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Comment by mcone | Hacker News Reader

Most people in this thread seem to be downplaying the seriousness of these problems, but as a parent I can tell you that the problems are very real. Paul Graham wrote about them several years ago in his essay "The Acceleration of Addictiveness" [0]:

"I've avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world."

[0] http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

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> Most people in this thread seem to be downplaying the seriousness of these problems, but as a parent I can tell you that the problems are very real.

In my generation, parents said the same thing about TV.

The urge to believe in the moral decay of the young is extremely powerful. This article exploits it, and commensurate skepticism is warranted.

> This article exploits it, and commensurate skepticism is warranted.

Sure, but empirical evidence tells me that my children are much happier after having played outside with their friends for an hour than they are after watching videos on YouTube. I can't just ignore that.

And what about the multitudes of children that are not outside playing because of being online? In the community where I live, there are very few kids outside. All my son has ever wanted to do is play online, multiplayer games. The idea of roaming the streets on a bike and playing in a park... that is completely foreign to him.

They are missing out

It is going to take major cultural and societal change to make it so we interact with our technology in a healthy way.

I was born in 1980. There were kids in my generation who preferred video games to outside, too, but, for the most part, parents didn't allow this behavior. You have a say in what your child gets up to on a Saturday morning. It's not just up to him.

True, but video games of that era eventually got boring; not to mention you had to coax your parents into finally buying you another vs downloading from an infinite library. I can remember my friends and I collectively getting bored of playing video games and deciding to go outside. At some point, most kids ended up outside, so there was a desire to go out and play.

The only time I can remember my parents having to tell us to go outside is when we lazed around the house in our PJs too long on a non-school day.

Today, the opposite is true. They want to be on their devices for both entertainment and social interaction. Yeah, parents have a say, but it's a constant fight.

I don't have kids myself but can refer to my nieces.

They have iPhones and access to the internet but they have limited internet time. Not limited in some sort of technological way, but their parents simply tell them they're not allowed to use the devices before 5pm during weekdays and they quite simply listen to their parents.

Why don't other parents do this?

Sounds like he never did get the chance to learn what else he could want.

And also near impossible to do because parents won't let them roam more than 100 feet away, let alone the 5+ miles I roamed as a kid.

Well, there's nobody out there and they're not allowed to go anywhere interesting anyway. It's not surprising.

"but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it".

The point is you don't have to "use" a "TV". But we arguably have to use a smartphone and the internet.

> In my generation, parents said the same thing about TV.

I lived through the transition, and the internet/smartphones are definitely worse than TV.

TV gets boring (or there's nothing on), the one NES game you got for Christmas last year gets boring, but there's always something new within easy reach on the internet. It's much harder to get so bored you want to do something else.

>there's always something new within easy reach on the internet. It's much harder to get so bored you want to do something else.

Very true, but have you ever found yourself bored enough to do something else, yet still continuing to check your favorite sites or looking for engagement online and being disappointed? It's like looking for that dopamine hit and not finding it. It kind of goes beyond boredom to a strange kind of empty feeling.

> Very true, but have you ever found yourself bored enough to do something else, yet still continuing to check your favorite sites or looking for engagement online, and being disappointed? It's like looking for that dopamine hit and not finding it. It kind of goes beyond boredom to a strange kind of empty feeling.

This pretty much sums up a great majority of my online browsing experience in the last few years.

> TV gets boring (or there's nothing on), the one NES game you got for Christmas last year gets boring, but there's always something new within easy reach on the internet. It's much harder to get so bored you want to do something else.

I think the notion of video games getting boring might be weird to people who didn't grow up with consoles like the NES, but it's true. I'm sure plenty of people went nuts for games back then and played them all day, not just one odd day in a while but all the time, but for most an hour or two of Mario or Doom or Commander Keen was about all you could take, then you'd wanna go ride bikes or something.

It seems to me that this started to shift around the 16-bit console era, and got way worse quickly in the late 90s. I'm not entirely sure why. I think part of it was that games started to be tuned to be more "fun"/addictive, especially by toning down difficulty and allowing endless increasingly-low-friction lives/continues. Now, of course, they've gone farther than that and have tuned them to be consistent low-dose dopamine delivery services. It's creepy.

And yeah, then there's netflix and such. It occurred to me just the other day (I'm dense) that my kids will have no idea what it means to schedule TV-watching around when something airs. No clue what it means to miss an episode something and just... miss it. To not have the option of watching cartoons (or whatever) right this second because there aren't any on, and there won't be until tomorrow. Now you can always catch up, binge-style. With $30-$40 in subscriptions (or a torrent client) You can watch just your favorite shows and movies 8hrs/day for weeks on end without running out of material, even if you've got fairly specific or refined tastes.

  Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.

  Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.

- Emily Bludworth de Barios, "Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear."

From:

http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31

I feel TV was actually really bad for me personally. So, I have no problem saying Smartphones are likely just as bad if not worse for young kids.

What's important is it's not bad in the same way. Tending to zone vs. having trouble focusing etc.

>In my generation, parents said the same thing about TV

How do you know they weren't right, relatively speaking?

>The urge to believe in the moral decay of the young is extremely powerful.

Did you read the article? It's not about "moral decay", but a multitude of other (measurable) behavioral and emotional factors. As it happens, many adults are also experiencing challenges related to these same factors.

I think the difference is that there is no moral argument here, just a functional one. TV is fine, morally, but its rise did correlate strongly with the explosion of obesity and diabetes. Our entertainments have been getting more engaging at an accelerating rate, and we should probably consider what that means before we lose the capacity to decide.

For one, I think they were right about TV. And as a millennial, I think there is a significant moral decay happening. Our culture seems to value self gratification and meaningless BS above all else. While the more empathetic political inclinations of the young might mask that, when we'd actually have to be the ones responsible for making the world a better place, it seems we'd rather play video games, watch Netflix, do drugs, or hook up with strangers we meet on the internet. I suppose you could use environmentalism as an argument against having children, but that doesn't apply to adoption. We aren't raising children. The proportion of people who are these days are generally less well equipped for the job, and the percentage of single parent households continues to rise. Statistically speaking, this almost guarantees a downward trend in terms of mental and social health. Maybe what I've seen of the people that live in my city and stats about this type of thing aren't telling the whole story, but to me it seems like there's a measurable decline that's happening. Or at least an increase in selfish behavior, even if that change is just due to changing cultural expectations.

Edit: As far as the internet goes, kids watching a bunch of porn on their phones alone has already been demonstrated to be causing significant problems. There are high school boys with erectile dysfunction! Last month, teen vogue published an article on how to have anal sex. This seems to be a rather disturbing trend to me.

> that doesn't apply to adoption.

The barrier to entry for adopting a child is ridiculously high, even when compared to just having a child, both in terms of cost and time.

https://adoption.com/wiki/Adoption_Costs

https://adoption.com/what-does-a-home-study-involve

I'm not saying the costs and time is unjustified, but it takes a financially secure and stable couple to do. You would really want to have kids to go through the process.

>The urge to believe in the moral decay of the young is extremely powerful.

It's probably actually right. It takes a long time to figure life out. The problem is that the older people of today are comparing themselves who have lots of life experience with youngsters who have a lot to figure out. People forget that they were just as rambunctious when they were young.

It's also true that youngsters take their own day-and-age as the new-and-improved era in which they live, and have much less ability to compare past circumstances with modern ones.

The idea that the modern era is morally superior to preceding ones (even taking into account reprehensible notions such as slavery) is a tautology that stymies a critical reflection of history.

I've found it more useful to think of the modern day as a semi-improved and semi-regressed random walk of history. Some parts better, some parts worse. No sweeping generalizations to distort what we can't ever really know in our hearts – how past lives felt.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Socrates supposedly said that already over 2000 years ago, similar sentiments have probably been around for thousands of more years.

Elders demand respect and locality (follow in our footsteps) on account of their age and experience, while youths demand individuality and freedom to pursue their dreams and passions, it's bound to clash.

> In my generation, parents said the same thing about TV.

And they weren't wrong. One of the best things I've ever done is gotten rid of my TV.

I'm a millennial myself, and I think there might be a good argument to make that there is an accelerated moral decay happening, and that has been happening for many decades.

It feels good to say that this is just old hogwash that gets repeated each generation – but as a student of history I look around and start to think maybe there is a long and steady moral decline that materializes itself in huge and unsolved economic/social crisis like what we're seeing now in the U.S.

But TV does have bad effects — among other things, it causes us to believe that we have a deep knowledge of facts about subjects we actually have only a superficial knowledge of artistic depictions of (cf. the CSI effect in jury trials). Its unfortunate political and social effects are notable when one looks at the last few decades.

The world would probably be much better if people watched less TV.

It's digital crack.

I'm pissed that I was effectively forced to let my 13 year old get a smartphone because all of her friends had one (which meant their parents had caved).

You seem to be criticising them for doing the exact same thing that you ended up doing.

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