Back in the day you didn't get rape threats from 50 anonymous accounts, or see pictures of you photoshopped sucking dicks, or feel like even more of a loser because you see in 4K detail how everybody else in class is having more fun outside of school. The internet is a threat and embarrassment and envy machine. You feel like you're constantly losing a battle to be relevant and have a good time, and you pathologically monitor feeds of other people's lives to try to stay ahead. When that doesn't work you lose yourself in mindless entertainment to avoid mental stress, also avoiding processing hard emotions.
That's not all new, but it's at a level higher than ever before.
None of those activities really had me envying anyone else. I remember the first thing that made me feel worthless and unaccomplished was TED talks!
I agree the problem is that it's hard to separate our online life from our offline life now.
Life for kids and everyone is drastically different from what it was just a few decades ago, because we have drastically different access and exposure to information, in general. This has changed the human experience.
I suspect it is because I have not looked hard enough, but I do not see enough about how much this has changed us. We try to pinpoint specific aspects, like social media, but I rarely see discussion about how just the raw exposure and access to information has changed us.
The value of knowledge is decreased, because it is accessible to everyone. This fact changed how people find their place in the world, find meaning and purpose, make social connections, etc. How much did this change us? I believe it has completely altered the human experience. Technology only hits this hard a few times every 1000 or so years. Gunpowder, printing press, electricity, internet. We're in the midst of a big shift now.
Here's an example: consider magic and sleight of hand. Until easily accessible information, the method of 'doing a trick' was arcane knowledge. This was the case for thousands of years. Knowledge was generally obtainable, but you had to go out of your way to get it. No adult believed in magic, but the fuzziness around the knowledge was enough to allow the audience to suspend belief that something wondrous happened.
This aspect of wonder is now rare. To what degree is the lack of access to wonder a root cause of the decline in teen mental health?
For what it is worth, I was that person in 2007 who warned everyone I knew about social media, for the exact reasons we are now discussing.
It is a long time ago I impressed my class at school by programming the "biorhythm" on a Casio pocket calculator. Whatever you do, someone did it better, larger, shinier and posted the video on Youtube.
Of course it is not that gloomy and there is still a lot of fun experiments to be had. Currently we have a photographic trap and try to get pictures of wild animals: it is quite hard and that makes it all the more fun. It is a also a way to know our immediate surroundings better and that cannot be replaced by an online experience.
[edit] In low income households smartphone+subscription take a large share of the free income, yet are felt as necessary. This leaves no money for leisure other then social networks, which are costless.
This occurs across a variety of dimensions: too much information about the goings-on of our friends and family, about the world at large, about all the things we're supposed to do to "stay healthy", etc.
This is grasping at straws. While the expectation is you'll create and maintain curated online presence tied to your real life identity in a world of increasingly economically stratified society.
Click bait is the perfect example of this. You see an ad telling you about a story that sounds interesting, so you click the link. Suddenly you are drawing in to a website with 1 sentence of text per page that you want to read surrounded by crappy ads and pop-ups. You want to know how the story panned out, but are overwhelmed by the garbage. Lesson learned, but how do I teach Google to stop showing me that crap?
Personally, I think this all comes down to the cost of publishing. When a publisher had to shell out real money to print a book by an author, there was an incentive for the publisher to hire editors that did a good job of making sure the books they printed were of value (the same applies to newspapers). When the marginal cost of putting a news story on a website is $0, there's not really any point in hiring an editor anymore.
The same parallel exists in the phone network today. Back in the 1980s when it cost $0.34 per minute to make a long distance call, the people calling you probably thought twice before calling. Today's VoIP networks charging less than a penny a minute have enabled farms of robocallers to harass you with garbage calls. The near zero cost of international calls means that call centers in poor countries can profitably harass the elderly in rich companies with endless new scams.
Again, the same pattern exists with videos. 20 years ago a slickly produced video took time and money to produce. Now any teenager with a phone or laptop can throw a bunch of clips together, add some voice over and hit publish without spending a penny.
