Go watch Sesame Street, S01EO1.[1] Early Sesame Street is all about unsupervised kids in a big city. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NUiHCr9Cs
Another thing that's jarring is how slow paced the early episodes were.
Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
251–260 of 413 posts
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#252This 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…
Of course we told (many times) our 3 yr old son not to put his hand on the stove.
And one day he just had to try it and feel what all these stories were about. He started crying immediately. We went to the hospital and came back rather quick. It wasn't so bad, just had to have a bandage for a couple of days.
Some weeks later he does it again. On purpuse.
!!??
I tell my brother and he answers: "I kind of understand him. Sometimes I want to do it too."
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#253This 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…
[dead]
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#254> There is also evidence that teens who have part-time jobs are happier than those who don’t, because of the sense of independence and confidence they gain from the job. Genuinely wondering where they got any data for that, given that child labour is generally illegal these days and all. What kind of part time jobs for children that pay actual money exist in the present? I suppose you've got the rare ones like acting…
In the US that's changing...
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#255This 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 also played WoW and learned a lot. I was leading a guild and was a raid leader in a somewhat semi-competitive environment (we were competing with other guilds on our server for first kills). If you want to learn how to be a team leader in a highly competitive environment where people fail, things do not go as planned, and you need to improvise, where stress comes into play when you fail for the 27th time over the last 4 hours, then you can do it there for free. You learn how to make hard choices (you may need to replace a friend with another guildmate if they are holding the whole team back by failing game mechanics, etc.), how to lead a team, how people behave in stressful situations, how to keep the team together, and how to keep morale high, etc. So next time you see a kid playing WoW with others, don't underestimate the learning experience he will get there.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#256We 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…
That sucks. I used to ride the bus home after school, throw my backpack at my house, and run off to play with my buds until the sun started to go down. It was the most amazing part of my day, just being free to be a kid and DO WHATEVER. Sometimes we'd walk to the stream and pick up rocks to look for bugs and crawfish. Sometimes we'd play card games. Sometimes we'd go to the park and play "wall ball", which obviously included a painful peg to the back with a tennis ball if you failed whatever the goal of that game even was!
Anyways, point is, this fostered my interest in nature (looking for bugs), my sociability and strategy (card games), and my agility and teamwork (wall ball). This was stuff I worked hard at too, because they were my interests.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less ability to compete in the job market with others who were managed in basically all skilled jobs
When was the last time a job interviewer asked what extracurriculars you did when you were 14? There is an extremely small sliver of society where that one additional extracurricular makes the difference between getting into an excellent school vs a merely great school. For everyone else, the long term value is quite dubious.
As much as you might want it to be, your life right now is not a blank human plus qualifications. Who you are as a person is shaped by your life before this point. A person who has invested in those extra curricular skills will simply be more skilled now, from precise ways (the specific skills learnt) to more general ways (the required concentration and perseverance etc)
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#258Wow, 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…
I'll shout it from the rooftops: Down with helicopter parenting! Independence, life skills, and fun stem from the freedom to explore on one's own. If anything parents, should be constantly nudging and encouraging kids to be more independent than is typically expected by: 1. Letting them have some unstructured, unsupervised time, especially out in the neighborhood. 2. Not automatically doing or thinking for them, espe…
Helicopter parenting is bad until it gets your kid into Cornell. Therapy can wait until that corporate job health plan kicks in.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remove zoning restrictions is step 1 to allow denser more walkable areas, which will reduce urban cost of living. Step 2 is to change the highway code to make stroads illegal and make more normal safe roads. Step 3 is change the fha rules so more dense homes are built. Step 4 change cafe standards so smaller lighter cars are the norm, possibly tax suvs and trucks. These are all stroke of a pen changes.
> These are all stroke of a pen changes. In a democracy you need buy-in from society at large. What's the plan on achieving that?
You can poll people about things that they want, but (like it happened with many great inventions) people don't actually know what they need. Do they want less car-centric environment? Most will answer "no" because they've never lived in a society that wasn't as car-centric. Most people are not urbanists and most are content with their lives. You can poll them and do inquiries to death, or you can allow experts to implement all of the things that are unambiguously good from any perspective, let people grumble for a bit, adjust and after that reap benefits.
A part of being a democratic society is accepting that an opinion of an average person is worthless.
Re: Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
#260I am especially interested to hear from non-USA readers of HN, as to how much of this sounds like what is happening in their countries vs. how much is a unique American issue.
Outside looking in:
- In the rest of the world University applications are (mostly) decided on academic scores. This adds academic pressure but it means outside school work the time is yours (probably not so true in Asia though). In the US I get the impression that kids (and parents) need to create some sort of 110% intensity overachiever halo in all their out of school activities (as early as possible) to be able to pad their applications in order to impress an Admissions Officer.
- Your infrastructure is (beyond insanity) car hostage and the SUV arms race adds to even more pedestrian lack of safety. That pretty much makes a lot of kids confined to a few blocks around the house until they are 16. If you were to say to anyway in Europe that a town with more than 50k people has multilane streets but with no sidewalks they would probably protest.
- Having said that I still feel that at least for teenagers smartphone/social media usage is a major cause of mental health decline across the globe (so not US exclusive). It's the whole problem of comparing other people's filtered best with your internal self-perceived worst.