His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression.
Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way.
What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now we are at a Volleyball tournament. While he "sucks" at it, the social interaction and sense of belonging to the team/cause that puts a wide smile on his face.
Not saying we should take phones away from kids, but certainly they should be treated as potentially harming things when used incorrectly: guns, alcohol (, drugs?), etc.
In any case, Volleyball includes scores of girls dressed in spandex, so there is hope he will get interested in them and starts to think how to get to them rather than look at the phone.
My parents also missed tons of opportunities to help me start other hobbies such as learning to play a instrument which I would have loved.
So I stayed with the PC...lots of gaming initially, which lead to learning about hardware and how to build computers myself (gotta overclock that CPU)...but I also have to admit that it sparked the interest to make my own games early which led me to pick up programming and that opened up a ocean of opportunities later in life.
It’s really hard to know what skill will be useful later in life...so now that I have kids in my own I try to support their natural interests which also allows my wife and I to moderate thins like gaming to some reasonable degree.
When I was a teenager I was frequently bored. Nothing on TV (we only had a few channels), no mobile phones, SMS, or online social media. You could call a friend on the telephone, maybe, if they were home and their phone wasn't busy. Once you were old enough to drive, and assuming you had access to a car, your options opened up a bit but meeting friends still took some planning.
I have teens now, and I can literally not remember the last time I heard the "I'm bored" whinging that my parents heard so often. They are never bored. They always have their phones, with games and connections to friends. I don't know if that's good or bad.
This is the time period when encouraging people to go out coincided with being aware that meningitis and melinoma must be checked out by someone whose credentials would naturally be beyond all rapportage! Then Zika. And then don't go inside if the people there travel where long-capsid viruses are common; and the TSA would like to weigh in as a completely discredited agency which will be continuing thanks. Oh and no reason, but health premiums are a thing that mean to dominate now and if you work outside you can be fired for asking about health guidance. Primaries in the US; anyone, how's your favorite Third Party holding up? Great, great; now tell me just the good things about jurisprudence and family pride in Latin America; Canada if you like.
If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart—thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity—we'd be grateful.
When I went to uni I met similar friends which led to my social life improving, but before then there really was no substitute for online games at the time simply because I did not enjoy the company of the people I'd met at the time.
When I didn't have access to online games I'd just read the same amount instead.
I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of the time (but not always), online games are a symptom, not a cause.
Now how you can help him get a couple good friends, I don't know. It is something that has to happen very organically. Forcing it won't help in most cases (you'll know within a couple interactions). Don't try to push him to events he doesn't want to do. You can be around hundreds of people and still be lonely.
And that includes the characters who are educated and aware. God knows what's happening in households with unmonitored 24*7 sewage being pumped into developing minds.
Once your kid has had his or her mind misguided during crucial periods of its development, reprogramming it, postfacto is on par with rehabilitating the severely disabled. It takes a huge effort on all sides.
When it comes to mental health and development, the instinctive thing to do is not always the right thing. And it's even harder to do after things go wrong. So take it seriously. Keep talking to experts and other families going through the same thing. Stay on his case.
And lastly don't expect the govt or sillicon valleys shitheads (who produced this environment) to act fast.
He's 17 which is the "I think I'm an adult" area. Every 2 years he'll be looking back and thinking, "wow, I was really young".
Tread cautiously, treat him like an adult and just talk to him. The more comfortable he feels around you, the better. Many of us got sick of our parents at that age (I moved out the week after I turned 18 - nobody expected it), but I figured out later when I lived with another adult who treated me almost like I'd imagine a really good boss would, ala, "everyone keeps the house clean, if I ask you to do something it's because I've already done something today and I know you've seen it and not done anything about it. I get it, nobody wants to do this stuff - but I work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week and I hate it too, but it's easier on both of us if we work together".
Get him to participate in more around the house stuff, cooking is good, help with your taxes if he's interested (then hopefully exploit that for the next 30 years). Repairing stuff. Don't tell, ask - reward.
