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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way.

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The causal link to social media is presented very simply in the article, but I suspect that's mainly because the article is not about diagnosis, but about the prevalence of the pattern.

There is a lot of data to support the social media effect specifically (some referenced in the linked articles from Twenge), and I suspect the next few posts from Rausch will dive in more deeply, so it's not right to claim that they're jumping to convenient answers - these aren't casual bloggers sharing their reckons.

edit: actually there's a heap of related writing on that site, e.g. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...

Not only is there a lot more content on the blog about the topic but Haidt and Rausch have several public Google docs where they keep an ongoing list of evidence for and against their hypotheses.

Every time one of their articles gets discussed on HN (which happens at least once a month at this point) the discussion goes in circles about evidence and causality without engaging the meat of the content.

HN just doesn’t have any mechanism to promote long term discussions about this topic.

It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.

Kids need more time away from other kids. They're spending too much time in the insane asylum with the other inmates. This leads to bullying, gossiping, comparing themselves against one another. Social media made it worse.

Kids at home on the farm, reading books, exploring nature - that was healthy. Now they're addicted to algorithmic peer pressure before their brains can even adjust to filtering it out.

there are insufficient farms to offer that to all kids. At least social media levels the playing field somewhat, it does need improvement though.

It doesn't have to be a literal farm though. I spent so much time in my childhood building Legos or with metal construction sets or reading in my room alone.

We just moved from three painfully lonely acres in the countryside to a small city and my kids seem much happier.

Seriously, we moved to the middle of nowhere when I was a kid and it sucked. Nobody to play with. Not much to do outside (it was mostly just fields).

So of course I found things to get up to that often got me into trouble. Boredom and lack of mental stimulation are not great for anyone, but for kids who don't yet have the skills to deal with it, the results can be a lot worse.

Our kids are 4 and 6 and being unable to see friends without a lot of planning was miserable.

Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the sake of others - what if that was channeled to real world aid).

Don't overgeneralize. People are different and have different needs. You can speak your truth without having to say it is true for everyone.

> Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures

That may be generally true, but it doesn’t imply that time alone is always bad, nor that all time “being social” is good. It’s certainly plausible that the explosion of access to social media has been a net negative and that spending some of that time alone would be better.

Thinking back, the time I spent having sneaked to the school library during lunch break definitely felt healthier than the times I got caught by a teacher and sent back to “socially commune” with my tormentors, er, classmates.

I think you're describing a different problem - a societal culture that enables and encourages bullying at all ages.

If your peers aren't cruel to you, then spending time around them is extremely healthy.

Reacting to your first sentences and ignoring the rest, it made me think of my own cohort on the tail end of Gen X, where there were fewer of us following the masses of boomers and their Gen X echo.

This affects basic things like the ratio of contacts with your own childhood peers versus those of other ages. It also affects how much the media and pop culture seems to cover your interests versus others. In my experience, it was those larger groups who lived in the echo chamber, while we had more isolation or a sense of being on the outside looking in.

Could it be as simple as the anglosphere has been repeating this kind of baby bust? I can only imagine how it would feel to grow up with this sense of otherness plus the panopticon of social media. I am less certain that the angst about global warming etc can explain it. I think we had a comparable zeitgeist with the cold war and environmental concerns.

But, I can also imagine some other environmental or nutritional hypothesis for an anglosphere trend, rather than demographic experiences...

> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time

None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame.

> That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way.

It gets discussed on the linked substack constantly.

> > what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time

> None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame.

I disagree. Cell phones come to mind as a major enabler here.

> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time?

Not good enough thats mostly the US doing that

Agreed that this topic requires more investigation but convenient answers. Occam's razor still applies though.

There are cultures where

> control, structure, and surveillance

have not been neglected the way they have been neglected in the western culture. So it would be interesting to check if youth mental issues did rise in such cultures too.

Put bluntly: Do taliban kids have the same mental issues as kids which were risen in an environment without

> control, structure, and surveillance

I think social media is definitely a part of that.

Jonathan Haidt, the man behind this article and most of this discussion, cofounded LetGrow.org [0] with the explicit intention of helping to free kids from the control that their helicopter parents increasingly smother them with. That organization is behind several laws in various states intended to protect parents who give their kids more freedom. He very much sees social media and helicopter parenting as two sides of the same coin, two tightly related forces that conspire to ruin childhood and thereby ruin children's mental health.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a trend among parents to latch on to Haidt's anti-social-media advocacy while ignoring his recommendations for what we fill the time with instead (hint: free roaming independence!), but it's not because he hasn't been vocal about both aspects.

[0] https://letgrow.org/about-us/

This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.

