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Nearly Half of Parents Worry Their Child Is Addicted To Mobile Devices, Study Finds (usatoday.com)
According to a new survey from Common Sense Media and SurveyMonkey, 47% of parents worry their child is addicted to their mobile device. By comparison, only 32% of parents say they're addicted themselves. USA Today reports: Half of parents also say they are at least somewhat concerned about how mobile devices will affect their kids' mental health. Nearly one in five say they're "extremely" or "very" concerned. According to the survey, 89% of parents believe it's up to them to curb their children's smartphone usage. The survey conducted between Jan. 25 and Jan. 29 included a sample of 4,201 adults, including 1,024 parents with children under age 18. Data was weighted to reflect the demographic composition of the U.S. for adults over 18, based on Census data. Many devices and services feature parental controls, but some parents may not be aware they exist. The Common Sense-SurveyMonkey survey found 22% of parents did not know YouTube -- which has faced scrutiny over how easy it is for kids to find inappropriate videos -- offered parental controls. Also, 37% have not used the controls before. Among parents surveyed who say their kids watch YouTube videos, 62% said their kids have seen inappropriate videos on the site. Most, or 81%, said it's the parents' job to prevent kids from seeing these videos.
That the survey was online via SurveyMoney. Perhaps not the best sampling.
I don't know, but it works for me.
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
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I'm sure someone will provide me with evidence if I'm wrong, but to date I am unaware of any actual peer reviewed reports documenting that "cell phone addition" is harmful or even exists. The worst I can find are a few reports that suggest that kids that watch ads for junk food on the internet tend to eat more junk food.
It's really that simple.
These people do realize that it's their job as a parents to tell their kids what they can and can't do, right? Or are they too busy trying to be their kids' chill friend and obsessing over their own selfish shit instead of, you know, BEING THE FUCKING PARENT?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Parents worry about all sorts of things. Everything is a threat. Which is technically accurate if assessed from the position of "zero risk". But just because a parent is worried about a thing doesn't make it an actual threat, though intuition suggests limiting screen time is a wise choice in general. Also, the inappropriate content issue is partially subjective as well. Define the term and try again, knowing that parents differ on what this means. So define the term and try again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
And while Common Sense Media isn't precisely pro-censorship, they strike me as panicky and reactionary. Also, they have a vested interest in promoting concerns from parents and potential donors. I'm not saying they're in anyway being deceitful, but what I have seen of them suggests a cognitive bias toward provoking fearful response.
Nearly half of children worry their parents are addicted to mobile devices.
#DeleteChrome
"Stop reading and go out and play, you'll ruin your eyes".
My mother fell for it, my dad was harder to fool.
davecb@spamcop.net
We learn from those around us ...
Half of parents worry that their kid is addicted to mobile devices? That number seems low. I'm betting that way more than half of their kids actually are addicted to their smartphones.
That their parents were afraid they were addicted to TV?!
Their parents' parents were afraid they were addicted to radio.
Apparently this is a thing with every generation that advances somewhat from the old.
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners. Contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” “[Technology] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing” - Socrates
Some more examples: http://mentalfloss.com/article...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
prior to smartphones it was TV
prior to TV it was telephones.
prior to telephones it was playing hooky and going to the theatre
and prior to that it was that damned jazz.
It seems some parents --not all mind you-- are out for an excuse to root out anything and everything their child could become addicted to and convict it of the moral decay of all society. The survey singles out Youtube as the degenerate du-jour, whereas my parents complained about the rap music and championed Tipper's parental advisories. After Columbine it was Doom and Mortal Kombat and "those damned video games" that were ushering in a new dark age of "super predators" hellbent on murdering their friends and families...so we got parental ratings for video games.
To the parents I say this: your child carries with them more knowledge, power, and responsibility in their pocket than you've likely known in the past fifty years. Any question they have can be quickly and comfortably answered by this device, which is nothing short of a god send for kids in cities ruled by moral majorities that refuse to teach sex education, outlaw abortion, and think Gays control the weather. Do yourselves a favour and teach them how to use these devices instead of enacting parental control after parental control, which you neither understand how to operate nor how to troubleshoot when your kid makes their way around it. Mentor your children, dont stifle them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Take it away and see IF they act like a junkie.
Nervous?
Sweating?
Inability to form thoughts or opinions?
Sunlight painful?
Can't sleep?
Lack of personal hygiene?
Irritable?
Defensive?
You might be an addict.
As somebody who lives in a college town, I would guess that the number is closer to 75%-85% of kids are seriously addicted. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with all of these kids walking around staring at their devices constantly. Heck, kids even walk less (and ride bikes almost never), because, I assume, they can spend more time on their gadgets sitting on buses than they can walking or biking..
I don't respond to AC's.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seriously, what parent isn't concerned that their kid is addicted to mobile devices? Cars, trucks, sure they seem innocent enough, but then they start demanding you change zoning codes to subsidize the device storage "Mom, I want my trucks in the living room AND the kitchen!", they require minimum parking standards "I don't want to go to grandma's house, there's no place to play with my car race set!", and they monopolize the streets demanding more than one-third of the land "I have to set up my race track in the hallway!".
Obviously, we as a society need to change this.
And get them to stop playing with their cell phones while doing so. Have you ever been run into by a metal truck as your kid careens down the sidewalk?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
phone? pfft, my son is a gamer and his video card weighs more than my PC tower. he can't carry that around 24x7
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
Distracted driving accounts for 300,000 injuries and 3,000 deaths every year in the US. And those statistics are doing nothing but rising. School shooting deaths don't even come close to that threat in society. This isn't just an addiction problem. This is a deadly problem that affects all of us.
And since we're not going to win the war against tobacco (440,000 deaths, 30,000 deaths from secondhand smoke) or alcohol (80,000 deaths), might as well try and tackle this ever-increasing issue in society.
And counting wars? You might as well give up on that. Warmongering is what we do, and it fuels our economy more than most care to admit. You would stand a better chance with making alcohol and tobacco illegal.
...that many are worried.
In other news, more than half of parents are idiots
I wish I was wrong.
If parents were serious they'd take the mobile devices away.
If your preteen was "addicted" to heroin, you'd hope most parents would do more than wring their hands over it. At the very least not tolerate it under their roof.
An addict never sees a problem with addiction. Doesn't fucking help matters when the junkies are also the parents.
I guess the other half doesn't notice because they rarely look up from their own devices. Kind of a weird stat there. I know parents who think that an hour a day is addiction. and those that think that there is no such thing as being addicted. Safe to say, this is an empty survey
The problem is not so much any sort of addiction as it's a time sink. Sites like YouTube are designed so that you keep clicking on more videos until hours have passed and no homework were done. If it weren't mobile devices, it'd be TV or something else, but mobile devices is what we have to worry about recently. When they're teens you can't just look over their shoulders, so the best I've come up with is openwrt (LEDE) DNS blocking.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I can't do anything. I am a mentally handicapped person - a parent! I can't possibly just take away the fucking thing from my child, because think of the children! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!!!!!
College is un-affordable, school shootings on the rise, we're at 8 wars an counting and AI is going to decimate the job market in the next 20 years... and they pick mobile device addiction to worry about.
Or maybe half of parents pick something they can control to worry about.
Or maybe most people in the world can focus on more than one problem at a time.
And what about the 19% who think it's up to someone else to make sure their kids don't see inappropriate material? What other parental responsibilities do they think they can shirk? Who do they think should be doing their job for them?
Of all of those mobile device addiction is the one that the parents themselves actually have a chance of doing something about