Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#811

Post by dotnet00 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

zionic wrote: post #755

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…

Does anyone else feel like homework is stupid? They have your kid for the majority of the working day, that's more than enough time for work. When they're home the last thing they should be doing is school.

I don't think it's entirely stupid.

Eg math problems solved in class would be solved as a group so everyone learns the process, and homework is for problems which use those same concepts, but require more careful thought. Most of my math skills were solidified by solving challenging problems like that at home. Simply learning the concepts in school was not enough to build a deep enough understanding, but adding in a good homework component took me from having trouble handling basic algebra to unwittingly deriving basic calculus in an exam when faced with problems I didn't realize weren't intended for me.

Homework as just mechanical work intended only to take several hours per day is pretty stupid though.

As another point, how many of us truly shut out work when at home? Many of us still end up spending a few off hours a week programming personal projects or just reading up on and learning new technologies. I think homework serves a similar function for kids.

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

#812

Post by jstarfish » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #627

Spooky23 wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah there's a framework for reporting abuse now at least, in the early aughts the game in my high school was to catfish dick pics from desperate boys over AOL Instant Messenger and send them to others randomly for shock value. It was vile, and at least one victim switched schools because of it, but no one ever got caught. It was reported to the police, but no one had any idea how to track down the person doing it. I…

> If this happened to my kids today it's very likely someone would be charged with a crime (rightfully so).

I have a sadistic stepdaughter who did similar-- on one occasion, I caught her catfishing lesbian girls and publicly accusing them of sexual abuse. From talking to a few of her (now ex-)friends, this was not an isolated incident. Enough of her lies caught up to her that she ended up changing schools, crying victim the whole time.

Kids these days know how to exploit privacy laws, be it HIPAA for their Munchausen-by-internet campaigns or anti-wiretap laws to conceal their targeted cyberbullying.

Evidence obtained from someone else's phone is generally inadmissible, so anybody positioned to discover such activity is going to have trouble reporting it.

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

#813

Post by juve1996 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

basisword wrote: post #698

standardUser wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. Sorry it can't just all be sunshine and roses like you prefer, but women in this country are about to lose a fundamental human right, so maybe "looking on the bright side" is not the appropriate disposition for these times.

>> Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. This is the exact kind of BS the parent comment is referring too. The world is full of problems but it’s never been better for most people in most ways.

Your comment represents the same worthless platitude.

It doesn't make sense to say "yea your life is significantly worse than your parents, but hey at least you aren't a slave building the pyramids at Giza."

The fact is it's relative. People are, in general, worse off than their parents were in the west at this point in time. That matters.

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

#814

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

juve1996 wrote: post #808

s1artibartfast wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the matter of proportionality. There are challenges and problems, some worse than prior generations and some better. Putting the comparison aside. It is not healthy or helpful to teach children that they are doomed, the situation is hopeless, and their their future is destined to be miserable. I wouldn't tell my child "your life will suck, and you would be better off dead" every morning when they wake up. Pe…

Children aren't being directly told these things. They are seeing it every day on blast from every source of media. It's not just kids. Its young adults choosing not to get married or have kids. The reality is grim. Progress is relative. Even if the young generation isn't that bad compared to the 1700s, it's bad compared to what it could directly be related to, which is the previous generation and the era of good and…

I'm not claiming that people tell their children this verbatim. I agree that this is what they are effectively being blasted by from media sources and this is very detrimental.

I also think that the pessimism is vastly overstated. Constant comparison is a recipe for disappointment just as much as if you compared your life to a celebrity on social media. There are still vast sources for happiness and life satisfaction that are untappd

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

#815

Post by dotnet00 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #679

carlgreene wrote: post #649

Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive. How do you expect them to feel? This is amplified on social media and shown with "proof" from all corners of the world. We've evolved from a place where hearing about bad news from the tribe was an advantage. It allowed us to adjust our life to take into account risks _seen_ by other folks in the tribe. On…

Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. Sorry it can't just all be sunshine and roses like you prefer, but women in this country are about to lose a fundamental human right, so maybe "looking on the bright side" is not the appropriate disposition for these times.

and young people know they need to fix it - by misrepresenting and blowing every issue out of proportion and throwing names around so when actual problems arise most people have little more than a deep sense of tired antipathy towards others.

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

#816

Post by HEmanZ » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

carlgreene wrote: post #773

WHA8m wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change, increased Cost of living, etc. - Do you really need data for this? About the abortion thing, just visit the page of a random media outlet. It will be among the first 10 articles.

These are problems, yes. But how did they "wreck the world". It is these kind of outlandish takes that are pervasive on social media and give no context or relativism to the current problems of the world. Of course we have problems. There will always be problems. Instead focus on giving the younger generation confidence that they can solve the problems by being optimistic about these things. I'm not saying to ignore…

Thank you. A lot of people I know act like the problems of today are somehow astronomically worse than they have ever been, unsolvable, completely new, and in-addition-to all previous generation's problems ("nothing has improved in a hundred years!").

An acquaintance of mine told me over drinks, after complaining a lot about the current world and in all seriousness, that "I don't think there has ever been a worse time to be alive." I've heard similar sentiments, less drastically put, from quite a few people in person and all over social media. He wouldn't even backtrack after I started pushing him to seriously describe why life is somehow worse now than it has ever been.

