preexisting difficulty with social interaction. However, we all require some social interaction (analog or digital), to greater and lesser extents, and so it perpetuates.

Books and art end up being a better outlet, but in my experience that's a discovery which people can only make for themselves.