Kids These Days | Hacker News Reader

Kids These Days

smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

76 pointsspeckx100 comments

One observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different problem.

Children are easily led on, and if we’re being honest most adults are too.

It is a well established fact now that suicide is contagious. Just the mention of it is enough to cause a spike in suicide attempts.

Then how do you tell people that they can be helped about it without triggering the very thing?

I would say you mention it when the subject has already come up. Probably do not however devote an entire class period or a special school assembly to it.

Reminds me of the task “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The first thing you do is think of a pink elephant.

The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.”

Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.

I once heard a lecture from an attorney, one of his tenets was as to completely avoid topics you don’t want opposing council to clue in on and attack. Don’t they to preempt it, just ignore it entirely unless you’re forced to confront it.

The analogy was “don’t tell your kid not to stick crayons in their nose” - otherwise, well, they most certainly will latch on to the topic and do so.

yeah basically like warning kids to not like frozen railing, which they would not even think about until the warning

it's like asking on suicide hotline whether you have some weapon or object in room which could hurt you, great ideas to give to suicidal people...

> the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became

An equally plausible explanation is that when the school had zero resources to help kids with depression or other mental health problems they choose to keep their mouths shut and suffer it in silence.

Once the school started paying attention to the issue, it started surfacing people with pre-existing problems who had not previously had anyone to talk to about it.

I think one aspect that wasn’t discussed in this article sufficiently is:

> given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media. I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake.

In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years. Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.

There are a few towns around the world that ban phones and social media for kids. I really like this approach because it means nobody feels left out, and the parents are not the bad guys.

Fingers crossed it comes to my mountain hippie town before my 2 year old wants it.

you need to be able to experiment

With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.

Absolute case in point, in Germany drinking age is 16, but if you’re drunk and goofy and on social media rest assured you’ll be an outcast for a long while

> With what?

With stuff that you're be free to do as an adult with minimal to no restrictions.

Teens should have opportunities to experiment with these activities in safe spaces so that they have direct life experience to reflect on when they're in a less safe or unsafe environment.

I feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking.

"Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."

If the respiratory symptom you’re talking about is lung cancer then the rate of that has dropped by hundreds of thousands.

Not smoking works, but maybe people need more freedom to hurt themselves. I’d support that if society didn’t have to pay their bills later on.

True, but I imagine in an environment in which the vast majority of people smoke, the ones who don't will probably still passively inhale a lot more toxins than if no one smoked at all - making the effect size in direct comparison with smokers seem weaker than we know today it really is.

I believe social media and phone use could have a similar dynamic - like the kids said themselves, it's more a "collective action" than an individual problem.

That was what I was trying to get at with that analogy.

One of the effects of heavy social media and phone use is parents (and other carers) paying less attention to kids.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...

> Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago

Both things could be true: It's possible that parents are more physically present (because they consciously decided to reduce hours or work from home) but are less mentally present (because a lot of that home time gets eaten by being on the phone or because working at home is still work).

I have seen this claim before but I would really like the details. What are they doing? Physically present or engaging with kids?

As far as the UK goes I find this hard to reconcile with longer hours in school (breakfast clubs and after school things), huge growth in childcare businesses, etc.

I wonder whether the missing factor might be less informal childcare from family, so even if kids are spending more time with parents, they are spending less with family in total (therefore still getting less individual attention).

"Freedom" is a valuable concept but a poor model for understanding behavior. I'd support that if there were no business incentive to spend money and research to influence people into taking the wrong decisions.

When people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.

Sounds like you had a pretty lame childhood to me, and in the 30 years since it's only become worse.

Much like panda bears in captivity, it is unusually difficult to give a human being a life that resembles what it evolved for, which mostly involves convincing other humans to back off the safetyism a little.

What dignity can be found in the life of the modern child?

I felt the same way as an adult exploring Africa for three years. One guy even said I was a lion that grew up in captivity, so not completely wild.

“People in developed countries don’t know how to really live, they just die slowly”

Note that guy lived in the US for a decade, and his adult kids still do.

