Children Are Lonelier Than Ever. Can Anything Be Done? | Hacker News Reader

Children Are Lonelier Than Ever. Can Anything Be Done?

quillette.com

32 pointsjseliger24 comments

Jesus... this is almost laughable.

Yeah, something can be done. What was done to me as a kid in the 80s and 90s. Kick them out of the house. Tell them to go outside and play with their friends. Stop helicopter parenting them every second of the day, and stop trying to fill their entire waking lives with "enrichment" activities in a bid to get them into an Ivy League school.

I work with a young woman who went to Princeton and is a Robotics Deployment Engineer for Amazon, a job you could get having gone to a state cow college. How do I know this? I work for the company that's working with Amazon to deploy their robots. And I went to a state cow college. One of my colleagues didn't even go to college, he picked everything up on his own working at Amazon for two years and watching YouTube videos and reading books.

Leave these damn kids alone, take away their damn phones. Let them go outside. Let them get into trouble. Let them walk to the nearest city ballpark and play Home Run Derby like I did, at age 11. I would walk half a mile to my best friend's house, then we'd go walk to our friend's house a mile down the road, over and over, until we had 6-8 of us in a group, then we'd go do stuff.

We turned out fine. So will they.

The problem with that is suburbia doesn't really make it safe to navigate between neighborhoods.

If your friend lives in the same neighborhood, it's doable. If your friend lives in a neighborhood across the street, it's kinda doable.

However, cars are traveling at the speed up to 40 mph. Can be very dangerous if you're not cautious.

I remembered when I was a kid that I nearly died attempting to cross a street and got pulled back by my sister.

Hard to free range when everything is hostile to bicycles or walking.

So teach kids how to cross the street safely. Yes, there is always risk in doing so, just like there's risk in simply existing in a world where Bad Things Happen.

When I was growing up, every suburban street had multiple kids on it. The whole Wayne's World thing where they play hockey in the street and move the goal when a car comes -- kids actually did that. And of course every kid had a bike and could ride to some other kid's house. So a kid from suburbia could reasonably expect to have someone to hang out with, nearly all the time.

But, you know, this is Hackernews, cars were always evil, and we have always been at war with Suburbia.

Depends on the suburb. Some suburban towns are like Springfield from The Simpsons, or that town in Bob's Burgers, and kids can walk around them. But in other places, "the suburbs" means gated communities off sidewalk-free arterial roads, with nothing but big-box stores around, and the onramps to even-larger highways.

It is expected that children aged 7 and up will go to school on their own in Estonia. In some cases that involves walking a kilometer and crossing multiple roads. By later years some families have moved around and it is not entirely uncommon for them to take the bus to school (public transport, not a school bus).

I think kids can navigate around more safely than lots of people give them credit for. Although, American suburbia does look a little more hostile.

are there not even buslines in American suburbs? I grew up in Germany in a rural village of a thousand people, was very lonely because of how ridiculously old everyone was and how few kids there were, but I could always hop on the bus and get to the 50k town that was half an hour away where we used to meet up as kids, go the cinema, game store, whatever.

Typically no. American cities, with a few exceptions (San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and probably Los Angeles), have poor or no public transit, which is generally only for commuting and not suitable for any other kind of travel. There are cities where you can't even walk a few blocks away because there's no sidewalks and no guard rails and so you end up having to walk on the shoulder (or not at all).

It's kind of ridiculous.

It's not the phones, it's how they're using them. If they used them to look at youtube videos and read books as you did they would probably prepare themselves well enough they could get into that college they want.

You can kick your kids out of the house, but what about their friend's parents? If they don't do the same, the result is the same - no social contact in the way earlier generations had.

The problem is single parents can't do that alone, otherwise their kid won't have any other kids to play with. Individual parents can't change a cultural trend that's been happening for decades.

I grew up in a single parent household. My Dad left when I was 6.

Kick your kids out of the house, sure. Tell them to go play in the yard, and then you'll get charged with a felony.

https://reason.com/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-...

