Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, GPS tracking may actually make parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to free roam.
Okay, so it's supervised roam. Who cares? It's much better than keeping your kids at home and only allowing them out on pre-arranged "play dates", which is the other major alternative.
The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
651–660 of 937 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#652Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.
I’m amazed that I had to read so many comments complaining about social media before I hit this one. How have so few failed to consider the idea that young people might be correctly anxious and worried about the future which looks, in many ways, pretty grim.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#653The instinct is to treat this as an apocalyptic change of some sort in society. Here's an alternate framing. The DSM-5 was released in 2013.
And what exactly is the supposed significance of that?
No malign intent nor conspiracy is required; we changed how we defined certain mental illnesses, and as a result the number and kind of diagnoses for those mental illness (and for mental health) change as professionals adopt the new standards.
It's not that there's an increase or a change in the actual mental health, but just that the numbers before and after are simply not comparable.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thing not mentioned on urbanist Twitter as much: Teens are not allowed in malls and a lot of other (effectively) public places now.
How is that possible? The goal of a mall is to attract shoppers and sell stuff to them. Why would they turn away a shopper due to age? Especially these days, with malls dying all over the place, it seems quite peculiar that they would turn away any shopper!
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#655Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thing not mentioned on urbanist Twitter as much: Teens are not allowed in malls and a lot of other (effectively) public places now.
How is that possible? The goal of a mall is to attract shoppers and sell stuff to them. Why would they turn away a shopper due to age? Especially these days, with malls dying all over the place, it seems quite peculiar that they would turn away any shopper!
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.
There was also concern over population explosion back then ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb ). But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way. At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not kn…
> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always…
heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the…
> Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures That may be generally true, but it doesn’t imply that time alone is always bad, nor that all time “being social” is good. It’s certainly plausible that the explosion of access to social media has been a net negative and that spending some of that time alone would be better. Thinking back, the time I…
If your peers aren't cruel to you, then spending time around them is extremely healthy.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
elf on the shelf is a frighteningly common indoctrination to a life of surveillance
I have the related theory that the whole Santa Clause and Easter Bunny lie thing makes children more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain, why wouldn't politicians and media personalities conspire to lie to me about the earth being flat or climate change if there is profit or power to be had?
You are mixing up propgandists who run with theories as though they are proven fact on bad faith to push agendas without a shred of evidence.
Law enforcement engages in theorizing about conspiracies, intelligence agencies engage in theorizing about conspiracies, almost every country has laws making criminal conspiracy illegal. And there are plenty of conspiracies that turn out to be true, they also tend to be quite banal and human rather than sexy hollywood aliens, global gov conspiracies, etc.
Attacking theorizing with such a broad stroke is attacking critical thinking not disinformation. You can't decide what path of possible truth to persue without theorizing.
If anything santa and the easter bunny are gentle introductions for kids to learn how to tune their BS detection circuit.