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Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

jonathanhaidt.substack.com

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Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#61

Post by lapetitejort »

fallingknife wrote: post #31
caesil wrote: post #18

I wonder if this doesn't have a lot to do with cars. In surrendering utterly to the preeminence of streets, we have essentially taken our open, free world and overlain it with an immense grid of electric fences -- thick lines all over the map that, if children wander across them, might easily lead to their deaths. So "hold hands everywhere" and "don't let your children run free outside" become the norms. The only saf…

No. It's paranoia. Cars have been around for a long time.

Cars have been around for 100 years, but cars with grills taller than the average child going 60 down residential streets is somewhat new.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#62

Post by OfSanguineFire »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #51
deanmoriarty wrote: post #22

Wow, this is so sad. I grew up in Europe in the 90s with parents who pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I was a well-behaved child/teenager and getting reasonable school grades. At 6 years old I was literally biking by the river or wandering in the woods with my friends after school for hours on end. Every day was an exciting adventure without any adult supervision, just random groups of 2-10 kids who…

You're going to have to be somewhat careful or forward thinking to keep those same benefits for your kids going forward, I'm afraid. I made the opposite move and I see kids playing outside far more often here in Finland than I ever did in the States, and I grew up in a quite cozy little suburb. In my darker moments I fear this may be one of those things where the tradeoffs between a high performance society and a tak…

Younger children in Finland do play outside more than younger children in the USA do these days. However, the linked article is about teen mental health, and Finland has a pretty bad track record for that, too. Loads of Finnish teenagers are walled off indoors, with social media their main outlet.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#63

Post by feoren »

dgb23 wrote: post #53
ccleve wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only wa…

Boredom can be a great breeding ground for creativity.

This is absolutely true, but the problem is that we are oversaturated with time-wasters that prevent that kind of deep, creativity-breeding boredom. There's always another phone game, another show, more social media -- and these things were specially designed to hold your attention and prevent you from being "good bored". South Park nailed it with their discussion about how the problem with doing pot as a kid is that it makes you OK with being bored. Well, now we have millions of things like that.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#64

Post by nonethewiser »

> Moreover, the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey revealed that during the previous year 18.8% of US high school students seriously considered attempting suicide, 15.7% made a suicide plan, 8.9% attempted suicide one or more times, and 2.5% made a suicide attempt requiring medical treatment.

Wait a minute, what?

Nearly 1 in 10 attempted suicide? So in a middle school of say 400 kids a kid would know almost 40 peers that tried to kill themselves? I wasnt in middle school in 2019 but this just doesnt seem right. Maybe im misunderstanding.

Edit: it says high school not middle school, but point stands

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#65

Post by theptip »

Waterluvian wrote: post #9

This may be obvious or well-discussed but I had an epiphany some years back when my dad, regarding my kids, said (paraphrasing), "they're not playing. 'Play' is a misleading term. They're testing the world. They're learning how things work. How gravity works. How friction holds lego together. How actions cause reactions. How friends and strangers behave when you do things. How to use language with make believe. How t…

WoW is an interesting example. I’m sure there are lessons to be learned in any activity; it’s not like structured playtime is giving you zero information to update your world model.

I suppose the question is whether the “learning density” is high or low, and diverse, in video games. I spent a lot of time on single player games as a kid and am open to the idea that MMOs give you more learning (particularly social, of course), but I do wonder how they compare with, say, team sports or running around the woods with your friends.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#66

Post by jstarfish »

pj_mukh wrote: post #46
fallingknife wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's paranoia. Cars have been around for a long time.

Is it paranoia? If it wasn’t for guns, cars would be the number killer of kids under 16. Note: This includes kids IN cars being ferried around from activity to activity. Granted the numbers are lower now than before but that’s because of various safety and traffic calming efforts. Seems like we should push harder on that front, so parents can feel safe encouraging their kids to just pop over to their friends place on…

It's paranoia. The pedophile panic of the last few decades led to nobody letting kids out of their sight.

Things like the sex offender registry "help" but don't at the same time. It's not something I ever concerned myself with ("I know the stats, it's usually a relative!") until someone encouraged me to do it while closing on a house. I'm now acutely aware of the fact that there are dozens of child predators within a 1-mile radius of my home.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#67

Post by mantas »

grey413 wrote: post #29
awesomeMilou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too. Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries. Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss wh…

Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.

Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#68

Post by nonethewiser »

Waterluvian wrote: post #9

This may be obvious or well-discussed but I had an epiphany some years back when my dad, regarding my kids, said (paraphrasing), "they're not playing. 'Play' is a misleading term. They're testing the world. They're learning how things work. How gravity works. How friction holds lego together. How actions cause reactions. How friends and strangers behave when you do things. How to use language with make believe. How t…

Very true with rough and tumble play as well. Which i imagine is virtually non-existant for kids raised only by single mothers. And is extremely important for adolescent boy.s Basically it teaches limits - what hurts and what causes pain to others. And overall leads to much healthier social development. Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this https://youtu.be/Ay1KVzVXbjc

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#69

Post by jauntywundrkind »

lolinder wrote: post #44
Waterluvian wrote: post #9

This may be obvious or well-discussed but I had an epiphany some years back when my dad, regarding my kids, said (paraphrasing), "they're not playing. 'Play' is a misleading term. They're testing the world. They're learning how things work. How gravity works. How friction holds lego together. How actions cause reactions. How friends and strangers behave when you do things. How to use language with make believe. How t…

I wholeheartedly agree based on my own kids, but want to add a caution lest someone misunderstand: this testing, learning, and growing is of a kind that can only be done without adult supervision. It's not something that you can give them with a private lesson. It's not something that can be taught in a classroom. It's not something that can happen at all without adults letting the kids figure it out on their own by…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_o... feels obligatory to mention here:

> a theory in education which posits that individuals or learners do not acquire knowledge and understanding by passively perceiving it within a direct process of knowledge transmission, rather they construct new understandings and knowledge through experience and social discourse, integrating new information with what they already know (prior knowledge).

A bunch of the big One Laptop Per Child people were strong constructivists. It didnt seem super successful, but the OS really did a lot to build a more open sandbox for compute that kids could more directly be involved with, see & manipulate. I wish that effort had gone a bit better, had developed more compelling learning software & been given a shot at a much bigger scale, where more could have been learned/tried.

Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

#70

Post by mantas »

bowsamic wrote: post #15
atonse wrote: post #2

We have really made it a point to have our kid play freely as much as possible and minimize scheduled activities (piano lessons etc.) the problem is that most of his friends are in a million classes so even if he’s free, they often aren’t. That’s been the big challenge. So then there are these magical days where they all don’t have any activities and those invariably happen to be the days ALL kids look forward to. Cu…

[flagged]

Disadvantaged in what sense? It’s likely those kids won’t even go for the same grind as „managed“ kids.
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