Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

If you have kids, take the "wait until 8th" pledge: https://www.waituntil8th.org/

No smart phones until after 8th grade.

I've done years of therapy, and use some medication to help with my ADHD. I will say though, singlehandedly, the best (and hardest) thing I've had to do is fight my own phone/internet/computer usage.

I grew up with computers and still work professionally with them day to day, but have made a serious effort in the last year to cut down my usage in an extreme manner:

- Using a 'brick' device to control which apps work on my phone, requiring I physically tap my phone to the brick to lock/unlock the restricted mode. This is always on.

- Blocking tons of sites via multiple means (iOS screen time, eero network profiles)

- Turning my iPhone into a very very basic phone: in "bricked" mode, which I will find myself using for continuous days at a time, I can only use: gmail, photos, notes, weather, maps, spotify, telephone, imessage. No news, no internet browsing, no social media.

- I've deleted all social media accounts (except LinkedIn, but this too is blocked on my phone).

From all of this, the initial realization was, "wow, I'm bored..", which is hard at first to sit with as a feeling, when normally my first instinct to that feeling was "let's open some app/youtube/etc." Then you slowly find positive things creeping in to occupy that boredom time: reading, calling friends/family, getting chores done, etc.

You know. Everything's round and cute and colorful. Like candy.

"Oh. This is for retarded people."

Unfortunately I was wrong.

It's actually much worse than that. It's for normal people. But it makes you retarded.

Slowly. You don't even notice it happening.

It eats away... day by day.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4