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Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

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Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#561

Post by mnsc »

seydor wrote: post #522
radarsat1 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, still lost. What is "the 50% of diversity"? Are you trying to say "white"? (Not sure that's 50%...) Not judging, literally just trying to understand the semantics here. This is some kind of code that I'm not getting.

yes that s a good example. "being proud to be black" is diverse, being proud to be white is not. There is definitely a level of doublespeak here, although i'm not sure if teens are really annoyed by it

When someone expresses black pride my interpretation is that they are reclaiming, trying to manifest and celebrate that they no longer live in times where being born black meant that you were a second hand citizen and that you should/could feel no pride.

When someone express white pride I can't interpret it the same way because there hasn't been a time where the structures were so that being born white made you inferior to someone born black purely based on skin color.

So the difference is the history and the context.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#562

Post by gilbetron »

Spooky23 wrote: post #529
indymike wrote: post #481

Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there: 1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work th…

I’ll counter that with the caveat that my kids are grade 5 and younger. We’re very involved in school and other activities - my wife is a PTO president and long time member, I coach youth sports and other community type programs. The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. Yo…

So you don't have a teen yet, then. Let me know how it goes when you have teens - the transition is crazy! (or for some kids, not)

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#563

Post by namelessoracle »

I think everyone's mental health is going down because of social media. Kids may be getting it worse because parents mental health going down can be doubly impacting on the kids. And teen is where they start using social media themselves.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#564

Post by trey-jones »

Spooky23 wrote: post #529
indymike wrote: post #481

Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there: 1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work th…

I’ll counter that with the caveat that my kids are grade 5 and younger. We’re very involved in school and other activities - my wife is a PTO president and long time member, I coach youth sports and other community type programs. The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. Yo…

I think there are probably a multitude of factors, and both social media and too much generic screen time both are unhealthy in quantity. Many things are unhealthy in quantity after all. My oldest is 12, for context. Another factor that I think is really important is that I observe a lot of kids aren't given any responsibility at all. A lot of parents are control freaks. After all, it's easier for me to just do it myself than clean up the mess you make when you do it. 100 years ago you sent your 10 year old out to plow the field because that was the only way the family survived winter. I'm not saying those were better times, but those kids might have had the satisfaction of a job well done, and that's definitely good for mental health.

What's also interesting is that many of the kids that do get responsibility are the ones in really crappy situations. That is, responsibility is forced on them because of circumstances. So these kids might do poorly in school, but end up with a better work ethic than rich kids with education. Or they end up dead or in jail. It's all messed up and there are no easy solutions. We all just need to do better.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#565

Post by usrn »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #544
seydor wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes that s a good example. "being proud to be black" is diverse, being proud to be white is not. There is definitely a level of doublespeak here, although i'm not sure if teens are really annoyed by it

That’s because we have a history of white supremacy in that country though. Similar to how in Germany you’ll get weird looks if you’re echoing nazi talking points; there’s an existing history and cultural context to that sort of thing in that country that the country now wants to not repeat.

There are effectively no Nazis in Germany but there are still ethnostates and genocide in Africa. I really don't see how White people are special here.

EDIT: As usual with the social justice crowd: no discussion just downvotes. It makes a lot of us feel like there legitimately is no argument for your position.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#566

Post by mmarq »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #555
mmarq wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What saved him? > He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before. Yes, but not only that. He also saw that he was better off than his parents and that throughout the years his life improved significantly, while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and,…

> while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year. my question is: are they actually? because if we factor in what it meant to live when their parents lived, are they really worse? I'm not particularly richer monetary wise than my parents were at my age, but I earn a lot more money than they did, that I spend in a lot of things that didn't eve…

> my question is: are they actually?

Yes, they are. At least in the UK, an average salary is often not enough to rent an ex-council flat, a place where the poor used to reside. To afford a flat comparable to the one where I used to live as a child (that we could afford with the salary of a primary school teacher), I’d have to earn 6 times the average salary.

Yes, I can take flights, which if you are a frequent flyer take 5% of your life. But for a large majority of people my age, the rest of their life is spent in an accommodation that is more expensive and objectively worse than the one their parents could afford.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#567

Post by hilbert42 »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #445
caslon wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teenagers back then had more to look forward to. You work for some local company for three decades, then you retire, picking up a house somewhere in the process and are able to put your kids in college. Family members die, but who cares? Sure, it'll traumatize you, but it doesn't ruin your future. Not like that hasn't been happening consistently over the past few years with a pandemic. Nowadays, what's anyone got to…

Social media can be blamed in the sense of giving people too much choice / competition and such, but yes, the key problem is people trying to tackle this from an angle which seeks to invalidate people's feelings rather than look if things are heading into the wrong direction. Yes, war sucks. Famine sucks. All of that sucks and can make people just as hopeless. The premise is the same as the one now: people don't feel…

"Teenagers are learning these things through both the news and the internet, and want none of it."

I agree with what you're saying, I just wonder why kids of my generation had more resilience. It's not as if we weren't under constant stress for we were so.

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as if it were yesterday and wondering if I'd even exist the next day let alone be going to school. I also remember the constant threats of nuclear war. Week after week, month after month, our letterbox would get stuffed with pamphlets forecasting nuclear armageddon, they were usually printed in black and red with images of nuclear bombs exploding on the front.

There was a time in the early to mid 1960s when there seemed to be no future. If that weren't enough, by the time we were 15 or 16 or so we started to worry about the draft and the Vietnam War—that's before we had even left school. It's damn horrible when one's marble pops up in the draft, I can attest to that.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#568

Post by api »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #519
api wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add one more that IMHO is huge: Youth culture seems dead. I remember being a teen and early-20 in the 90s-2000s and there were things like a hippie festival circuit, raves, goth culture, club culture, and so on. I keep hoping I'm just old and don't see it, but I remember back then it would seep out and get covered by the media and get chatted about on the nascent Internet. I see nothing like it today. Sure there…

Genuinely and speaking in the kindest way: I think what you consider culture has aged out. Youth culture does exist, but has simply changed in a way that no longer appeals to your definition of culture. It’s also covered in the news, see: the Astroworld crowd crush. There’s new terminology (bussin, deadass, bet, etc.), new aesthetics (cottagecore), and new music consumption (the rise of kpop). And my knowledge is lik…

Is/was there a sense of being part of something special and exclusive in those scenes or was it just something fun to do?

I didn’t say it in my OP above but I have heard young people bemoan a lack of interesting culture that is “theirs.” Hip hop, IDM, etc are all things from GenX or earlier, though obviously with a fresh coat of paint.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#569

Post by psychlops »

Aside from the terrible picture this paints and appreciation that this information is coming to light, it is frustrating that the authors chose to paint this as a gendered issue (#1.5) with girls being more impacted than boys. If they had bothered to look up CDC information they would see that teen boys suicide rates doubled during the same time period.

Girls and boys choose different ways to deal with depression and the authors focused on reportable depression and signs of self-harm which are biased gendered measurements of depression.

Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

#570

Post by thenerdhead »

indymike wrote: post #481

Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there: 1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work th…

Your argument seems more positioned around public education than it does social media. This seems to be the same problem, new generation. TV in the 50s. Video games in the 90s. Now smartphones.
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