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Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

economist.com

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Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#311

Post by Joof »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #294
nostrademons wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entirely possible, but there's also potential selection bias. I was a teen in the late 90s, and was friends with a lot of the druggie/stoner/party crowd. By and large, these people do not have kids, because they can't afford to. A good many of them are dead now, either from overdoses, or drug-related accidents (like crashing their car while going 100 mph while high), or suicide. The 55 years of American history post-…

Kind of reminds me of the kids I grew up around in San Jose back in the 1960's and 70's. A lot of them thought they could party, skate through school and then go work for FMC or some such just like their dads. If I had to guess 75% of them have long ago left California because they couldn't cut it. At least in the Bay Area teens appear to be way more buttoned down and smart than my generation. Don't get me started on…

I've always felt that this is a misconception. My friends did a ton of drugs, had parties and participated in hobbies, especially in college. Now they're all Engineers, PhDs, Doctor's and Entrepreneurs. They just happened to work hard at school too. They don't have kids cause they're busy, so it might be as bad.

But no, it's because they're rowdy kids doing 'bad things'.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#312

Post by buzzkillington »

user5994461 wrote: post #187
daptaq wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all. That's easy to explain: You don't have to talk about these things anymore, because of IM & co.. It's all still happening, but it's easier to hide it from the "dweebs". I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. At best you realize a few year…

The partying portrayed in the media is more representative of student life in universities. There's not much going on in high schools, 15 years old kids living at their parents who can't even buy alcohol.

>There's not much going on in high schools, 15 years old kids living at their parents who can't even buy alcohol.

I was doing hard drugs in house parties at 15 and I was one of the older ones. I had a friend who had to have his kidneys replaced by the time he was 16 and knew of 5 girls who had abortions before they were 18.

There is plenty going on in high schools.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#313

Post by throw149102 »

kazinator wrote: post #215

Teens typically look up to pop culture produced by people who are about ten years their senior. For current teens, that consists of vapid millennials. No music, no cool behavior, no new anything. The only cool stuff teens can find is from their grandparents' generation or older. So then all they can do is go to YouTube and post a comment under some 80's video "Sigh, I was born at the wrong time" and then go back to b…

> No Music

I presume you're not a fan of lofi? K-pop? Dubstep? Video game soundtracks, in general?

There's also an element here of how people express their tastes: Now a days, everyone has infinite access on Spotify/Youtube/Apple music. So I would say that music has become very decentralized. Anyone can put something on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, and anyone can listen to it. So the label of "pop" is maybe not as descriptive as it could be.

> No Cool behavior

I want to say something sardonic and rude like "So what, like smoking and getting pregnant as teenagers and raping people?" But I literally have no idea what you mean by cool behavior, and that's what my mind goes to when you say "cool". What do you really mean when you say "cool behavior"?

> no new anything

What do you think of twitch.tv? Or Esports? I presume your thoughts are not positive?

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#314

Post by t-writescode »

guntars wrote: post #260
softwaredoug wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I've noticed the biggest problem that prevents "free range" kids is other adults without kids. Those of us WITH kids relish getting the kids outside and out of our hair. But those without kids frequently are calling the parents to complain our children are roaming the neighborhood, perhaps on their property. Or they fear these kids will create problems. Usually, however, they're just kids being kids. Goi…

I don’t know, kids being kids is just another word for getting in trouble. I certainly wouldn’t want kids roaming around my property if they are anything like I was at that age.

Kids being kids for me, when I was a kid was:

  * walking to the local convenience store
  * roaming the woods
  * playing paintball in the woods
  * building forts
  * playing manhunt
  * going on _long_ bike rides
  * paddling out on a canoe in our neighborhood's lake
  * staying up stupid late, playing video games with friends
    all in a single room together, also eating pizza
We also didn't go _into_ other people's properties, in general. We went into this weird county-owned forest thing, or walked the streets on sidewalks in our suburbs (and ran across 6 lanes of traffic to get to the other side of the street for the store)