The only path I see forward from here is that this entire situation will get worse. Technologies like GPT-3 are amazing, but they come with a cost: it becomes cheaper to write walls of text. People will use it or perhaps are using it to create websites devoid of real content. Search engines that are already having trouble distinguishing between real thoughtful content and the wasteland of content farms will have an even harder time to produce relevant results for search requests.
I hate to say, but we were better off when the cost of people's attention was much greater than $0.
Again we’ve made a truism that we’re doing for the greater good by setting ourselves aside for the hustle. Yet no science gives anyone omniscience; we follow along because what else to do, but the high minded goals we follow along with do not have to be rockets to nowhere.
Notice how all the rich people do little real work to provide material things they need? They externalize the necessary effort required for their survival, despite being mortals who are expected to support themselves, they gossip and babble and produce little that truly supports them.
The public needs to let go of the Protestant work ethic, the mountain man struggle and become a better negotiator. The grind keeps them from imagining in detail for themselves.
Funny thing is it didn't actually get any less dangerous, people just decided that if everyone did it then there's no problem.
But a strange thing happened with people I knew was that after FB's "Real Name Policy". Anyone who kept using a pseudonym was viewed as outdated at best, sometimes a downright weirdo. Only people part of Twitter/Tumbler niche communities kept using fake names.
I also remember around the 2010s a "friend of a friend" bragging about reporting someone using a nickname to Facebook and having Facebook accept the report and force the person to change.
Interestingly, some teens that I know are sort of going back to that. They don't have Facebook, if they have Instagram, it is just random pictures of objects, more like Tumblr was, no interest in being influencers.
Always remember that the Internet and social media are dominated by people who put an unhealthy amount of time and energy into the Internet and social media. Those people are not real, any more than the old-media commentariat and their taboos are real. Most people are much less visible because they have lives.
Sure, your WhatsApp conversations are end to end encrypted. Except if you’re in a group conversation. Or if you have the on by default backup turned on.
It wasnt all peaches and candy.
If you don't want to see dicks on Chatroulette, don't use Chatoroulette. Or use it, but leave when you see a dick.
Some creeper on AIM? Block them. If they keep making new accounts to come back, create a new account and invite your friends to that one.
With bigger social media, the social cost of not being where your peer group is is high. Things are engineered to try and limit your exposure to the crazy stuff but it's still out there and in higher volumes than ever before.
It's also much harder to avoid now if somehow an algorithm decides you should see it. And you can't just create a new account and leave a dead one behind you, or at least it's much harder.
If you wanted to watch terrorists sever a head you had to at the very least search for it (it was usually more complicated than that). Facebook wouldn’t stuff it in between videos of kittens doing cute stuff while you endlessly scroll your newsfeed.
Or just happen to stumble onto 4chan during the summer period of each year where it would be flooded with gore and other shock content*. Or be unlucky enough to be on a site which had been targeted by a raid by 4chan or other imageboard users and flood those with shock content.
* to provide historical context for the younger folk here, 4chan would receive a flood of new users every year roughly corresponding to the American summer holiday period, and there would be a noticeable decline in posting quality during that time.
To ensure that only people who fit in with board culture stuck around, the site (or at least /b/ which was where I spent most of my time back in those days) would be flooded with the most offensive content possible to scare away the bulk of the new users. This was rather effective at filtering out people of an emotionally sensitive nature and leaving only the most jaded and persistent to become regular users.
Much like the so-called "Eternal September", the board eventually had a culture change and became more welcoming of new users, and this practice declined. Although that was a long time ago and I think perhaps it may have been more that the introduction of CAPTCHA, rate-limiting, and other anti-spam measures prevented the use of automated image dumping software that was used to flood threads with shock content.
But I think another factor is the sheer existence of our ancestors. As more time goes on, the more history there is with more people having achieved great accomplishments. Younger generations will naturally just have more to live up to (with the potential to feel depressed if they don't).
Now, as a teenager you are plugged into that social fabric 24/7. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to find yourself in that hyper-connected social graph.
But now that kids are connected to each other 100% of the time (being in class in school is also not excuse enough to not be connected) you have to be funny and clever all the time. An off hand comment while distracted by a million other things can lead to havoc in your social and online life.