I've only ever felt alive when I left back to Peru. You're quite literally forced to always live in the moment, rather than plan for the future, or even ruminate in the past.

Something about the environment, maybe the increased Microbiota due to food, higher freshness and Non-GMO food, being forced to talk with family. Its not as though as screens aren't present, but they don't feel so overwhelming back there.

Despite Lima having pretty bad places (hence the joke of Perukistan), Peru overall has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, with underreporting being unlikely, since their neighbors with similar culture have less infrastructure yet report much more.

There is a bit of a difference between making a explosives and planting a bomb in another student's locker. The former involves taking risks and may have some utility. The latter only results in others living in fear.

Call that lame if you will. I'd rather think of it as being civil.

One man's drugs, knives, and bombs are another mans skateboards and Amiga 500s

> They have access to cheap travel, better food

What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.

I specifically do not want kids because it feels like I would be shortchanging them. I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. But you are right. Owning a car is absurdly expensive, public transit is pretty grim in the US and definitely not cheap, plus our food supply is literal slop. Even the cheap stuff is expensive now.

It is truly depressing. I can’t imagine being a kid who has to navigate all that on top of social media and constant agitprop.

> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day.

This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.

Have you ever heard of leaded gas?

Did you see the "these days" part in my comment?

Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.

Shortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados?

Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.

> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s?

You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt?

One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).

And those classrooms had no AC (probably), no WiFi, no projectors, no access to (almost unlimited) online resources, no fancy gym, etc etc.

The projectors are not worth the extra cost (not even close!). When I think of all the classes I took in over a decade at universities, very few benefited from projectors. They existed mostly for lazy professors who wanted to write a slide deck once and keep using it, without doing interactive work on the whiteboard.

Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.

WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.

Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.

Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"

Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.

Without global warming, AC were not necedsary. Wifi, projector and nonfancy gym are literally no issues - if they disappeared you wont regret.

There was progress, but these are not important parts of it.

In 1988 in _Atlanta_ my local public school finally got ceiling fans installed, thanks to the PTA fundraising. We never had AC. We had one window unit at home in my parents bedroom. It was fine.

Do you know how many people went to college in 1960?

Do you know how many households didn't have indoor plumbing?

Do you know how many people died of measles?

You are cherry picking a few data points to paint a very, very rosy picture of a reality in which the vast, vast majority of people were living a life much, much poorer than even a poor person today.

Only about 10% of Americans had college degrees in the 1960s compared to about 37% today and the large majority of them were men. Does that sound like a past anyone wants to return to?

And how many of those degrees are going to result in a worthwhile job? University is a massive industry now, billions of dollars are at play, and it has never been easier to take out $100k in perma-debt to go to school. Of course more people go, a B.S. is the ground floor now, yet many degrees are barely worth the paper they are printed on.

Maybe not organic avocados but more likely to be eating produce from your own backyard garden.

That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.

The 1960s was well after agriculture as a percentage of the population in the US had declined to a small figure, and relatively few suburban or urban dwellers were growing things for their own consumption.

Well we still were in small town America in the 1970s. :)

Absolutely incorrect. Do you really think the majority of people lived on an acre of arable land providing bountiful vegetables year-round? Do you know what a "tenement" is? Do you know how many people had indoor plumbing in 1960? How many died of the measles?

The vegetables obviously weren’t fresh year round but my grandmother and mother and aunts canned lots and lots of vegetables we ate throughout the winter.

I guess this is just what selection pressure looks like. It’s possible that adults who struggle to navigate social media and agitprop to the extent that they can’t imagine being able to raise kids in the 21st century might actually be right that their offspring would also struggle.

When was the last time you met somebody who only walked all thier life? Never rode a horse because only the rich could afford such things.

When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.

Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.

> You talk about poison, but that is pure lie

I think it's fairly well accepted that the high obesity rates are caused by the shifting American diet. Yes it's more available than the 1950s (although I suspect not terribly so), but the effect it has on public health has been a nightmare.

You can just as readily find correlation with behavioral changes linked to a sedentary lifestyle driven by a firehouse of entertainment that first became available with cable television. That doesn't satisfy the orthorexic cause, so isn't discussed much.

Shifting diet, but poison is the wrong term.

Fundamentally, obesity is caused by an excess of calories. The foods we eat today are more calorie-dense. Even an apple is sweeter and larger than it was in the 1950s. But bottom line people are obese because calories are cheaper and more readily available than they used to be.

He seems to focused on what happened in the last few decades. Your points seem to apply to a much longer time-scale.

The last few decades are much harder to quantify. I wouldn't want to go back to my youth.

So better off today compared to 200 years ago.

Regarding travel, you can decide for yourself:

https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...

It seems uncontroversial to say that young people now, and for the last 25 years, have access to cheaper travel than previous generations. The network of budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and MENA is extensive; I can often find a WizzAir flight for as little as 10€ if I'm willing to fly with just a smaller carry-on. As for long-distance bus travel, FlixBus in Europe sucks in so many ways and has a monopoly over whole countries, but its tickets (if you purchase well in advance) are often cheaper than the local operators that one had to use before.

This bit strikes me as rather stuck in the past and oblivious to 2026:

"the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."

That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.

It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.

The article intentionally is giving an overly optimistic view of the modern day, when giving the argument that "kids these days" are better off, and it's quickly contrasted with a pessimistic view:

> children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure.... Our children are living in a time of crisis

Yes it's stated less technically proficient than your version, but the point remains that you can look at the current internet as a blessing or a curse, and is mostly just an intro to the rest of the article

I think this is the first time on HN when I've been one of those people who didn't adequately look at the linked article before commenting, and boy is my face red.

I think that this is true to some extent, but that people often underestimate how much Discord and group chats get used compared to "traditional" (feels weird calling it that, in this context) social media.

4chan is still thriving

That was a great article, or maybe it was just a lot of gibberish that failed to say much of anything.

The article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.

I think that in and of itself shows the broader problem: nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore.

Things are changing too quickly, technologically at an unprecedented speed and as a consequence socially in unpredictable ways. We've gone from only having the TV and newspapers, to computers, smartphones, social networks, now actual machines you can talk to like they were humans, in like 30 years total. Quantifying the psychological and sociological effect of it all is nigh impossible. Everyone just does whatever seems like a good idea and hopes for the best, and of course there's no shortage of those talking out of their ass because there is no data yet to prove or disprove any real guidelines to anything.

A meteoric rise on anxiety is a completely rational response to that imo, with climate change looming above as a cherry on top.

Those things and also everyone always having a video recorder in their pocket and a culture of posting them online where they can go viral, is likely a huge factor.

One of the difficulties pointed out in the article is the difficulty of finding a control group when the entire culture has been transformed by these technologies.

Mood.

Yeah, our psyches evolved in times when the environment was relatively stable for your entire lifetime. Rate of change in the environment just keeps increasing, and our wiring just isn't made for that. Our internal prediction engine is less and less able to model the future based on the past. Painting with broad strokes here, but I think generally this is the upstream cause of a lot of the increased mental health issues we're seeing.

Im a layman... but how do you measure social medias impacts, when everyones algorithm is different? If everyone is on it but having a different experience, how can that be measured? I imagine some are better at being resistant to it and can subconsciencly push it to more positive direction and ignore the depression-bait it starts feeding them when IT knows they are down... I was in a severly nacassistic relationship for years, and while I'm mostly over it, those few times a year I log into facebook, all it wants to do is remind me of it and feed me all this victim crap. It can't be healthy for a young mind to be staring at this all day, its absolutely manipulating. It's kind of messed up.

a lot of attention given to phones, somewhat rightly so, but little to the rest of society. class -- can we think of any current events might lead to children being despondent about their future? anything at all going on in the world?

Compared to world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, widespread racism, etc.? No.