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#315

Post by majormajor »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #242
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish adults understood the realities of being young in 2020. Even when I graduated HS in 2007 I could tell my experience and the academic expectations I needed to live up to were much higher than it was for my mom. After I graduated I saw younger friends take more AP classes than I did and do more leadership activities than I did. Expectations are always ramping up. It is no party. Our laws and bureaucracies haven’…

FWIW, this isn't so much a story of "being young in 2020" as it is "being young in 2020 in the hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US". This phenomenon is actually pretty unique to a handful of metro areas, which happen to be over-represented on HN. In most of the country, bright high school students are focused on getting into their state's flagship public university, and exceptionally succ…

My early-2000s experience in mid-size-city Texas - not even Dallas or Houston - was getting closer to the OP. It wasn't that extreme, but the bright students were in magnet programs (or private schools, if $$$$), and were loading up on APs, SAT IIs, and all that crap. And the goal - accomplished by a handful of my class - was Harvard, Rice, Columbia, Duke, etc.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#316

Post by jl2718 »

nabla9 wrote: post #104

Finland has mandatory military service for males. So every year you most of the young men (mostly age 18 to 20) into a controlled environment and go through standardized testing and observation. - Physical fitness has gone down, overweight goes up. - Intelligence peaked among those who were born in 70's and has been in slight decline last 18 years. Similar results can be seen in other developed countries. - Anxiety d…

For IQ, the average (mean) is heavily influenced by the number of low performers. It’s not a good indicator of what is going on with the ‘normal’ kids. Some of the observations here might indicate that there is a growing population of kids with social and mental problems. This is probably a much bigger problem than a mild decline of the median.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#317

Post by jackcosgrove »

dankoss wrote: post #270
jimmaswell wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So absurd that college admissions care about your hobbies etc. If they want to receive public funding they should have to only consider academic performance, maybe with some weighting for life circumstances. Are we missing out on the most qualified mathematicians and doctors because they didn't attend volunteer programs and play sports?

I think it's because at the top level, everyone already has perfect grades so schools need additional criteria to limit their selection pool.

They have perfect grades because of grade inflation. It's cruel that because the boundaries of what is tested have narrowed, those who wish to prove themselves must focus on perfection rather than mastery.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#318

Post by csallen »

oblio wrote: post #147
daptaq wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even dating at all. That's easy to explain: You don't have to talk about these things anymore, because of IM & co.. It's all still happening, but it's easier to hide it from the "dweebs". I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. At best you realize a few year…

> I've seen both sides, and it's really surprising how well this unwritten system works. Mind giving more details for someone who was last a teen more than a decade ago? :-)

My twin brother was much more popular than I was in high school. I was one of the nerds working hard to get into a good school. I never heard anything about the parties, drugs, sex, etc. going on until my senior year. My own brother rarely talked to me about what was going on.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#319

Post by buzzkillington »

Joof wrote: post #300
_5yps wrote: post #27

16-year-old here. My experience is probably markedly different from most teenagers in the US (I'm an immigrant who goes to a competitive school full of other immigrants) but I find that, for the most part, this article hits the nail on the head. High School is nothing like the usual media portrayal - I've never heard anyone even talk about a party, nobody's doing anything stronger than weed, nobody's fucking or even…

You just suggested that a lot of ivy-league schools are second tier. I'm not sure you're very representative of the vast majority of people. In Texas, there's stuff like Stanford and Cornell, which is ivy league -- 1-2 kids might do that. Then we have 2 top tier state schools, then it's the other stuff. Everyone else I work with got some degree from an Ivy League. Half have PhDs. It carries some weight and I think we…

The point of the degree is to have it and then pretend it doesn't matter.

Re: Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)

#320

Post by t-writescode »

peterangular wrote: post #305
guntars wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, kids being kids is just another word for getting in trouble. I certainly wouldn’t want kids roaming around my property if they are anything like I was at that age.

It's liability. Letting people onto your property is liability no matter what the context. Unsupervised kids roaming my property is a no-go and not my responsibility. I get that people want to have their ideals here, but there's a whole "risk to the property owner" side to this conversation that's not happening.

Or just teach them to not go into other people's property? I didn't when I was their age. Families had fences to designate property.
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