It's infuriating, like seriously, you'd rather be born a random person 100 years ago instead of today? I can't even imagine someone wanting to be born a random person 50 years ago vs today (unless by random you mean "random middle class white heterosexual man in a western country" in which case, maybe your odds were better 50 years ago).

You'd have to be completely ignorant of almost all human history AND brainwashed by social media to come to this conclusion. Unfortunately I think this describes way too many people.

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

#817

Post by silisili » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #493

silisili wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar, but different. I don't let my child use social media at all, and limited to 30 mins screen time total a day. She's excluded in that all her friends use TikTok, and she can't. Maybe it's for the best. My parents used to say 'if all your friends jumped off a bridge...', and I hated it, so I haven't used that one yet. I'm trying to rely on actual merits instead of follower cliches.

Can I ask how old your child is? By the time I was a teenager, I needed greater than 30 minutes of screen time just to complete assignments. One high school class alone was over and an hour and a half on the computer.

She is 10. Yes, that many 10 year old are on TikTok, sadly.

I should have been more clear and said 'phone time', literally, because it's a Google Family Link phone limit. She's allowed to use a chromebook to do homework when needed, which honestly isn't often at this age. Honestly, computers don't seem to interest her much, yet.

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

#818

Post by leksak » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

Can't social media have played a part in 1-4 developing?

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

#819

Post by tzs » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #651

gilbetron wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example from my son, a 13 year old white kid, gave me is that if you have one of the "diversity cards" (minority, LGBQT+, female sometimes, or some other thing) than you get to joke and talk in a way than those that don't have such a card. So his friends that are gay or black or indian or disabled are able to tease each other about it and have more liberty to use terms that my son is not allowed to. The gay kid…

I see this often with gangs I grew up around. Black people can call each other niggers in a casual, non-attack way. But as soon as a white person does it, it’s racist.

It will be interesting to see if music changes this. I mostly listen to classical and older pop/rock/folk but recently decided to see what is current and so listened to the entire Billboard Hot 100.

There was a lot of rap and hip-hop with lyrics that prominently and repeatedly used that word. I wondered then about what happens when non-Black fans sing along with such a song on radio or streaming or at a concert.

I did some research and it seems that a small minority of the artists think that people who sing along should sing all the words regardless of race, with most thinking non-Blacks should not sing that word. Some in the latter group also feel that it is a losing battle to try to stop it.

I think those that want to stop it can succeed--for now. If I ever feel the urge for example to sing along to some rap or hip-hop song I'll have no trouble remembering to skip the N-word part. I've long known that this is a word I should not be saying except under special circumstances where it is clear I should say it and that singing along is probably not special circumstances.

That works for me because I'm adult and when I learned the word as a kid I learned it as a derogatory term.

But now that the N-word is in popular music that plenty of non-Blacks listen to, there will be kids who grow up from the start with that in the music they listen to. It will be a word they naturally learn as part of normal language acquisition without learning the most negative connotations.

I bet it will be lot harder to get that generation to not use it when singing alone, or to not adopt it with the positive meanings that it sometime has when used in rap or hip-hop.

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

#820

Post by nonrandomstring » Thu, May 05, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #551

nonrandomstring wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious: how do the "weird ones" do? The outsiders, contrarians, the ones who don't quite fit in and who might even take pleasure in not caring about social media? Anecdotally, really really well! based on Haidt's watershed of 2009 I'm seeing what's in the pipeline at bachelors and masters level education 10-12 years on. Most of my L6 and L7 are young adults aged around 20-25. They've either had about a decade…

>Things have flipped so that technology overuse is now normative, and the "geeky" thing to do is be moderate, circumspect and sceptical. Hearing this, even anecdotally, makes me sigh with relief. What is your impression of their lives? Do they hang out with each other, or with normies, in RL, or just spend a lot of time alone?

> Do they hang out with each other

No. So that's why it's not a "movement" AFAICS, not unless I'm missing something emerging in youth culture.

As a "weird kid" in the 80s I was delighted to find a Computer Club and discover there were others. But this is something different. You can't really rally around things you all don't do.

Thinking about it now though, I didn't see "geekiness" as an _identity_ at the time. It's like that got imposed ex-post-facto in the late 90s.

Seems a few are outdoors-sporty, things like long distance walking, canoeing, mountain biking and stuff. Maybe a bit "health geeky". One guy is really into astronomy and going up mountains to get better telescope views. But this is pure anecdote. I don't really have an archetype in mind. It's like "really into life, but minus the techno-bullshit and control freakery". One person described it as "slow living", but I haven't got a handle on that yet. There's definitely an anti-corporate element too I'd say.

> spend a lot of time alone?

My guess is that they value their time and attention, and just don't see constant connectivity and "convenience" as that much of a big deal. They're also individualistic and confident, as in not embarrassed to be without a phone, or be the one who does things differently, like holding up a line for an extra 10 seconds by paying cash (and then being the only one who tips the waitress).

I definitely see myself as part of that, whatever it is - but being a 50 something computer guy who spends WAY too much time at the keyboard, it's slightly contradictory.

Come to think of it, a better angle is "last of the normies" in a world gone mad. I think there's a way to celebrate being relatively tech-free as a kind of traditional normality.