On the social side, go to meetups or clubs in things you've found interesting together, ask him for help finding them. I get people say kids should be around people their own age, and generally speaking I think they should, but I look back and at that time I just wanted to do stuff that interested me. Unfortunately none of my friends from school had similar interests - so I found that escape through work and online.
I'm glad I forced myself to hang with my friends then since we still keep in touch, but there's opportunities all through his 20s (and especially university, send him to student living spaces) to build relationships with people his own age. I do regret however, forcing myself into relationships just because it was "what was expected of me".
Plenty of people live lives that are considered "the norm", parents hope their children follow similar paths they did. But sometime we don't. And that's OK, so long as we're happy. So concentrate on that.
Good luck!
Looking back, my parents were just too busy and struggling on their own so were just late in trying to help me.
Thank you, this advice will really help me.
Kudos to you for figuring this out. Taking the screen away without providing alternatives doesn't seem very helpful. Even if we accept the thesis that online interaction isn't deep or satisfying enough, replacing it with no interaction is still a step in the wrong direction. Anything that gets them to interact with peers or parents, be it sports or board games or shared craft projects or whatever, is going to be both more effective and easier to maintain over time.
P.S. Yes, this is even true for introverts. Even if interaction is draining and has to be limited, there's still a difference between low-quality vs. high-quality interaction.
If the final 2 hrs before sleep were a time for non-screen activities (reading, board games or just general family talk), that might be a good compromise between letting him keep it and taking it away entirely.
I think that taking it away from me would have made things worse instead of me suddenly becoming very good socially. Next year, I went to college, met new people and stopped caring about League.
I found it a great resource to reach out and break into the tech sector. It only becomes a dick measuring contest when you've no clear goal on the platform.
“I’m moving to Berlin because of Brexit and looking for iOS roles” -> “Would you like this job in London as a python developer?”
(Given I’m now back in the UK helping family look after a parent with Alzheimer’s while she can still recognise me, I should probably update my profile...)
if he's still looking after that long in this market they're probably right
And, hard as moving is, I see no future for me in the UK, only a dead parent.
So if you think Germany is going to be radically different to the UK, I would suggest thinking again. Anti EU sentiment is rising everywhere.
1) All the main German federal parties support the EU.
2) The migration concerns are about asylum seekers rather than EU citizens, because (as I have discovered by trying) German bureaucracy is effective at keeping out speculative job seekers like me.
3) The UK government keeps passing surveillance laws which violate the UK implementation of the European declaration of human rights, and I don’t like that the UK will start getting away with it after they leave the relevant jurisdiction.
4) The UK government has no agreement amongst its own ministers about the strategic goals for Brexit, let alone figured out the relative costs and benefits of different ways to approach it, let alone made preparations for it.
I don’t mean small things either, May said the UK would leave the Customs Union but the Treasury doesn’t want to and nobody has even submitted planning permission for building new customs inspections points.
3 and 4 are the big problems for me. Personally staying in the EU is merely desirable, not Earth-shatteringly vital.
W.R.T. surveillance, yes that sucks, but spy agencies have never been accountable to the law in any country as far as I can tell. German BND is exactly the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Intelligence_Service_(...
To the extent that they're less effective than GCHQ this reflects maybe a smaller budget or less capable employees, rather than major difference in intent. BND certainly doesn't care about EU human rights law any more than other countries do.
With respect to (4), the EU has no agreement amongst its own leaders about the strategic goals for Brexit either. Merkle and Macron want to exploit it to massively deepen integration, but Merkle is now longer chancellor and there's no clear consensus in Germany for that. Netherlands, Finland, other countries don't want deeper integration. Eastern European countries are busy fighting the commission and want deep relations with the UK after leaving. But the EU can't stop attempting to cherry-pick: the very thing it criticizes the UK for. The only deal it's been able to propose is all the bits the EU wants and none of the things the UK wants, steadily increasing the chance of no deal at all. And that's about 10% of the mess.
The reason Brexit is proving difficult to handle smoothly is because the EU and its loyalists really struggle with the idea of compromise, and extremism always divides people - go watch Darkest Hour and see how even in the face of a far, far, far worse and clearer adversary than Michel Barnier the British government was still split down the middle between "go it alone and fight" vs "appease and hope for the best". No big surprise that the same "give them whatever they want" vs "walk away" tension can be seen now too. That's democratic governments for you.
“Main” - literally all other parties with seats have refused to be in a coalition with AfD. Also, unless they’ve changed position since I last looked (they might, as I don’t look at them often), they are currently anti-€ rather than anti-EU.
Further, the EU’s strategic goals from Brexit is damage limitation and clear resolution. I think you’re mixing up their goal for Brexit itself with the potential post-Brexit futures for the EU, which I think they should be considering about now-ish.
As for the EU’s attitude to compromise, I wish to point out that not only did the EU compromise on budget contributions with Thatcher; not only did Cameron get compromises from the EU right before the referendum; not only did the EU compromise and allow opt-outs on the Euro, Schengen, defence (Denmark’s the only one who wanted that), partial opt-outs of the charter of fundamental rights (“lol” UK and Poland), and something I don’t understand beyond guessing from the name called “area of freedom, security and justice”; in addition to all that, the _point_ of the EU is compromise between member states.
> The third largest party in Germany wants to leave the euro
I presume they feel they have to leave the euro before there is an option of leaving the EU.
It's true that other parties refuse to be in coalition with the AfD. This is a bad move on their part. It doesn't make them not a main party though. Especially because the other parties have also been refusing to be in coalitions with each other too.
Right now German politics is the most disastrous in Europe - all the political leaders hate each other, all have publicly trashed each other, all have been refusing to work together and yet Merkel and her buddies continue to rule as if nothing had happened. It's taking months to form a government because they're trying to figure out which party-destroying, soul-sucking coalition is least unacceptable to them and the voters.
We will have to disagree on the EU's approach to compromise. Yes, it compromised with Thatcher back in the 1980's but that was a different time. The EU was much smaller and its institutions felt much less powerful, so compromise and teamwork was much more important back then. As the EU has grown so have its ambitions and the character of the project has changed. The modern EU is not the same organisation that Thatcher dealt with.
That can be seen in recent events. Cameron was given nothing at all and told to pretend it was some massive sacrifice by other leaders. The British public easily saw through that instantly which is why virtually nobody in the remain campaign referred to his "deal" ever again. A compromise would have been the UK suspending unlimited immigration from the EU. It was made clear that such a thing was never going to be on offer and they thought it was insane to even ask.
As for the opt-outs ... good luck keeping them in the event of a remain vote! The EU sees "opt outs" as some horrible nasty legacy thing that they regret ever happened, not as a basic part of negotiation. Even their phrasing shows what they truly think: Germany and Germans like to refer to them as "special privileges"! I have German friends and debated Brexit with one of them once, that's how she called them and I'm not surprised, they call it "extrawürst" in their language - extra sausage. Deep down Germans know that the EU is an undesirable future, but feel they have to suffer through it anyway for the greater good (elimination of Germany as a country and transference of German pride to Europe, a new country free of the horrible history of their own).
The only real solution is to somehow make the cost of contact more expensive. I'm not sure of any way to do that other than simply trying to convince enough people to waste enough recruiter time collectively to make the dragnet approach unprofitable. And to be honest, given the churn in the industry, it might be unprofitable anyway- but there are always hoards of new graduates ever year without any particular marketable skills looking to leech onto the industry who become recruiters only to burn out after a few years anyway.
There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the <insert big shot here> to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards.
There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.
So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality."
It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.
The average LinkedIn profile is just if not more fictitious than Facebook. And everyone knows it but plays along anyway.
They may be beautiful, they may be on a yacht - but the thing has been chartered for an hour for an instagram shoot, they’re staying in a backpacker’s hostel, that methuselah of champagne was bought empty and filled with water, and they’re not actually called Montague Herostache, but rather Duane Dibbley. It’s all artifice.
Source: I watched gaggles of instagrammers faking the lifestyle at Royal Phuket Marina during a yacht show last year, paying to pose on megayachts. It was rather sad - like caged birds primping their plumage.
Nothing new under the sun.
You have to curate your feed. Curate curate curate.
