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How getting richer made teenagers less free

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Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#121

Post by Cthulhu_ »

lm28469 wrote: post #28

And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.

I'd argue their parents are similarly affected with Something - a kind of anxiety or fear that something will happen to their kids or they won't end up alright if they're left to their own devices.

"left to their own devices" has its own meaning nowadays too, and there's more and more calls to NOT let them on their own devices, because they're an attention sink.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#122

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dgb23 wrote: post #91
lm28469 wrote: post #28

And it also creates permanent adulescents, scared of responsibilities, scared of commitment, scared of exploring. I've seen it countless times with teenagers in my family, they're overgrown babies.

The irony is that parents feel like their kids are safer and more sheltered when they restrict their movement, while the opposite is true. There was never a time in history where kids would be targeted and manipulated by corporations as today. The digital phone is a marketing gadget that brainwashes us to constantly interact with it. In extreme cases, every aspect of our lives is being scored, monetized and compared.…

To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.

Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#124

Post by eaenki »

throwaway732255 wrote: post #103
TrackerFF wrote: post #15

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurr…

> Interestingly, I've heard from parents that many feel like they're both suffocating and feeling inadequate When my spouse and I were dating, we made fun of those “overly involved parents” who tried to live vicariously through their kids and over-scheduled them. Since having kids, my spouse has (over a one year period) put our 5 year old in: T-ball, swimming, dance, theater, Sunday school, church, soccer, gymnastics…

[flagged]

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#125

Post by ileonichwiesz »

dlisboa wrote: post #95
TrackerFF wrote: post #15

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurr…

It's a cultural shift. Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were. Not that yours were necessarily bad parents for that time but there is way more information today of the issues with the world. I certainly wouldn't let my kid walk home alone in the woods at night: are we really sure this degree of freedom is so developmentally important to be worth the risk? I'd al…

> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.

They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.

Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#126

Post by Cthulhu_ »

squigz wrote: post #85
Aeglaecia wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wonder whats gonna happen in a decade or two when our youngest and brightest minds have all been penned by a culture disconnected from reality

There's something ironic about posting this on HN, where likely a large percentage of us practically grew up on the Internet.

We were ahead of the curve in having our attention spans hijacked by infinite content. This article is from 2003 (but has been updated over time, as e.g. Spotify and Slack came out later) and was already a warning: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/

edit: ah finally; through another HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528944) I was able to find the original link to the article (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2003/07/10/nadd.html) and an archived version of the first version (https://web.archive.org/web/20031008160117/http://www.randsi...). Notably, the list of activities changed:

2003 version:

> Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.

Current version:

> Me, I’ve got Slack opened and logged into four different teams, I’m listening to music in Spotify, I’ve got Chrome open with three tabs where I’m watching stocks on E*TRADE, I’m tinkering with WordPress, and I’m looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I’ve got iMessage open, Tweetbot is merrily streaming the latest fortune cookies from friends, and I’ve got two Sublime windows open where I’m capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to-do lists. Oh yeah, I’m rewriting this article as well.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#127

Post by UncleMeat »

spockz wrote: post #86
somenameforme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I actually agree with you about debt and the general societal degradation, but kidnapping is a non-issue. In modern times there's a total of about 70 child kidnappings per year in the US. I am excluding parental kidnappings which sends that up by orders of magnitude, but I think that's fair because that's an entirely different issue and you specifically said stranger anyhow (though even of those 70 - a sizable chu…

What is included in the stats for kidnapping? Where I live a confused young man convinced a little girl to get on his ebike and forced her to ride along with him for a few hours before coming back to the neighbourhood and being stopped by police that was out in full force for him. My point being, “only 70 a year in the US” sounds like a very low number and inconsequential number since we had an abduction close by alr…

It is true that people have wildly incorrect understanding of crime rates and that this causes them to make strange decisions both in their personal lives and in the policies they support.

Child abductions are amazingly rare. Data for them is strong because they are consistently reported.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#128

Post by UncleMeat »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #6

The constrain isn’t merely financial, it’s broader than that. Teenagers are less free because adults and society have bulldozed the adversity out of teen lives. This sheltering is creating generations that are more - not less - fragile. Generations that know nothing but comfort. They are prisoners of unrealistic expectations of what real life is like.

This is an evergreen complaint made of every generation.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#129

Post by ileonichwiesz »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #93
TrackerFF wrote: post #15

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and came from a rural place with a lot of poverty and at best working class people. We'd be outside all day long - being inside was considered a privilege. Weekdays and weekends. Decades later, most of my peers have middle-class jobs. Their kids are barely outside. Their parents are involved with them from morning to evening, or chauffeuring them between sports and other extracurr…

Similar generations and i've noticed the same thing, but living in an urban place, in a large complex of socialist apartment buildings, in a country that fell apart from a larger socialist one to a smaller capitalist one. Two of the biggest differences were extracurricular activities and technology... back in my day, you maybe had one or two 'after school' things per week, usually immediately after school, for an hou…

> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...

I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.

Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.

Re: How getting richer made teenagers less free

#130

Post by [deleted] »

dlisboa wrote: post #102
smallnix wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the risk What is the risk really? I mean put in numbers.

Do you have children? Would you point them a loaded gun that's only, say, 0.5% likely to go off and shoot them? 1 in 100k cancers also disappear spontaneously, should I wait and see for my kid and not treat them? When it comes to your own children the only number that matters is 1. The 1 time it happens their lives, your life, is over.

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