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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

#161

Post by qooiii2 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #55
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…

Yes, this culture of parents scheduling play dates drives me insane. And even if you try to schedule, everyone is so busy. Kids have karate and 30 minutes later baseball and that's after school. It so much different from our childhood and we struggle to integrate into it.

It's tough but doable. You have to get on people's calendars a week or two out whenever you can, and if you're lucky, it eventually turns into easy, low-stress, open-ended playdates.

Meeting other parents is a huge effort, though! It's basically dating all over again. If your kids ride the school bus, that's a big help because you automatically meet nearby parents who are home in the afternoon. Otherwise, you have to go to lots of events and ask parents for their phone numbers, but the majority don't work out for random reasons.

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

#162

Post by ant6n »

Waterluvian wrote: post #48
lolinder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The way I explain this is, "my job is not to protect my kids from harm, it's to protect them from irreparable harm." I've had this instinct whenever my kids are on the jungle gym to say, "slow down!" "That's too high!" etc. but I usually catch myself and think, "if they fall is it a cry or a hospital visit?"

>> The way I explain this is, "my job is not to protect my kids from harm, it's to protect them from irreparable harm."

I also like to protect my shit from harm. Kids can be quite destructive in their play.

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

#163

Post by ddq »

clsec wrote: post #134

Seeing lots of comments about over scheduling children's free time. I took music lessons, did Cub Scouts Weeblos & Boy Scouts, played little league, played Pop Warner & high school football and ran track. All after school activities. As for freedom.. I took SF MUNI, BART, Ferries and Golden Gate Transit starting at 7 year old. Any free time I had was spent playing with friends. And I had to be home by the time the st…

Scouting is an interesting example because my experience included both ends of the scheduling vs. freedom spectrum. My first troop was all about the weekly meetings, merit badge classes, memorization, structured activities, and the like. Camping trips almost always had a specific goal, like hiking a certain trail or getting certain merit badges. My second troop was about going camping and making our own fun. Once the necessary duties were out of the way, we were pretty much left to our own devices and it was infinitely more rewarding, both as a kid and in my retrospective analysis. I learned so much more just figuring things out with the other boys, especially on the social development side.

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

#164

Post by Kon-Peki »

floren wrote: post #150
Kon-Peki wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile I know people who look at analytics and numbers to decide what sports and activities their child (who is still in elementary school!) should be doing in order to maximize college admissions chances. Those people are dumb; ignore them. They're "fighting the last war", so to say. Seriously, an orchestra needs 30-40 violins per tuba. There has to be a lot of violin players, or there is no orchestra (the Harv…

They're not trying to optimize so the kid can be a profession violinist -- god forbid, there's hardly any money there at all! No, the idea is to just do things which make the kid look different on a college application. That's it. Once the Harvard letter comes in, the cello can be sold, it's served its purpose.

Yeah, I totally get that :)

But you know, just about every single good university has an orchestra - lots of them have multiple (symphony, philharmonia, etc). There are way more kids playing music for their school than will ever be professional musicians. And there is a need for 2-3 times more violin players than cello players.

If your kid enjoys playing violin and wants to play in college, that will count for a lot more than someone who plays a cello just so they can write it down on their application.

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

#165

Post by awesomeMilou »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #153
shard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures This is a major thing in many East Asian cultures as well, China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea. Korea had to pass a law saying that private academies have to close at 10pm, so that kids aren't studying past midnight, but some academies still stay open secretly as the parents are demanding the extra hours. It's a vicious circle: kids compete for the few spots in…

After bedtime, I would grab a book, creep into the bathroom, and hop into the dry bathtub to read. I preferred this to a flashlight under the covers. Mom would find me, send me back to bed, and shame me for reading. Then I was further shamed and humiliated when I was fitted for spectacles in third grade. Of course my parents blamed myopia on reading books in poor lighting. That bathroom was actually the site of innum…

Question is, what did you read? I don't think these kids going to night school are there to read popular youth literature.

