Kids These Days(smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net) |
Kids These Days(smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net) |
The analogy was “don’t tell your kid not to stick crayons in their nose” - otherwise, well, they most certainly will latch on to the topic and do so.
Then how do you tell people that they can be helped about it without triggering the very thing?
The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.”
Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.
An equally plausible explanation is that when the school had zero resources to help kids with depression or other mental health problems they choose to keep their mouths shut and suffer it in silence.
Once the school started paying attention to the issue, it started surfacing people with pre-existing problems who had not previously had anyone to talk to about it.
it's like asking on suicide hotline whether you have some weapon or object in room which could hurt you, great ideas to give to suicidal people...
> given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.
Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media. I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake.
In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years. Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.
Fingers crossed it comes to my mountain hippie town before my 2 year old wants it.
With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.
With stuff that you're be free to do as an adult with minimal to no restrictions.
Teens should have opportunities to experiment with these activities in safe spaces so that they have direct life experience to reflect on when they're in a less safe or unsafe environment.
"Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."
Not smoking works, but maybe people need more freedom to hurt themselves. I’d support that if society didn’t have to pay their bills later on.
I believe social media and phone use could have a similar dynamic - like the kids said themselves, it's more a "collective action" than an individual problem.
That was what I was trying to get at with that analogy.
Much like panda bears in captivity, it is unusually difficult to give a human being a life that resembles what it evolved for, which mostly involves convincing other humans to back off the safetyism a little.
What dignity can be found in the life of the modern child?
Call that lame if you will. I'd rather think of it as being civil.
“People in developed countries don’t know how to really live, they just die slowly”
Note that guy lived in the US for a decade, and his adult kids still do.
What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.
"the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."
That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.
It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.
> children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure.... Our children are living in a time of crisis
Yes it's stated less technically proficient than your version, but the point remains that you can look at the current internet as a blessing or a curse, and is mostly just an intro to the rest of the article
Things are changing too quickly, technologically at an unprecedented speed and as a consequence socially in unpredictable ways. We've gone from only having the TV and newspapers, to computers, smartphones, social networks, now actual machines you can talk to like they were humans, in like 30 years total. Quantifying the psychological and sociological effect of it all is nigh impossible. Everyone just does whatever seems like a good idea and hopes for the best, and of course there's no shortage of those talking out of their ass because there is no data yet to prove or disprove any real guidelines to anything.
A meteoric rise on anxiety is a completely rational response to that imo, with climate change looming above as a cherry on top.
My question to the reader is this: Who benefits from this?
The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.
It is somewhat sad that things have gradually become more un-tinkerable. What used to be a bunch of large components over a large circuit board, or maybe even a mechanical system is now a tiny chip with literally no way to tell anything about it when you disassemble it.
On the other hand, there's far, far more resources for dedicated tinkering these days. $5 microcontrollers and electronics kits 20 years ago? Not a thing. Internet guides you can follow to master it all? Good luck with books that are too hard for you to start reading without a mentor or a school. Learning tinkering has never been easier, but people's motivation for it has never been lower either.
This article is so unbelievably misguided. Kids nowadays deal with a lot of crap that none of us dealt with in the 80s/90s/2000s.
That is, someone who lived through the best periods of America and Liberalism, and didn't know that it ended at 2014, the exact year China surpassed the US in PPP, and still lives with the "End of History" optimism and wealth the rest of us never got to experience.
Why would he put "drink less" is reasons why teens should be happier?
Some of my happiest memories growing up in the late 90's early 2000's involved drinking with a bunch of friends in their basements.
My wife on the other hand drank because she was unhappy.
These things are not the same.
When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.
Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.
I think it's fairly well accepted that the high obesity rates are caused by the shifting American diet. Yes it's more available than the 1950s (although I suspect not terribly so), but the effect it has on public health has been a nightmare.
https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...
It is truly depressing. I can’t imagine being a kid who has to navigate all that on top of social media and constant agitprop.
Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.
This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.
Something about the environment, maybe the increased Microbiota due to food, higher freshness and Non-GMO food, being forced to talk with family. Its not as though as screens aren't present, but they don't feel so overwhelming back there.
Despite Lima having pretty bad places (hence the joke of Perukistan), Peru overall has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, with underreporting being unlikely, since their neighbors with similar culture have less infrastructure yet report much more.
> Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago
As far as the UK goes I find this hard to reconcile with longer hours in school (breakfast clubs and after school things), huge growth in childcare businesses, etc.
I wonder whether the missing factor might be less informal childcare from family, so even if kids are spending more time with parents, they are spending less with family in total (therefore still getting less individual attention).
Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.
You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt?
One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).
Do you know how many households didn't have indoor plumbing?
Do you know how many people died of measles?
You are cherry picking a few data points to paint a very, very rosy picture of a reality in which the vast, vast majority of people were living a life much, much poorer than even a poor person today.
There was progress, but these are not important parts of it.
Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.
WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.
Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.
Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"
Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.
That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.