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With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

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Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#71

Post by bpicolo »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #70

Screen time is a symptom, not a cause. One of the vital drives of adolescents are to gain independence from their parents and figure out their own place in life. To do this, teens need to interact with peers, hang out, make mistakes, and generally be sociable. Our society, largely, does not allow this. Instead, safety fears, need for cars, etc, keep teens at home. So what else is a teen to do to interact socially wit…

People are using smartphones as a replacement for face-to-face interaction. That's not just symptomatic.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#72

Post by JabavuAdams »

adamnemecek wrote: post #6

Im sure smartphones could be a possible factor however one must not forget how depressing the whole high school experience is. I think that the pressure has increased quite a bit. The amount of hw has also increased. I don’t think that this suicide increase has been observed in say Finland.

They address the homework issue in the article. They claim that time spent doing homework has not increased significantly between 2010 and 2015

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#73

Post by ThrustVectoring »

bpicolo wrote: post #71
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #70

Screen time is a symptom, not a cause. One of the vital drives of adolescents are to gain independence from their parents and figure out their own place in life. To do this, teens need to interact with peers, hang out, make mistakes, and generally be sociable. Our society, largely, does not allow this. Instead, safety fears, need for cars, etc, keep teens at home. So what else is a teen to do to interact socially wit…

People are using smartphones as a replacement for face-to-face interaction. That's not just symptomatic.

The solution isn't to ban or reduce smartphone usage, like you would if smartphone usage itself was causing problems. The solution is to make it easier and more accepted to hang out face-to-face.

Ban the phone and keep the isolating culture and you wind up with even more isolated teens.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#74

Post by watwut »

wutbrodo wrote: post #33
purple-again wrote: post #4

Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.

> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the…

Teenagers I do know personally talk about being worried about jobs, housing, debt and general economical problems. I never start those discussions, they do.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#77

Post by ben_w »

wutbrodo wrote: post #33
purple-again wrote: post #4

Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.

> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the…

When I was a teenager I didn’t think further than 5 years ahead. I did however write goth poetry, become Wiccan (and thus got all mopey about being at a Catholic school), get upset how unfair it was that UK law looked down on my sexuality (it had not yet equalised the gay and straight ages of consent), and frustrated how ridiculous it was for the Prime Minister to veto every EU thing he could in protest against the BSE-related ban on British beef. Ended up writing loads of letters to newspapers about politics of the day before internet comments were a big thing, then going to university really worried if my student loan would cover everything.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#78

Post by eat_veggies »

cwar wrote: post #22
purple-again wrote: post #4

Except from 2010 - 2015 many teens did feel a crushing sense of economic dread as they dealt with the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. The article just skims over it with a quick this is why economics couldn’t have been the reason.

I don't think many teens (13-18) are doing much deep thinking about those things. I was a teenager about a bit more about than a decade before this time period, so maybe things were just so great then I didn't consider these things. But it seems like a stretch to me that a middle school or high school student is depressed because they are worried about retirement. Things like that were far too abstract to be contribu…

Am teenager. I'm not too worried about my future because I have some decent development skills. However, a lot of my friends are depressed because a lot of these issues really aren't so far in the future as to be "too abstract." It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the college educations we're about to drop $50k+ on might not help us get jobs in the near future, or that working until we die will sort of suck, or that a pregnancy is an instant game-over (but it's okay, because apparently teens don't have sex anymore), or that most of the jobs we're going to end up getting are meaningless and will soon be automated away, so why not just off ourselves right now? It's scary. I sure as hell hope that tech now is the equivalent of the factory jobs of the 40's, so by the time my skills don't matter, I'll be set or dead.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#79

Post by matwood »

leetcrew wrote: post #50
matwood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no benefit to the student No benefit? Maybe you mean that you prefer an Android tablet? I didn't have a computer until I was 18. The internet wasn't much of a thing until I got to college. Every day I think about how amazing it would have been to have access to so much free information when I was a kid.

I spent much of my teenage years playing video games, building/overclocking computers, flashing roms on my phones, and devouring wikipedia. my parents were concerned that I was spending too much time online but I'm glad they didn't try to intervene. I was learning tons and by the time I got to college pretty much everything in the CS degree was trivially easy for me (except some of the formal math stuff). on the flip…

I get it, and what I was responding to was the "no benefit" comment. I carry research articles and books on my phone that I can read with any spare moment. It's amazing actually, and I don't see the point of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

> on the flip side, I am quite certain that most of my peers spent their hours primarily on youtube, facebook, and aim. they seemed to take pride in how little they understood the workings of their entertainment devices.

People, kids especially, love wasting time. All that changes is how they do the time wasting.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#80

Post by betenoire »

yakitori wrote: post #68
wutbrodo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the realities of student loans, an out of reach housing market, devalued college degrees, the gig economy, promises of no retirement, etc. Have you ever met a teenager? Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the…

> Have you ever met a teenager? Yes. And we've all been teenagers. >Almost literally zero percent of them think (or need to think) about this stuff, with the possible exception of some of the very oldest teenagers (ie, people in their first or second year of college who are starting to think about the details of the start of their careers). What? EVERY teenager thinks about it. Not only that, their parents financial…

> What teenager doesn't talk about or think of their future?

I don't want to get into why, but I didn't. If someone doesn't really think they have a future, what's there to think about?

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