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

#166

Post by medvezhenok »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #149

"About 1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC's Autism." When I was growing up, basically no one had it. The rates were 1 per 1,000 or lower. So one or two kids in the entire high school. Now you can expect one in your class. Many of these kids are supper naive and vulnerable, just trying to fit in. One reason why the right is skeptical of what is bein…

Sorry to burst your bubble, the rates of Autism likely haven't changed (or changed in a minor way), what has changed is the rate of diagnosis. A lot of the kids currently being diagnosed also have parents that are autistic but undiagnosed. Same thing with ADHD.

The paths available in society have gotten less friendly to those with ADHD/Austism (by default), so more people are seeking diagnosis today than in the past.

Also, if you go far enough back, the U.S. used to institutionalize people with mental conditions, which is a pretty strong case against seeking any sort of diagnosis.

The decrease in child mortality might have also increased the occurrence of certain conditions in the population, but I'm not aware of specific studies to that effect.

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

#167

Post by SoftTalker »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #147
vitaflo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I grew up people still do pop ins. You get around your problem by helping the person out with what they were doing when you popped in. Doing the dishes when you pop in? Cool, you get to dry them as I wash. Everyone basically follows this rule. There’s no expectation of entertaining guests if you pop in for a visit.

I feel like a literal pop in does not work for many people due to mobile phones and suburbs. Suburbs make it so you have to go at least a little out of your way to visit someone, which means you might as well call to make sure they are available before wasting your time on a detour. Although, I see no problem with impromptu visits, I get them all the time. They just happen to call or text before coming.

Agree. Even when I was a kid, "pop-ins" were only immediate neighbors, maybe within a 3-4 house radius. Anyone farther away you'd call first, even with landlines.

These days many people don't even know the names of the people living across the street.

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

#168

Post by honkycat »

we grew up in a less prosperous time than our parents and grandparents so our parents didn't have any time to raise us and were constantly economically terrorized.

I will also ALWAYS point out that our parents could go to bars at 18 and actually had places they could gather socially without parental supervision before half-way through college.

They put kinds in child jail, tell them to behave or else, make them sit through hours and hours of shitty classes in un air-conditioned rooms with checked out teachers. ( note: this is not how the children of the wealthy experience school )

Once again, you can point to economic factors like the erosion of the public spaces, the massive over-building of suburb and road infrastructure making outside objectively dangerous, and outsourcing public spaces to corporate owned malls that were NEVER profitable.

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

#169

Post by Waterluvian »

OO000oo wrote: post #99
pomian wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant comment. We had a principal in our little community school who had exactly that attitude. He encouraged 'playing", and was often criticized for his efforts, by parents who didn't understand. Overall, however, the kids from that school were all eager learners, curious as to the world around them, socially very well integrated, and easily adapted to the rigors in high school and later. Play, is under valued.

The parents have every reason for concern, not because there's something wrong with the principal but because there's something wrong with the society their children are entering. The parents realize that their children will be screwed if they don't get into a good college, and the poorer parents need scholarships too! The principal's philosophical musings won't pay the bills.

I think you're making a connection between "if you're focusing on open-ended stuff at school you aren't learning X, Y, Z." I can empathize and to an extent I agree that this is a concern with "fitting into the real world."

As someone who never ever even remotely had the grades to get into an engineering program and has spent his entire career as a robotics engineer, experiencing a lot of terrible engineers with advanced degrees (among a ton of incredibly brilliant ones!), I'm just not sold on it being that big a deal. I think the larger harm is a parent applying that kind of pressure.

All that being said, everything in moderation. I don't think it means, "hey let your kid do whatever." But it also doesn't mean, "force your child to study the violin and load them up with an entire childhood of structured programs until they hate you."

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

#170

Post by ddq »

outlace wrote: post #24

I haven’t looked into the data carefully but this strikes me as implausible at first impression for a few reasons. One is that cultures with highly structured time for kids like China do not have the same dramatic rises in mental illness, that I’m aware of. Two is that this seems to only apply to middle class or rich western kids (unsurprising for academic studies). You really think poor kids are spending too much ti…

The epidemic of youth suicide in Japan and South Korea related to the stress of their rigid, demanding education systems is fairly common knowledge.
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