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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

#121

Post by barry-cotter »

cududa wrote: post #119
brightball wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts are a pretty great place to get those same skills and experiences. Great opportunity to get a well rounded childhood.

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

By all accounts the experience varies enormously between troops. I’m sure someone who learned enough wilderness survival skills for it to be useful in their military career will pop up in the comments, and some more who suffered as you did.

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

#122

Post by isoskeles »

skywhopper wrote: post #25
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…

Yes, more and more super-suburban living, combined with increasingly restrictive teen driving regulations, curfews, and fear-based media stories about abductions have ratcheted down the ability of teens to hang out together. So when technology came along to enable improved interpersonal contact, it was embraced far more rapidly than it would have been if teen freedom were as high as it was in the 70s. The graphs they…

* suburbs [check]

* "hatred" [check]

* gun owners [check]

Looks like this is an open-and-shut case. The problem is Republicans / red staters / etc.

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

#123

Post by aquova »

the_jeremy wrote: post #30
b_tterc_p wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download the data for the chart. It's actually 2007 if you don't eyeball it. I think we're probably seeing Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. The great recession made loneliness less important to them or less apparent to them. Pretty cool actually. This kind of thing is probably unaccounted for in many similar studies.

I doubt that the start of the recession impacted teens this much. I think it's more likely the rise/fall of certain social media (yahoo/AIM/FB/idk) than relating to them missing physiological needs, especially given most teens are not fending for themselves.

I imagine this was it. I was starting high school in 2008, and I hadn't felt so connected with my friends than that first year or so that Facebook became popular. Previously, I would go home after school, and typically wouldn't see most of them until the next school day. That fall, everyone I knew signed up for Facebook, and we would all be online, chatting and posting dumb things on each other's walls.

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

#124

Post by mrj »

barry-cotter wrote: post #121
cududa wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, when I did cub scouts / Boy Scouts even 20 years ago it was basically glorified arts and crafts

By all accounts the experience varies enormously between troops. I’m sure someone who learned enough wilderness survival skills for it to be useful in their military career will pop up in the comments, and some more who suffered as you did.

Haha yeah. Camping was old hat to me when I went in the Marines. None of that stuff surprised me. One brutally cold night outside of Victorville we were supposed to dig in fighting holes but the ground was solid and nobody got more than a few inches deep despite hacking at it all day. We were going to be there all night.

Next to me was a big pile of wood chips for some reason. Knowing this would keep me warm and off of the ground, I lined my hole with a few inches of chips, training be damned. I was sleeping soundly (and warmly) when the company was roused at 0300 to go back to base. Nobody else slept a wink except those close enough to me to be warned. Basically, the CO got cold so we went home.

lol. I learned that survival training in the Scouts. Good times.

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

#125

Post by BFLpL0QNek »

ada1981 wrote: post #87
Zenst wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, both are now illegal, can't even sell a knife to anybody under 18, same with glue and many things above and beyond alcohol and tobacco. Equally, having a knife in public, would be mandatory jail in the UK in the current climate. For a child, they would be taken into care and some serious nightmares for the parents from social services and the police. As for explosives, all the above, but far worse. By defa…

My friends and I grew up field testing pretty much everything in the anarchist cook book. Our summers were filled making exotic explosives and blowing things up. It’s a wonder we all lived, with no major injuries or jail time. Our antics would land a kid these days in Guantanamo Bay.

Having a copy of the anarchist / jolly roger cookbook would have you serving jail time in 2019.

I remember a time where you would see printed copies at car boot sales or numerous geocity copies.

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

#126

Post by _zskd »

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…

I was kind of wild in high school. I graduated in 2008.

We had a lot of parties. drinking, smoking, etc.

My parents were really upset with me later in life. I have always brought up to them The fact that they were allowed to drink at 18. There were bars that would accept them. They had places to go.

In 2008, me and my peers had nowhere to go. The choice is to either find a place to secretly meet, or don't congregate at all in your teens. The choice there is obvious.

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

#127

Post by hbosch »

bitxbit wrote: post #80
hbosch wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sense of community is actually stronger than ever I think. But those communities are less geographic and much more ideological. The communal bond these days happens more in ideas and beliefs than in physical proximity. Social media made it so, and this shifted sense of community has given rise to increasingly radical and extreme ideologies — but also much stronger bonds in my opinion.

I understand what you mean but you still have to raise your child irl. What is very interesting is that most adults with children in this decade have experienced both worlds and perhaps become too immersed in this new “virtual” environment. In the process, we might be short changing our kids. I imagine a lot of parents feel this way.

The absolute futurist-cynic inside me wants to reply, badly, to this statement:

> you still have to raise your child irl.

with the fact that increasingly I see children being strolled around with tablets mounted in front of their faces, by parents with phones in front of their faces. Imagine these strollers were self-guided, say, they were monitored and could tram children around the park while they played on their pacifying devices! I feel we aren't too far off. DJI could certainly make quite a nice stroller, I would imagine.

I recently had a baby, and we had to fend off MANY attempts to gift us battery (or plug) powered baby seats -- and still we ended up with a mamaRoo[0] in our closet because my mother wouldn't take "no" for an answer. This is a device where you can strap your newborn in (!) and the chair will rock her for you, play gentle music either via the onboard memory or via Bluetooth, to soothe or quiet your baby for you. Behold the truly dystopian image on their product page[1]. Our thinking was that we wanted to keep responsibility of this task for ourselves, along with the stress, thank-you-very-much, because we wanted to experience it and we wanted our baby to experience it -- physically. But still! There are emporiums, I came to learn, full of these types of gadgets that are designed to offload the burden of parenting.

With the sheer momentum of technology and the absolute hijacking of our attention spans, I can all-too-vividly imagine a world not far from now where raising your child can happen almost entirely by "remote". I fear this, of course, but I can imagine it.

__

0. https://www.4moms.com/mamaroo

1. https://www.4moms.com/assets/mamaroo/ultimate_seat-602c8d008...

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

#128

Post by hbosch »

jmoss20 wrote: post #61
hbosch wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sense of community is actually stronger than ever I think. But those communities are less geographic and much more ideological. The communal bond these days happens more in ideas and beliefs than in physical proximity. Social media made it so, and this shifted sense of community has given rise to increasingly radical and extreme ideologies — but also much stronger bonds in my opinion.

That's a slightly different sense of community though -- there are things that local (geographically) communities can provide that online communities simply can't. Some of those things are probably pretty important.

This is an important conversation, but being on HN I cannot resist...

> there are things that local (geographically) communities can provide that online communities simply can't

Identify this delta! It may just be the seed to the next big social network. :)

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

#129

Post by WillPostForFood »

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…

I agree. Also the obsession with school and getting into college (much more work, much less play).

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

#130

Post by iClaudiusX »

_lflx wrote: post #13

tl;dr: technology in the late 90s and mid 00s gave power to users to be more social on their own terms, technology in the late 00s took power away from users and gave it to platforms to dictate social interaction with notifications It appears that this dip in loneliness started as early as the late 90s when internet and cell phone technology was connecting us and enabling us to be more, deliberately, social. Perhaps…

| social on their own terms

I think that is the key insight. Phone calls and instant messaging before smartphones meant that you had to make a deliberate choice to be available at a given time, and to give that communication most of your attention. When you wanted to stop, you simply logged off.

Now there is the expectation that you're always online so nobody wants to be the one to "bother" everyone and interrupt what they're doing. And you're constantly reminded of what you missed out on with the endless feed of everyone else's messages to each other.

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