I have a 13 and a 15 year old, and my opinion is it's the phones.
If those are a problem, it’s more likely to be from getting access at a younger age IMO. I have a theory that it’s primarily the increasing use of video as a medium that is damaging. Not only does video prevent building literacy skills, it also tends to be used to deliver content that leads to parasocial relationships and celebrity worship which is frankly concerning IME.
Obviously not really addressing your childhood in particular, but this is insane to me. Isn’t playing outside the whole point of moving to the suburbs? I grew up in Brooklyn and we played outside all day. I have a hard time seeing how more space, more grass, and less traffic makes that not really an option. Maybe this is a generational thing?
The trend in learning, like Frontend Masters, while amazing for what it is, its all video, and I'm finding people are putting out more and more video to teach topics, and less and less written works to teach stuff, and I'm getting more and more frustrated at this, as it takes me longer to digest videos than written materials.
I don't know how anyone learns to become a developer from just watching videos and doing exercises, my pace would be that of a snail.
And yes, I get that everyone learns differently, but us who learn best from reading are being left out in the cold.
Bringing it back to kids, I realized you could draw some parallels to TV. The thing about TV is that you had much fewer choices in what to watch and it was harder to “hide” from your parents compared to smartphone videos - if your parents thought something was stupid they could just overhear it and make you turn it off more easily than the smartphone equivalent. Also, with TV the branding is usually not done on the e-celeb/individual level, it’s more show-based branding, so it’s a little less tilted towards parasocial content.
There are a few things driving this trend towards video I think, one is that a lot of consumers now are less literate/educated than would be on the internet in the past, as well as younger with poorer reading skills - video has relatively more demand vs text. The other is that videos are easier to monetize and from what I understand have higher paying ads.
You're right the continuing trend of less and less "serious" readers continues unabated as it has for decades
And it pretty much matches my experience in school at the time. You could also see this with school books, where the older books were "serious" and the newer ones "fun".
I also find it rather funny that the "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong"[1] that was mentioned in another thread is only available as a podcast, and isn't a written story (there's a transcript, but it's very hard to follow).
>Who thinks about that? I don’t know how to teach a child how to read, so I just assumed that the children I sent to school would come back to me literate. Cause that’s what school does, right?
Parents, even well meaning ones, just not digging into what it is there kids are doing in the classrooms, not really investing in learning on a high level how the kids are learning and its effectiveness.
If more parents cared about that, I think we'd have way better schools on the whole
If we take facebook for example. We did have it when I was in high school but it was far less addictive. It was invite-only, no dark patterns, no ads, no games, no suggested posts, no celebrities, no "influencers", no political campaigns, no activism, no clickbait articles to create outrage. There was also no family member on it and only your "real" friends would see your posts. When we posted something stupid, we knew that only our classmates and close friends would read it, not our parents/teachers/boss/journalists/neighbor/etc.
And of course it's not just kids, it's everyone. But kids are the only humans that are regularly and uniformly tested for aptitude with public results we can all look at and discuss. Just for a random statistic to support this assertion, over 50% of US adults haven't read a single book in the past 12 months. Something that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
I mean look, it very well may be different now. I don’t have kids and have no expertise on any science of child rearing. But “it isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago” is also something I heard 20 years ago.
People have always taken the path of least resistance. Radio, TV, and now the internet has gradually shifted the path of least resistance away from reading.
Not to mention the constant distractions one is constantly bombarded with even if one where to try. Popup ads, newsletter signups, inline gifs and memes, notifications, etc. Heck, even Wikipedia breaks up the text with constant hyperlinks which break up the linearity of the page.
And here you are.
Actually we are going in that direction with all the sports betting bullshit too.
Very different from today's pay-to-win manipulative Skinner Boxes, but probably not very healthy. Living someplace where I couldn't physically hang out with other kids easily after school (thanks, car culture) it probably helped me build better social skills. But at the cost of my attention span and physical social skills.
It certainly makes me wonder what skill tradeoffs today's video game kids are making.
Potency and availability matter. I've heard of multiple cases of kids soiling themselves rather than stop playing a game. I never heard of that growing up surrounded with video games.
https://www.news24.com/life/archive/how-a-9-year-old-became-...