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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

Father of four daughters and five kids. Of my five kids, two have attempted suicide (both tried at school). In both cases, they missed a concept in school and the teachers clamped down on what they saw as laziness. Being a middle-school kid is tough, and that extra negative interaction was the trigger (suicide is complicated, and there was a lot more going than the academic problem).

So many of the parents I met as my kids went through counseling and group were quick to blame tech. As they would talk through what had happened, it would become apparent that it wasn't the tech - it was the people. The tech was just where the kids were communicating. It was a lot like blaming the highway for a drunk driver's behavior. All I can really say is LISTEN when your kids are struggling. It's hard because kids will hide their problems. It's hard because there's no manual for being a parent, and every child very different.

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What I see very commonly(and what I experienced growing up) is that kids nowadays are given very, very little autonomy nowadays. Kids are confined to a very small amount of space where they aren't allowed to play, explore, or be out of sight of a caregiver. At school, they are expected to behave like little adults. Rambunctiousness and energy are shamed. Socialization is relegated to a small period of recess or extracurriculars, both of which are monitored. Exercise isn't done on a regular basis. In this environment, it's natural for them to escape to a digital world where they can actually do what they want.

When I was a kid in such an environment, I played video games for hours and hours. I once stayed up 40+ hours playing GTA. When I moved out and controlled my own life, the appeal disappeared overnight.

With that said, there's definitely something to the claims that social media is addictive. Reddit had me hooked for years. They are like skinner boxes. But it's only part of the story, and different technologies will probably cause different outcomes and levels of addiction. I don't mind my kid playing a Switch, but I don't plan on letting her have a social media account.

Yes, in short: they are treated like children but demanded to behave like an adult. For me the answer is giving them as much self-responsibility and independence as they can manage. Treat them like a child and they will behave like a child.

> I don't mind my kid playing a Switch, but I don't plan on letting her have a social media account.

The problem is eventually she'll be left out if she's the only one of her peers without social media.

> The problem is eventually she'll be left out if she's the only one of her peers without social media.

My thinking here is this: its not necessarily the social communication aspect of social media that's the issue, it's the engagement-driven algorithmic feed that presents the addiction potential. Their feed becomes tuned to whatever gets them hooked, even if it's vapid or harmful. Because of this, I'll still let her text friends and probably use Snapchat or other IM apps. But anything that uses feeds is a hard "no."

It still leaves the potential for bullying, but that potential will always exist.

I understand that, and believe me I am sympathetic (nothing wrong with texting, but instagram/tiktok/facebook algorithms are probably very harmful for a developing mind). But then the question becomes: how do you intend to stop it? Short of forbidding her from using a phone or computer, how can you stop her/him from using an app behind your back?

Same as anything: tell her not to, teach her why it's important, and tell her that there will be repercussions and a loss of trust if she is caught breaking the rules, then kind of keep an eye on her. A certain level of deviance is normal and expected in children, and she will eventually be caught and punished.

My goal as a parent isn't to enforce a way of life with an iron fist, but to guide her and shape the way she lives her life while letting her learn about living it herself. I could install apps that monitor her usage, but I want to give her a sense of autonomy and freedom within a stable environment with clear expectations.

From another parent, yours seems like a totally reasonable compromise. If someone is going to shun a kid for not being on an app, they're probably not the kid's friend in the first place.

> there's definitely something to the claims that social media is addictive. Reddit had me hooked for years

Addiction is exactly that. I’ve had a conf on addictions and the speaker said most people grow out of addictions, even heroin, and the people who die from them are a surprisingly small proportion. She mentioned people going out of hard drugs, and generally from one day to another after they realize the cost it had. Just like you did ;)

Congrats, I guess.

I’m terribly sorry to hear this and hope that your daughters are doing well.

One thing that I’ve noticed with my nephews (my son is not quite old enough) is that smartphones seem to amplify certain behaviors, good and bad.

I was bullied pretty badly in school until I turned into a big gorilla. But then life was segmented. Little league friends knew little or nothing about what was happening in school. Things were “said” not written.

Now everything is connected. It’s great as during COVID groups of friends were able to organize Minecraft groups and keep connected. But.. I’ve noticed some of the older kids feel very anxious about what people say — as the online stuff in in writing and screenshots, etc can pretty easily be shared. Many parents don’t understand “online” life and take extreme stances.

It is what I say to everybody: I am very happy that you can find no traces of my childhood on the Internet.

I was never a problem kid, teen and student, but we had parties, fun, we enjoyed life knowing that the day after what happened would simply stay as memories which would later vanish with the time.

We have 3 boys (8, 12 and 14) and I can see how for our oldest one, all the social medias (or whatever social "App du jour") is putting more pressure on how he looks. He has a tendency to pay attention to clothes, hair style, whatever and all this tech is increasing the pressure.

At the moment it has no effects on the two others but they do not have this interest at all.

The amplification effect of an existing tendency is real and very hard to manage because you can talk a lot with your kids but you cannot cut them from these "built to be addictive" apps which are used by all the friends.

And these stuff last... nothing is erased...

Counterpoint: The iPhone saved me.

Yes, it’s also a source of the problem compounding, but when dealing with people was absolutely unbearable (especially during lockdown where everyone had rules for others), being able to override all of those suicidal/psychopathic/rage thoughts with a tasteless podcast/youtube video has proven successful. In another generation I would gave gotten myself drunk to sleep, at least I can binge-watch until sleep.

Of course phone addiction is here a signal correlated with things going extremely bad, but plays various roles in that.

A lot has changed from when I was a kid, but one thing I noticed hasn't: teachers (and other education system "contributors") are still very quick and eager to sort kids into buckets. Gifted, lazy, ESL, troublemaker, creative, well-behaved-but-dumb, etc. and once your kid is in a bucket, good luck getting them out. I couldn't imagine the hopelessness of being a kid where all the authority figures around you just assessed one day you were headed for failure and treated you that way forever, but it's standard at school.

In my day, it was blatant: we were actually on numerically assigned tracks, 1 to 6, where 1 was "college bound," 6 was "prison bound," and the numbers in between were on a step-function spectrum between those two extremes. And people rarely if ever changed tracks.

Yeah that's just wrong and horrible. We know most kids love to learn and you see that from infancy to kindergarten. That's innate.

I don't think we spend enough time teaching behavioral and emotional regulation skills which is the core skill you need to strengthen throughout life.

I dont agree that tech is unrelated to mental health, but I like how you ended this comment. It shocks me how few parents actually listen to their kids. Even the otherwise good parents who invest enormous time and energy into their kids will do anything for them except actually listen to them. It's like they're so convinced that they already know what's going their child's mind that asking seems ridiculous.

Tech certainly does have some effect on mental health. Probably both positive and probably some negative, too.. It's really easy though to blame the tech and miss something much bigger. We thought my daughter wasn't getting her work done at school because of she spent too much time on TikTok. We were taking away the devices when we should have been talking and understanding what was going on in her life.

This really makes me wonder; kid suicides and the pressure in school as a causal factor is something I have heard of from multiple trustworthy sources in the US, including teachers.

When I was growing up most teachers ranged from strict/disciplinarian, to casually mean, towards the kids who were lazy and/or didn't understand things. Even really great teachers that were otherwise kind and really helped kids did this - e.g. one (of the kind, helpful ones) would make sarcastic jokes at the expense of kids who didn't do their homework, making the entire class laugh at them (one of the gentler ones that I liked was "oh, you forgot? It takes special talent to forget something when you haven't bothered to read it in the first place!" or smth like that).

Some of my college professors said things like "you have to understand how this concept works, or next year you may be trying to understand how Kalashnikov works" [as an expelled conscript in the Russian army - basically a prison from which college exempts you].

Still, I do not know a single person in any of my classes in school or college, or anyone I knew really, who has committed suicide... and to the best of my knowledge nobody has attempted it either.

What is special about the culture/upbringing/environment/... in the USA that makes pressure and "meanness" (for the lack of better word) such a problem for kids?

I'm really sorry to hear about your kids' struggles. Middle school seems especially intense these days. One of our kids has had a really rough time at middle school for similar reasons. We ended up pulling her out and homeschooling.

Even the private schools are validated her as "not willing to learn". What a mess.

I'm sorry to hear that, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I hope your children are currently doing well.

> As they would talk through what had happened, it would become apparent that it wasn't the tech - it was the people. The tech was just where the kids were communicating.

I think this is clearly true, but I think the idea is that tech has enabled new modes of interaction that can cause much more damage much more easily, and that we haven't built social antibodies to yet. I tend to roll my eyes at the doom-and-gloomers claiming that global connectivity hasn't done anything but cause psychological problems, but I did assume that there were significant societal costs currently being realized by this upheaval in the way humans connect to each other, and found the study to be quite an interesting finding.

(throwaway account)

I'm not a parent, but the circumstances of your children is quite similar to my girlfriend.

Her parents had been pushing her to succeed academically since middle school, and they really punished her (either physically or verbally) for getting bad grades. This pattern continued even after she started college. The final straw was when her depression made a return, she got a 2.0 GPA, and she decided suicide was better than letting her parents know.

I hope you won't take this as me taking a jab at your parenting, it's just that your story resonates a lot with me, and I feel like taking my feelings out. I hope you and your family are able to recover from this unfortunate event.

Have you considered taking them out of school?

Yes, and we did.

Great move, and so sorry about your kids. Lost a daughter myself in similar circumstances.

We really were lucky. So sorry to hear about your daughter.

I'm just curious, what kind of school did they go to - was this in the US? Was it an affluent-suburban public school? Private?

Affluent suburban public for one. Less affluent, borderline rural for the other.

Not a valid comparison.

Alcohol and Tech can fuck people's brains up by fiddling with its reward mechanisms - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/issue/september-...

After the fiddling happens parents, bosses, teachers, friends etc are quite capable with good intentions and knowledge gaps of making things worse.

Ask a family member or a friend of alcoholic or a gambler or a druggie what success they have had just "listening". What does work is keeping a close eye on the kid when they are most susceptible. Not giving them access to drugs and leaving the drugs with them in their room the whole night.

Thats were parents fuck up.

> Ask a family member or a friend of alcoholic or a gambler or a druggie what success they have had just "listening"

Suicide and chemical addiction are not the same thing.

Also, while someone going in a bender may get hurt, someone trying to kill themselves... is a much deeper risk. To say listening will not help is very much wrong. In a lot of cases someone who is suicidal (my kids both did and the person they told is why I still have five kids) will literally tell others what they are planning.

That article's not opening for me on mobile, but do realize that just because something "affects the reward mechanisms" doesn't make it an addiction. There are lots of things that affect the reward mechanism - learning new things, spending time with kids - that we wouldn't consider addictions. The junk science on this topic has really gotten out of hand.

Nah. Easy scapegoat for shitty rubberneckers.

“They left him on the computer too long. We restrict johnnys computer use so that won’t happen.”

Tech doesn’t create new social problems. It exacerbates existing ones in new ways. Teen mental health issues have been steadily increasing for decades.

"The tech was just where the kids were communicating. It was a lot like blaming the highway for a drunk driver's behavior." Seems like they were comparing the highway system, not alcohol.

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