Category: Child Care

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Kids With Early Smartphone Use Have Worse Mental Health

New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls

Recent Jon Haidt substack dives into the results.

For parents who resisted, or who plan to resist, a new report may encourage many more parents to join you: Sapien Labs, which runs an ongoing global survey of mental health with nearly a million participants so far, released a “Rapid Report” today on a question they added in January asking young adults (those between ages 18 and 24): “At what age did you get your own smartphone or tablet (e.g. iPad) with Internet access that you could carry with you?”  When they plot the age of first smartphone on the X axis against their extensive set of questions about mental health on the Y axis, they find a consistent pattern: the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today. This is true in all the regions studied (the survey is offered in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili), and the relationships are consistently stronger for women.

It didn’t use to be this way…..before smartphones and social media.

There is a well-known finding in happiness research that, across nearly all nations, happiness or well-being forms a U-shaped curve across the lifespan (See Rauch, 2018). Young adults and people in their 60s and 70s are happier than those in middle age. But that may be changing, especially for women, as Gen Z (born in and after 1996) enters young adulthood. You can see the sudden collapse of young adult mental health in some of our previous posts on this Substack. For example, Figure 1 shows that up until 2011, young Canadian women were the most likely to report having excellent or very good mental health. By 2015 they were the least likely, and the decline in their self-reported mental health accelerated after that, while it changed very little for older women. (The same pattern holds for Canadian men, but to a lesser degree.)

Check out the details here. And read his advice to parents, schools, & legislators on how to move forward.

“Crypto Connection by Frederico Clapis” by Dave Pearce (London) is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Parents Before ‘Friends’

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California Classified Normal Breasts As “Abnormal Structures of the Body.”

So that insurance companies would pay to remove the breasts of confused minors.

California Insurance Code language.

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European Nations Adopt A More Cautious Approach Toward Gender Dysphoria

Much of Europe is moving away from Gender-Affirming Care.

Read all about it in Forbes….

…longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.

The landscape of gender-affirming medical procedures is undergoing significant transformations in Europe. Nations are progressively adopting a more guarded stance concerning providing gender-affirming medical treatments to minors; evidenced by a wave of regulatory shifts and newly-introduced legislations.

Notably, the UK has led the charge with a pivotal court ruling, dubbed the ‘Bell ruling,’ which underscores the improbability of minors under 16 providing informed consent for undergoing puberty blockers. This judgment reverberated across Europe, leading Sweden and Finland to usher in stricter guidelines regarding gender-affirming healthcare for young people.

…according to European health authorities and medical experts, there isn’t yet a medical consensus for the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in gender dysphoric minors.

Finland, in particular, now necessitates that minors seeking such treatments should be subject to a comprehensive mental health evaluation before commencing treatment. Likewise, Sweden decrees that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones should not be the go-to treatment modality for gender dysphoria among children and adolescents.

Proponents of this cautious approach claim that such regulations ensure careful consideration, protecting minors from potential regret or adverse health impacts.

Forbes continues…

A common claim by Americans who oppose state restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors is that Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, and the U.K. have not done away with hormonal interventions, and therefore lawmakers who seek limits are presumably going against what European health authorities recommend. Additionally, voices in America’s “affirmative-medicine” movement point to Europe not having bans on gender-affirming care for minors. It’s true that Europeans aren’t banning such care, and so legislators in the U.S. who pursue bans are at odds with European recommendations. But this only tells part of an evolving and layered story.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, the American approach provides more autonomy to minors, in which the medical establishment’s role is mostly to affirm a child’s declaration that he or she is trans. This affirmative model immediately removes several of the guardrails put in place by, say, the Dutch Protocol, resulting in a possible deficient lack of medical “safeguarding.”

A growing number of nations in Europe are not practicing “gender-affirming care” for minors in quite the same way as America is. In fact, for several years, Europe has been moving in a different direction from the U.S., as Europeans exercise greater restraint when treating children with gender dysphoria. In essence, progressively the message emanating from European gender experts is that until there is reliable long-term evidence that the benefits of youth gender transition outweigh the risks, it is prudent to limit most medical interventions to rigorous clinical research settings.

SOURCE: Forbes

Companion Post

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.

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Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion.