--- title: "The panic over kids and smartphones has gone too far" url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-panic-over-kids-and-smartphones-has-gone-too-far-jfe20zbcb source_url: https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/the-panic-over-kids-and-smartphones type: article source: "Substack" published: 2024-08-12T19:40:35.296Z updated: 2024-11-07T12:53:18.959Z tags: ["social-media", "mental-health"] reading_time: 10 upvotes: 6 comments: 3 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The panic over kids and smartphones has gone too far **[Substack](https://daily.dev/sources/substack)** · 10 min read · 6 upvotes · 3 comments ## Summary Influential figures in politics and media are pushing the narrative that smartphones and social media are causing a mental health crisis among children, leading to moral panic. This is evidenced by Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Anxious Generation,' which has received significant critique. In response, a new YouTube series titled 'tech panic' aims to debunk these myths and provide context on how to truly protect kids online while promoting healthy media use. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@ghost** · 2 upvotes > Research clearly shows that. We had enough time to study it. Sorry if you belong to those generations affected and feel defensive about it. > > I did not want to admit it either, but sadly it is true. > > Moderating dependence and exposure to social media is a good thing. > > Mobile devices are not the culprit, but the tool that makes social media available in every moment of our lives. **@mykytanikitenko42** · 0 upvotes > Because we now have better medical tools to diagnose mental issues, it came up that children are suffering in the society we build. Because adult people can not admit it (especially those ones which work in education area), they will blame smartphones, but I have no idea how smartphones anyhow different tool for dissociation compared to tv, computer games, being on a street and etc. It is much easier to tell smartphones are responsible for this, so we ban smartphones and kids stop suffering compared to doing long, expensive reforms in education systems, rebuilding relationships between... ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Don’t just attend KubeCon \+ CloudNativeCon, Merge Forward your experience\!](https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-just-attend-kubecon-cloudnativecon-merge-forward-your-experience--l0rpp73x8) · CNCF · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Announcing H2 2026 KCDs](https://daily.dev/posts/announcing-h2-2026-kcds-m96goajm1) · CNCF · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Two months of Open Community Groups](https://daily.dev/posts/two-months-of-open-community-groups-asf52zhbs) · CNCF · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#social-media](https://daily.dev/tags/social-media), [#mental-health](https://daily.dev/tags/mental-health) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-panic-over-kids-and-smartphones-has-gone-too-far-jfe20zbcb)