Oh, but the parents weren't home that time, okay. Even though I was walking home from school or to my grandmother's house well before I turned 11.

Okay, well, just send them into the back yard to play, where they'll be safe and you can watch them from the window, and then CPS will investigate you and, even though it's ridiculous, you'll now have a complaint on file forever.

https://www.scarymommy.com/mom-child-services-investigation-...

Believe it or not, I don't want to helicopter parent my kid; he'll wander off on the playground, and if I need to see him I'll go look for him; otherwise he'll come find me, eventually. Still, the reality is that I can't actually let him out of my sight, not for his own safety but for the risk of some fucking Karen calling the police because I'm not holding his hands every goddamn minute.

So please don't go around telling people to act like you did when you were a kid, because I did the same thing too and I loved it, and now there's a pretty solid chance that that kind of behaviour would risk my kid getting taken away. Even if the chances of them going through with it were slim, my family doesn't need that kind of stress and bullshit and constant random checkups and more restrictions than ever.

Hell, my kid has known how to take the bus since he was three years old, but hey, even though it's statistically safer than driving I might still end up spending three years and $70,000 to convince some unaccountable government-appointed body that yes, my kids are safer taking the bus than anything else.

https://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-...

Note: Here in Vancouver, we don't have school buses because we have such a great transit system, but kids aren't allowed to take it anyway so we still have to spend an hour or more out of our days every morning and in the middle of the afternoon to take kids to school. That's a huge problem when you're job hunting and you have to say "Oh but I won't be able to start work until 10 because there's no other way to get my kid to school than taking him myself or fighting for a spot at before/after school care with a 160-kid waitlist."

So yeah, you're not wrong, except that your advice is purely asinine in our ridiculous world of neighbours calling the police on kids instead of keeping an eye on them. Please think about things before you speak up.

I would argue just about everyone of all ages is lonelier than ever, and not just because of the pandemic.

How long ago did “Bowling Alone” come out?

I spend my time between the US west coast and certain cities in Europe. I don’t think Americans, as a whole, know how to hang out and talk the way Europeans do. Part of it is our cities… there aren’t real public spaces. Everything’s commercial, or a development. Making plans to meet people involves a singular destination.

In Europe I’ll meet friends out, and we’ll have other friends catch up with us over the coarse of an evening, and we’ll move from a cafe to a square to a park, and we’ll have been chatting and it’ll suddenly be 4am. In America it’s very hard to get people to commit to a thing, and that’s usually dinner or a bar.

You’re right this was my experience in Europe as well. I should’ve clarified most people in the US are getting lonelier.

Here here! Seattle has been great for making money and not great for making friends.

Yeah, this isn't about COVID. It's a deeper issue with The Culture.

Yeah COVID just accelerated trends that have been happening since the 60's.

The OP cited a study by "Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, and colleagues in the Journal of Adolescence" but the provided link is broken. Here is a working link [1]. This source is one of the highest quality pieces of evidence presented in support of the claim that "children are lonelier than ever".

Unfortunately the OP suggested very little in terms of "what can be done", beyond the classic "reduce screen time" recommendation.

Excerpts from [1]:

> The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey of 15- and 16-year-old students around the world included a 6-item measure of school loneliness in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015, and 2018 (n = 1,049,784, 51% female) across 37 countries.

> School loneliness increased 2012–2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents in 2018 (vs. 2012) had elevated levels of school loneliness. Increases in loneliness were larger among girls than among boys and in countries with full measurement invariance. In multi-level modeling analyses, school loneliness was high when smartphone access and internet use were high.

> School loneliness was positively correlated with negative affect and negatively correlated with positive affect and life satisfaction, suggesting the measure has broad implications for adolescent well-being.

> The psychological well-being of adolescents around the world began to decline after 2012, in conjunction with the rise of smartphone access and increased internet use, though causation cannot be proven and more years of data will provide a more complete picture.

[1] Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014019712...

Adults are also lonelier than ever, but this is accepted as a feature of the modern world.

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