The dissolution of many of the financial/social cornerstones of our society such as: class mobility, third places, education, trust in your neighbor, privacy, meritocracy, free thinking (and the right to dissent), etc.

My question to the reader is this: Who benefits from this?

> but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.

As the author also points out.

my bad

> My friend Frank Keil has a terrific new book out (buy it here), in which, among many other things, he mourns the loss of tinkering. Children and teenagers used to take things apart and put them back together again—toasters, bicycles, and especially cars. Keil argues that the decline of tinkering has had profound consequences for children and adolescents’ understanding of the world.

It is somewhat sad that things have gradually become more un-tinkerable. What used to be a bunch of large components over a large circuit board, or maybe even a mechanical system is now a tiny chip with literally no way to tell anything about it when you disassemble it.

On the other hand, there's far, far more resources for dedicated tinkering these days. $5 microcontrollers and electronics kits 20 years ago? Not a thing. Internet guides you can follow to master it all? Good luck with books that are too hard for you to start reading without a mentor or a school. Learning tinkering has never been easier, but people's motivation for it has never been lower either.

Kids in europe walk from early to school and can drive by bisycle pretty far alone, without the police almost shoot parents for leaving children 1 hour alone outside.

Same happens in the USA all the time. Don't let media impressions fill you.

Walking or riding my bike to school was certainly not an option. I know very few people (no one?) for which those were options. It was difficult to visit my friends as well so I spent a lot of time alone.

It is viable in pre-war developments where cars weren't assumed, such that housing and services needed to be denser.

It happens all the time in newer suburbs. Schools, particularly elementary schools, are almost always built inside of neighborhoods where all the local kids will be walking to school. Now, there are still buses, probably somewhere between a third and a fourth of the kids live close enough to walk to school. However, those who do are generally expected to walk to school in every city I've lived in.

Why wasn’t it an option? I regularly walked/rode to & from primary & high school in Australia.

I'm in my early 30s, and I walked to and from school fairly often growing up in a suburb. My wife is the same age and living in one of the largest cities in the country used to ride the subway to and from school, but basically had the same experience of being able to do it unsupervised for at least some portion of her school years. It's hard for me to imagine what circumstances would lead you to not know anybody who had that option at all.

meanwhile:

https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...

Saying that teenage pregnancy, rape, suicide and alcohol abuse were not serious problems in 1940 is some serious head-in-sand thinking.

I can't stand this writing style. It's very boomer-ey and reeks of elitism and "well back in MUH day we just toughed it out and it was great and the kids these days are too WEAK!"

This article is so unbelievably misguided. Kids nowadays deal with a lot of crap that none of us dealt with in the 80s/90s/2000s.

It's written by someone who lived through the "End of History".

That is, someone who lived through the best periods of America and Liberalism, and didn't know that it ended at 2014, the exact year China surpassed the US in PPP, and still lives with the "End of History" optimism and wealth the rest of us never got to experience.

> Teenagers drink less, smoke less, and are less likely to die in car accidents.

Why would he put "drink less" is reasons why teens should be happier?

The author discusses at length how the conclusions we reach about social media are strongly tied to our personal values and what we consider “good” or “bad” outcomes.

Don't know about the research, but I've always assumed that drinking has some correlation with psychological pathology. I drink myself, and would self-diagnose myself as being happy. However, drinking, particularly heavy drinking seems correlated to problems.

Drinking is often (not always) an escape. So if a kid is drinking more than experimentally or e.g. occasional weekend gatherings with friends, it's a good sign they are having trouble coping with something. Same would go for smoking weed, etc. A normal well-adjusted person is not driven to get intoxicated frequently.

I think it's kind of cuts both ways.

Some of my happiest memories growing up in the late 90's early 2000's involved drinking with a bunch of friends in their basements.

My wife on the other hand drank because she was unhappy.

These things are not the same.

Why call out "drink less" but not "smoke less"? Both are recreational drugs, both are socially stimulative, but only the former has the propensity to lead to serious harm in the short term.

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