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

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

#231

Post by Broken_Hippo »

brightball wrote: post #186
philpem wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're great if you fit in with the group. If the group decides you're "different" in some way, you're going to get shunned, and shunned hard. Speaking from experience here. It works great for "normal" kids but for any kid even the slightest bit non-neurotypical, it's going to be absolute hell.

I didn't really fit into the group when I was a kid, but in hindsight I still gained a lot from them (including experience learning to better fit into groups).

The thing is this: When you are shunned, you don't get to learn to fit into groups better. You are simply left out. No one picks you until adults step in to make sure you are included, and if you are lucky the adults aren't part of the shunning.

Luckily for me, Girl Scouts was only somewhat bad one year. We moved, and then I hated the activities which focused around makeup and "girl stuff" instead of crafts and camping and things. My shunning was in school itself, and unfortunately the teachers didn't help at all.

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

#232

Post by Broken_Hippo »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #150
paulsutter wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely kids still try to make gunpowder, what are you talking about? And for who but kids are pocket knives and chenistry sets made? > there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife.

In California you get carded when buying anti-dust compressed air, and they won't sell to minors. I was baffled when I was buying a few cans at my local Fry's and they asked me for ID. I remember having lots of compressed air cans around my home when I was growing up and I somehow managed to not kill myself.

This is more because folks huff canned air to get high. The first time I heard of this was someone huffing air freshener, but canned air doesn't have as much... smell, yet still has propellant enough to get high.

I worked in a pharmacy for some years. A teenager came into the store one day, went to the stationary isle, and started huffing the canned air. Dude was a bit violent towards the pharmacist, who was checking to see what the noise was. We wound up calling the cops and feeling really badly for his mother, who was waiting in the car in the parking lot.

Luckily, most folks have canned air for normal purposes - and it seems you did as well.

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

#233

Post by holtalanm »

teens? hell most millenials might be like that, too.

i see my friends every other month if im lucky, but i play video games with them nightly. Friends i met in college that ended up moving away, but we still hang out and keep in touch online.

i used to have one friend that lived close by but he recently moved thousands of miles away, too. so now, 90% of my interactions with my friends is online.

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

#234

Post by jMyles »

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.

> thing called a 'bus'

What a privileged, demeaning tone. I don't understand this.

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

#235

Post by hobs »

brightball wrote: post #186
philpem wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're great if you fit in with the group. If the group decides you're "different" in some way, you're going to get shunned, and shunned hard. Speaking from experience here. It works great for "normal" kids but for any kid even the slightest bit non-neurotypical, it's going to be absolute hell.

I didn't really fit into the group when I was a kid, but in hindsight I still gained a lot from them (including experience learning to better fit into groups).

Well I am glad your troop helped out a bit, I had mine ask me to leave and not come back because I didnt fit in with their religious boyscouts.

Honestly a large amount of troops are maintained by mormons or others as extended wings of their belief systems.

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

#236

Post by ghaff »

roganartu wrote: post #218
Phenix88be wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of parents would refuse such exercise today since they precious children could get hurt. I also think no one will do it anyway since parent will hold you responsible for any scratchs or dommages. > Granted it's almost impossible to actually get yourself killed in 24 hours You should not under estimate the stupid thing children/adolescent can do today...

The wording of their comment suggests heavily to me that they are from Australia. I participated in scouts in Australia about the same amount of time ago as we did somewhat similar things, going on camps where there was a reasonable amount of independence and I would have described it as arts and craftsy. You mention concern about liability these days, but it's important to remember not everywhere is America. I can't…

The US is a very large and diverse country. There are lots of outdoor adventure sort of activities in much of the country.

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

#237

Post by notyourday »

Symbiote wrote: post #165
_qwfv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is that it's not anti social. It's maybe less visibly social, but being in a group voice or video chat while playing board or video games is definitely a social activity. Or building something together - computers enable us to engage in storytelling and art in ways our ancestors could only dream of. Yeah, sure, they aren't social in the same way you were. But you weren't social in the same ways your paren…

So then, how does sex happen? (Or any intimacy.) That's the bit the old people don't understand. Board games are fine, as would be video games in the same room as the other players. But online? Note that the same worry would apply to a youth who spent all their free time reading alone in the past.

It does not. That's why we have a massive drop in teenage pregnancies.

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

#238

Post by CalRobert »

Zenst wrote: post #50
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…

So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions. Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today. After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These…

50 years from now there's a decent chance they'll be coping with the fallout from climate change (or hey, maybe antibiotic resistance?) and the collapse of the power structures that stifles the existence of current teenagers.

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

#239

Post by vfinn »

It's more difficult to find interesting people nearby than it's to find interesting people in the internet. It could be also, that it's easier to develop online identity than it's to develop an identity in real life. If people feel they can connect with other people the way they are able to connect in real life, it's easy to see why making connections face to face decreases: your looks don't matter, your speech impediment don't matter, your disabilities don't matter; if you're strange, you find similarly strange people online; if you have rare interests, you find company, etc...

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

#240

Post by pessimizer »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #116

Idk if this is specific to my generation, but us young people suck at hanging out. People never confirm whether or not they're going to an event. They flake all the time, often without warning. If they're not flaking, they're perpetually late, often absurdly (nothing like getting to a place and getting a text about just leaving). It drives me nuts. But it's so ubiquitous, it's hard to take a stand against it. It's li…

When I was a kid, which is getting to be a long time ago, we never really scheduled anything. People in our peer group tended to hang out in maybe 6-10 different locations - one being a particular bar, one being a particular corner, one being a particular house, etc. Sometimes a location would disappear, sometimes you'd hear about a new location.

On your downtime, you would go to one of those locations and join the group already there, or loiter a little while until someone you knew showed up. If nobody showed up, you'd drift to one of the other locations and do the same thing. One out of 20 times you'd go home without seeing anybody that you were interested in hanging out with.

That's how a commons works, I think. The problem is a lack of a commons, and a suspicion of people in public who aren't currently in the process of shopping. The idea that in this alienated time I'd go to a particular restaurant where people go, drink coffee and just wait for somebody to show up that wanted to hang out almost sounds utopian or suspiciously foreign, but it was my life from probably age 12 to 24.

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