It's also worth noting that 'restrictiveness' is subjective. Your parents could be too restrictive for _you_, but in an alternative universe your hypothetical sibling could complain that his parents didn't care enough, let him do whatever and didn't prevent him from doing some things that he later he regretted, for instance starting drinking too early, getting himself involved in some sketchy people etc.

I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.

Parents weren't GPS tracking their children in the 1990s.

To be fair, GPS tracking may actually make parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to free roam.

It would more accurately be called unfree roaming.

If your parents know where you are with 3m accuracy it isn’t really free roaming.

In other words, being watched or tracked will definitely affect a kids behavior.

If a kid changes behavior because of a parent watching then that kid absolutely needs watching.

It's still free roaming because the kid is 100% in charge of where they will go. That's the part that matters, not that someone can tell where they are.

I think this applies to kids just as well as adults: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

But what scares me more is how this trend has the potential to normalize surveillance in general. It's not uncommon to for people to treat their employer or the government as a surrogate parent. So why wouldn't kids raised in a digital surveillance family accept a digital surveillance state?

elf on the shelf is a frighteningly common indoctrination to a life of surveillance

I have the related theory that the whole Santa Clause and Easter Bunny lie thing makes children more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain, why wouldn't politicians and media personalities conspire to lie to me about the earth being flat or climate change if there is profit or power to be had?

> If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain

Some adults enjoy playing pretend with kids, and some kids enjoy playing pretend with adults too. I would not characterize it as a no gain situation.

So the learning then is that adults might conspire to make me believe the world is round instead of flat for no reason other than fun?

You do realize there is nothing wrong with theorizing about conspiracies, kind of like theorizing about physics.

You are mixing up propgandists who run with theories as though they are proven fact on bad faith to push agendas without a shred of evidence.

Law enforcement engages in theorizing about conspiracies, intelligence agencies engage in theorizing about conspiracies, almost every country has laws making criminal conspiracy illegal. And there are plenty of conspiracies that turn out to be true, they also tend to be quite banal and human rather than sexy hollywood aliens, global gov conspiracies, etc.

Attacking theorizing with such a broad stroke is attacking critical thinking not disinformation. You can't decide what path of possible truth to persue without theorizing.

If anything santa and the easter bunny are gentle introductions for kids to learn how to tune their BS detection circuit.

Oh c'mon, that's absurd.

Most children learn to distinguish reality from fantasy between the ages of 7 and 10. Conspiracy theories are based on the idea that some sinister entity is hiding some truth about the world, and that only a select few are aware of it. People are not born with this level of cynicism, and if they eventually acquire it, it will be during adolescence or adulthood, once they're already able to distinguish fantasy from reality. This is an entirely separate thought process than the one involved in child fantasies.

While pretend play may not be as crucial to development as previously thought[1], it's still a healthy and fun part of growing up. It increases the familial bond, and gradually prepares children to a less magical world. Let them enjoy it while it lasts.

[1]: https://news.virginia.edu/content/pretend-play-may-not-be-cr...

I lifted an Elf on the Shelf box in a store, and it felt heavy for a stuffed toy. What's in there? Are those things WiFi enabled now?

Most of the one's I've seen also come with a book telling the story, that could easily be that heft.

If you just lifted the box, it might have the book included. Traditionally, they're sold together, though I've seen the book sold on its own.

that’ll be the societal debt.

You are wrong on so many levels for stating this as though many parents are adequate moral arbiters and not often irrational, unreasonable, or overprotective about what they think is okay for their kid to do. A child is not “100% in charge of where they will go” if they have to consider the consequences of or pay a price for doing innocuous things after returning home when they know they are being monitored.

Everybody, especially kids, deserves to have some alone time and actual agency.

Geez what? If a kid greater certain age does not change behaviour with parents watching please see a psychologist with it.

That sounds awfully close to "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"

Okay, so it's supervised roam. Who cares? It's much better than keeping your kids at home and only allowing them out on pre-arranged "play dates", which is the other major alternative.

In much of USA allowing free roam and not repenting and recanting the sin when CPS inevitably called and starts the inquisition will end with them in foster care with the same problems but now broken continuity of care.

GPS tracking does not brainwash kids...

Who said anything in this series of comments about "brainwashing"?

A lot of that cultural change in attitudes can be traced back to the Etan Patz kidnapping case in 1979. That case received widespread, prolonged media attention at the time which made many parents more fearful. He was one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons which made it impossible to ignore.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/etan-patz-case-verdict-pedro-he...

It seemed free roaming was still widely accepted in the 90s though? What changed since the 2000s?

The change happened gradually throughout the 90's. People born in the late 80's typically had free-roam experience, while those born in the miid-late 90's did not,

For me personally, the ability to look at the sex offender registry and realize there are 4 registered folks within a mile of my house.

It metastasized. It didn’t decrease. Now kids are barely allowed to go outside on their own

> I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.

