Is HN also social media? My girlfriend always tell me to stop behaving like a teenage girl. Am I at great risk here?
Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
301–310 of 689 posts
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#302I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
Middle School educator here. I can assure you that your daughters will not be alone when it comes to a moratorium on social media. However, the girls they may very well want to be friends with may be very much into social media and group chats. My advice is to be firm but also take steps to create social opportunities for your daughters. I have a 12yo and I host board game nights with amazing snack trays. I help her…
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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#303I wonder if online dating tends to lead to similar impacts to mental health for some groups of people as social media does to teen girls. Just like in Haidt's examples, it's impersonal, phone-based, leading to constant social comparison, feelings of rejection, ostracism and ghosting. I wouldn't be shocked if a few years from now research came out showing that it has similar effects to adults, but they're just better…
Dating apps select for anti social behavior by default. How many women actually need a dating app to find men?
Women also have the advantage on these apps ('putting the pussy on a pedestal') whereas IRL its far closer to equal.
Then once you do start getting matches the more formulaic it becomes and the more disenchanting and antiromantic it is until you've surpassed some high watermark among your sample size of interaction.
It's not how we're meant to function. Of course it works for some, that's a statistical certainty. The worse the sorting (or the more egalitarian) is the worse the experience will be, which is why Tinder is more of a hookup app.
The more 'serious' dating sites encounter the same initial problems despite better sorting. You're selecting for a certain kind of people who for whatever reason have low satisfaction in their personal social lives. Race to the bottom.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#304I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
It may be a bit cynical, but the other option might be to make sure they're validated by social media, not depressed. Pay for photo shootings and makeup so they look larger than life and get lots of likes. Do that enough and they'll be the ones with the seemingly perfect lives, body and beauty that others get depressed by while liking their pictures, and thus sending them positive signals that will improve their self-esteem.
Might trigger some narcissism issues, but that might be an acceptable trade-off. In the end, it's a game like private schools and universities. You're not the ones making the rules, but if you want your children to succeed, playing by the idiotic rules might be your safest bet.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's letting kids parent themselves.
You're looking at it in isolation because you are not privy to the kids' social circle. What the gp is describing is a social cost imposed on the non-participant kid. If repeated often, this will lower their status within their social circle and (much like chickens) the least popular kids become the default target for emotional abuse and bullying. If they withdraw form their social circle to cut their losses, then th…
I'm a parent, and I was what you call a "non-participant" kid who was bullied when I was in junior high and high school. Here's the thing: School ends. It's a tiny part of one's life. I know, when you're in it, it feels like it takes forever, but once you graduate high school, nobody on earth gives a shit about where you were on the social totem pole. In the grand scheme of things, the cliques and social circles are entirely unimportant, and I plan to teach my kid that. Keep your eye on the prize. K-12 school is something you simply endure until you are an adult in the adult world.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#306I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
I had my 12 year old daughter read the article and after she argued a while I said: Ok, write up your rejoinder and I will post it and see what others think. For context we severely restrict access to social media in our house, but of course they find ways around this as expected (I don't pi-hole because I want them to learn to be hackers) ----------------------------------- *Why I think it’s reasonable for me to hav…
That's a pretty nice rebuttal!
It would be interesting to have her comment on "Why Nerds are Unpopular - Paul Graham" [1]
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#307I think it's somewhat important to ask why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys, and Haidt does not seem to really reflect on that. Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by fi…
Reflecting on that question means saying things that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology and are taking advantage of it, and that's exactly why social media wins; the current politics you mentioned are a protective layer against taking meaningful action against the machine. If society was as concerned about the…
> ...that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology...
You are wrong. Feminism as a broad social movement, and as an academic discipline, explicitly sought to question and attack the social structures and behaviors that were often insisted to be "innate" about female psychology and well being. Basically no one would find that offensive today. It's profoundly mainstream.
Many more people would find it offensive to imply that social media addiction, or that an increasing trend of suicidal ideation as a result of social media use, is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court. That's downright archaic.
Social media companies take advantage of the ways women are socialized into an incredible and unnecessary focus on their bodies by pouring rocket fuel on it.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've hit on the conundrum. Damned if you do join the social network (for the known reasons) and damned if you don't (isolation from friends). Until a major of parents remove access, this will always be the problem. Btw, I had the same issue with games and my son. I could not let him play, but then he wouldn't have had access to the sole socialization his peer group had. Both decisions were bad, but one was worse. L…
Video games and social media are two entirely different things. Some of my best times with my friends is LAN parties as well as going together at demo parties, traveling, coding together. Frankly, a ban on videogames is stupid as hell. Even today on discord and over the network, it?s stil entirely unlike social media. /smh
I agree they are different, but they definitely share some things.
Moderation with video games is hard for young people. Same for social media. That's why I mentioned it.
And, I wasn't suggesting a ban on video games.
Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
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Re: Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls
#310I'm still reading it, but this is great so far. As a father to four little girls, though, it makes me feel really defeated. I can already see that social media has eroded my wife's mental health. I just don't know what to do in the next few years when our girls approach the age when everyone else will get an iPhone and have an Instagram account. I want to say no, but that leads to many other issues, including what th…
Middle School educator here. I can assure you that your daughters will not be alone when it comes to a moratorium on social media. However, the girls they may very well want to be friends with may be very much into social media and group chats. My advice is to be firm but also take steps to create social opportunities for your daughters. I have a 12yo and I host board game nights with amazing snack trays. I help her…
Thanks for sharing this perspective. We have a 9yo and it's already the case some of her classmates have devices that are connected to social media. Very handy advice!