Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

theconversation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 294 posts

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#101

Post by baroffoos »

gaze wrote: post #69
hannasanarion wrote: post #3

All the sillhouettes of kids in the banner have undercuts and it makes me shivver. Hate that style. I guess I'm an old man now. Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default. In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or un…

"because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default" Maybe it's like eating your veggies.

Something that all healthy and well adjusted people like doing?

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#102

Post by baroffoos »

Pfhreak wrote: post #46
bobthepanda wrote: post #15

There's also the fact that when you're in the suburbs, you need a chauffeur until you can drive. American adults are working more and more, and thus less available to take children to outside activities, which these days are also further and further apart.

I grew up in the suburbs. We took this thing called a 'bus' into the city when we needed to.

We had a bus in my suburb. The bus stop was an hours walk away so you had to be driven there and it leaves once an hour and doesn't go to anywhere your friends are so if you wanted to visit a friends house you would have to take 2 bus trips in each direction which would probably add up to about 5 hours travel time in a day.

Or you could just invite them to an online game and have fun right away.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#103

Post by ctulek »

This is a very poorly written article, if not poorly done science. (See Criticism section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Twenge)

Showing two graphs with opposite directions and claiming one is the cause of the other is not how one should present their claims.

It could be just the case that because of some other reason(s) teens spend less face-to-face time with their friends, and they spend more time on social media.

Beside, the second graph already shows high loneliness rates in 80s, too. Is this also because of social media which did not exist in 80s?

There can be so many other reasons for teens to feel depressed: economy, global warming, the increasing gap between rich and poor, mortgage crisis, and now student debt crisis, so on and on.

Please do not divert our attention to wrong reasons, or please make sure that you are really on top of your game.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#104

Post by plainOldText »

According to some experts, spending more time on social media and less time face to face, might result in emotional under development as the conditions for the formation of the brain circuitry in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are not adequately met. [1]

The OFC is not well understood, but it has been implicated in mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YdpvnwtGc&feature=youtu.be...

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#105

Post by microcolonel »

Zak wrote: post #14

Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be. As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and gradu…

> Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.

Part of this is the ever increasing liability (real or perceived) of being in any proximity to somebody else's kids as a business owner or member of the general public.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#106

Post by darkpuma »

stcredzero wrote: post #17
darkpuma wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default." That's very far from true.

There are people who only like spending time with select people.

Oh I know. And there are people who prefer being hermits. There are also people who would rather spend time with strangers than go a minute alone. The preferences people have run the full gamut between hyper-social and hermit.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#107

Post by Zak »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #88
Zenst wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, both are now illegal, can't even sell a knife to anybody under 18, same with glue and many things above and beyond alcohol and tobacco. Equally, having a knife in public, would be mandatory jail in the UK in the current climate. For a child, they would be taken into care and some serious nightmares for the parents from social services and the police. As for explosives, all the above, but far worse. By defa…

What kind of knives are we talking about? Are even mini Swiss Army knives with 1.5" blades banned? What about a multi-tool like a Leatherman Wave, which has three 3" blades along with pliers, etc? I carry my leatherman everywhere I go, and wouldn't blink if I saw a 14 year old with one. Ontario, Canada.

UK law is that a folding knife under 3" is generally legal to carry in public. Anything else requires a "good reason", which can be problematic if the cop/judge doesn't see things your way. A court ruling some time ago decided that a folding knife with a locking mechanism is actually a fixed blade and therefore not generally legal to carry.

Traditional Swiss Army Knives are non-locking and most of them are under 3". Most modern multitools do have locking blades and would run afoul of the aforementioned court ruling. I'm not sure if being under 18 changes things, but it very well might given the UK has such a hostile attitude toward teenagers that it popularized the use of a low-grade sonic weapon to discourage their presence in public spaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito).

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#108

Post by 908087 »

"Tech" corporations have successfully conned a large portion of the population into believing that clicking a thumbs up icon under a photo of someone's breakfast or mindlessly scrolling through useless reposted memes qualifies as "staying in touch".

Even when people do venture out, it often seems to be for the sole purpose of collecting carefully planned and staged selfies that they feel will gain them more thumbs up clicks.

It's a sad situation, and I feel bad for the kids who are growing up in a world where this shit has a death grip on all of their peers.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#109

Post by microcolonel »

chongli wrote: post #66
e40 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you that as a parent of an 18 yr old, I've always encouraged him to go out and be with his friends. Since he was 12, he's much preferred to meet online in games. Whole groups of them. Whooping and hollering until the wee hours of the morning, when they can. But, I generally agree with your statement. Oh, I have a son, some it might be vastly different for daughters.

Video games have brought an unprecedented transformation in the way young boys spend their free time, and not all for the good. As a volunteer who tutors kids in high school (and a former "hardcore gamer") and middle school I will say, anecdotally speaking, that they've made boys more sedentary, more isolated, and less interested in school. I think the most insidious aspect of video games is that they are a success s…

> and less interested in school.

Though my profession is probably owed to the unsanctioned time I spent online in my youth (especially time away from school), and I luckily never had access to enough unearned money to buy a fast enough computer to play video games, never really played video games much, and still don't now that I have threadrippers, hundreds of gigs of ram, and top tier GPUs sitting around everywhere.

Some parents see the issues with video games as extending to access to computers as a whole, and I think that could have its own social cost.

If I were raising a kid right now, I'd probably have them on a feature phone, and a PC which stops short of playing modern games; but I think a lot of people would struggle with hypocrisy if they did that, since they own gaming hardware and play video games themselves, and my own mother is rather attached to her smartphone.

Re: U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person

#110

Post by gaze »

baroffoos wrote: post #101
gaze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default" Maybe it's like eating your veggies.

Something that all healthy and well adjusted people like doing?

Yeah exactly. But also, even if you don’t want to, you need to.
Post reply on HN