It stopped being a meme because the expected level of parental supervision of children got much higher and it went from being perceived as a thing that only weird people to what is required of parents in most places.

Calling social services on unattended kids isn't something that makes the news as much simply because almost all parents agree that children should never be left unattended until they are old enough to have a driver's license now and there aren't any unattended children to have social services called on them

Yet if you attend to a child as anything but a stereotypical mom look you'll have the police called and men with guns roll up and scare your child and detain them because it's "suspicious" as happened to me as a racially mixed dad-family at the park with my kid. Accused of kidnapping and held for a good hour.

You literally cannot win.

i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.

> Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time?

Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in.

My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our career entries, and lasted for years with its consequences.

In parallel, in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out, leading to years of wars and refugees. Then in 2014, the Russians made their first move into Ukraine, and the migration crisis began that then fully escalated in 2015. Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. As the migration crisis died down to manageable levels in 2019, we only had a few months of rest, as at the end of 2019 COVID hit the entire world - and before that was over, the Russians went into the rest of Ukraine. That in turn led to cost of living exploding, now also across the world instead of "just" in the urban agglomeration eras.

And the entire time, the far-right and authoritarians have been on the rise worldwide, politicians are doing nothing to meaningfully combat climate change or the demographic crisis or ever rising cost-of-living cost and income/wealth disparities.

And then people, particularly the Boomer generation, have the audacity of calling us snowflakes, weak, "depression is just a trend" or whatever? They created all this mess, they're all set in cheap homes they paid off decades ago, when wages were still worth something, while we've been fighting for survival? And our younger brothers and sisters have it even worse than we have, they saw us and our parents struggle all these years.

All the political crises, you listed starting with 2008, could have easily be relisted from a decade or two earlier. There have always been crises.

I am not sure that is any different than it has been for any generation.

> Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 7 years (through Trump, Brexit and Covid) it’s that propaganda works.

See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”. But if you actually think about his presidency, and ignore the fear mongering and propaganda, nothing bad actually happened! (Covid is, of course, another example, but whereas the virus itself wasn’t that bad, the governments’ reactions to it, was.)

> See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”.

Because I don't wish to get too political here, not for stuff I'd assume to indeed be general knowledge:

- the fight of Conservatives and the far-right against LGBT rights and abortion rights (I'll admit the SC decision Dobbs v. Jackson happened later, during Biden's term, but Trump and McConnell set the stage for this with their SC judge picks). LGBT youth already face a significantly higher risk of suicide, no need to make that intentionally worse.

- Trump incited a coup with thousands marching on and invading the US Capitol as a result, and nearly getting a high amount of Senators killed or kidnapped (there's enough evidence to suggest it's mostly the actions of Eugene Goodman that led to this not happening [1]).

- related to this, there has been a marked, massive and sustained increase in political violence during his term, mostly from the far-right [2], as well as a general polarization of US society.

- Trump leading the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the most pressing issue for our generation

- Trump's abysmal handling of Covid and himself spreading fake news (hydroxychloroquine, Chinese lab conspiracy myth), leading to 1.1 million deaths [7], a complete breakdown of trust in something as basic and vital as vaccines [3] or masks or public health in general. Anthony Fauci had to deal with people threatening his life for years [4][5].

- Trump, the self-proclaimed "king of debt" who promised to reduce the debt prior to taking office, instead massively increased the US national debt [6]. I'll give a tiny pass due to Covid effects, but that's about it - better handling of the pandemic could have saved a lot of that money.

- Trump fanning the flames on the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem. No matter one's stance on that conflict, it's undeniable that this move had a net negative effect. (Also note that Trump proposed a "deal" to solve that conflict that never happened in the end)

- Trump mocked media, women, disabled people, veterans, minorities relentlessly throughout his campaign, his term and after it. The resulting disgraceful decline of political conversation quality will have lasting effects (Overton effect), not to mention it was behavior completely unworthy of the President of the US.

- In his final days in office, Trump pushed the "Big Steal" lie so hard that it completely eroded trust in democracy itself among wide parts of the population [8]. To this day, he has not admitted he has legally lost the 2020 election (compared to Al Gore in the way sketchier 2000 elections). For me, this is the biggest most negative effect on the future - how much are free and fair elections actually worth if significant parts of the population do not believe that the elections were free and fair?

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/i-m-very-fortu...

[2] https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-poli...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/health-immunizations-children-mea...

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/dr-fauci-says-his-daughters-...

[5] https://fortune.com/2023/09/25/anthony-fauci-security-detail...

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/14/trump-leg...

[7] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/

[8] https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/almo...

Proof that propaganda works :) we might as well live in different timelines!

Kids have always been very controlled in places like Asia way before the last decade or two. That’s not it.

Do we have research on how teen mental health in Asia compares to teen mental health elsewhere?

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