It's as if responding to someone that said that one can never find any positive stream on Instagram, when people actually complained about what Instagram, at its majority, and as is used by most, is.
Media broadly is what you make of it. Turn on the TV and flip to CNN, I'm sure you'll be depressed within a couple minutes. At some basic level the burden of information curation rests on you - the human. You can't keep blaming CNN, Instagram, Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc etc ad infinitum.
At some point you have to step back and take the responsibility of information intake into your own hands.
That's not to say you don't have a valid point. You absolutely do have a valid point. But it's not as useful of a point as you're suggesting imo.
So the counter-argument is that Instagram is not so depressing provided that one uses as little Instagram as possible ("curate, curate, curate")?
That kind of proves the parent's point (which wasn't that one can't possible ever find anything non-depressing/jealousy inducing on Instagram).
No, you didn't understand. The point is that you should follow things that make you feel good and cut off access to things that make you feel bad. Choose your experience. Curate your feed. That's supposed to be the whole point.
It's like the difference between enjoying a glass of fine wine and alcoholic abuse that causes cirrhosis.
On one hand, we've got to burst this bubble we're in and get out of the echo chamber.
But if you burst the bubble and get out, then you'll just be depressed looking at everything you hate.
Hmm.
https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst...
I'm not able to open the report itself from that page, but I found a copy and uploaded it to archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180128204404/http://www.infoco...
Social media / instagram / etc allow the other party to feel human to you, at which point you can easily get into the thought of "They're not really better than me, are they? Why is their life so gilded"..
It's not. It's just your daily anti-facebook/social media propaganda. Every day there is something about the "evils of social media".
It's the new gangsta rap or violent video games. The news media spreads fear in order to sell ads.
It wasn't too long ago when the news media hyped up violent videos to sell ads. Violent video games were blamed for everything from school shootings to depression to anti-social behavior and everything in between. It wasn't too long ago that gangsta rap had to have parental advisory notices.
You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world.
Clearly media DOES affect our society. It may not be as simple as "listen to gangsta rap -> commit the crimes you heard about in gangsta rap" but there can totally be changes in our behavior which come directly from our media. If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.
I never argued that. So you are building a straw man. Of course everything has an "effect". But it didn't bring society down. That's the point. It isn't the cause of all of societies ills. If the media, people like you and others were right, then society would have collapsed a long time ago. It hasn't.
> You, yourself mentioned ads in your comment. What is an ad but a type of media? And yet, ads are so effective that they are basically the backbone of many of the largest tech companies in the world.
Sure. But ads are media specifically engineered to influence you in a particular manner. Gangsta rap, violent video games, porn, etc are meant to entertain. But I agree, all media influences.
> If this wasn't possible, advertising wouldn't be one of the largest industries in the world.
Once again, I'm not denying that media has influence. Advertising, news media, entertainment, movies, etc all influence to some degree. My point was about the scaremongering and scapegoating of certain things and how overblown it is and how people do it for money and influence.
Obsessively materialiastic, maybe. Sane, no.
So I’m mostly exposed to beauty, mostly invited to learning and delight.
How is this any different than society at large? How is this any different from TV and newspapers?
> Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.
Ten minutes on HN is enough considering all the fear mongering being pushed here.
And most people who use instagram are not severely depressed. Go figure. Wonder why that is"?
I suppose social media like Instagram makes the experience different, more intimate perhaps. Reading newspaper accounts of super-rich lifestyle is still a bit like hearing tales of life of Kublai Khan: it's something that happens far away, half mythical and half magical. A magazine publishes an article how the super-rich enjoy their life, sailing around the world on their yachts? Maybe it was an overview of the phenomenon in general, or if it was an in-depth portrait focused on some particular celebrity, it probably was a story about what they did maybe weeks or months ago. And in any case, when you've read the article, you put the magazine away, and continue with your life.
Following people on the internet service, looking at the pictures and stories they personally share with their followers in near real time, it's a bit more like observing a person doing all those things on first hand basis. And that could make it more soul-crushing as an experience.
But this is all conjecture. Someone pointed out in other comment that the true reason might be the economic downturn.