It’s not social media at all; it’s the reality they live in which happens to include social media. It’s plain truth; the majority don’t give a fuck about their future.
The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. You see kids as young as 2-3 hiding under a table engaged in some awful kiddie YouTube trash or a game. It ends up being a pacifier that induces anxiety, and I think that effect combined with social media is powerful and difficult for kids to manage.
In terms of targeting, i actually think that things are better today. Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles. The Boy Scout leader basically roamed the country and landed in NYC where he was eventually arrested for an unrelated rape. Today, there’s extensive background checking everywhere and it’s more difficult for a known offender to be in that position of trust.
Sports and the college recruitment funnel are another thing hurting kids. I had a kid drop out of little league because his soccer academy coach flipped out that he, as a 10 year old, isn’t fully committed to soccer. So he’s playing “elite” soccer, at a cost of almost $4k, because that’s how you make the high school team.
It's really sad to see things like this. Boy Scouts was one of the best parts of my childhood. Both my parents were heavily involved - dad was the Scout Master, mom was the merit badge counselor for backpacking and other woodland activities, my younger sisters came on many of the trips.
It served as a healthy foil to my absolute infatuation with learning about technology.
I would send my kids to Baden-Powell scouting if that was an option.
That's the single biggest problem with scouting - your experience is going to be largely dependent on the adult leadership. You can have dramatically different experiences depending on what pack or troop you're in and leadership changes often make what was a good experience a poor one.
The high-adventure trips were the best part for me. The multi-week canoeing trip in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada (northern-tier), multi-week sailing trip and snorkeling in the Florida Keys, the Philmont backing trip, etc. Our troop took backpacking trips on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, Talladega national forest in Alabama, etc. Many fun memories with family and friends.
I was in 3 troops as a kid due to moving around. The troop in the Chicago area was a fantastic example of a by-the-book Boy Scout troop. The scouts ran the show and the adults only got involved if we were about to do something very stupid (making non-dangerous mistakes and learning from them is an important part of maturing), or if the decision required an adult to sign off (spending troop money, etc.). The one in Alabama was more laid back, kind of boy and adult led, but the adults definitely did more of the work than the chicago area troop. The one in the bay area I joined ended up being a rich kid dick measuring contest and I quickly left the troop, which was the end of my time in the Boy Scouts.
[1]: https://www.adventurescoutsusa.org/#:~:text=Adventure%20Scou....
What's the difference?
vs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America
Baden-Powell scouting is co-ed, non-religious, and founded in the 70s. Boy Scouts of America is the 'original' version, and, as recently as 15 years ago (I think some of this has changed since) explicitly excluded atheists, girls, and gay kids. BSA leadership is (or was, I think this has changed) heavily influenced by conservative Mormons.
Also, they culturally appropriate the fuck out of Native American culture. Think white suburban dads dancing around with costume jewelry and plastic headdresses dancing 'native style' dances to 'commune with the Great Spirit of the land'.
I'm glad of my time spent in BSA, but I wish I'd had the opportunity for BP instead.
For an organization that explicitly advertises itself as a morally driven environment, it's extremely hypocritical for it to have any level of an abuse problem (sexual or otherwise).
That being said, it's been having an identity crisis for years, far longer than the circa-2018/19 attention on getting them to allow women. Obviously, like school, all of the troops are difference and experience their own unique sets of issues.
I was in Boy Scouts from 2004 to 2010, and Cub Scouts before then (1999 to 2004). I suppose I was lucky to start my adventure with a pack and later troop that was located in a liberal and wealthy suburb of Chicago that counted many highly educated people among its population (right down the street from Fermilab).
By 1999, they'd already started allowing women to participate as leaders. My den leader was a woman, many of the instructors were women. Cub Scouts (at least my experience with it) didn't have the same religious aspect that the boy scouts did. Our pack was chartered with a school, in contrast to Boy Scouts which typically charters with a religious organization (church, mosque, synagogue, etc.).
The actual material in the handbook and the overall organization has been ever increasingly non-denominational and non-christian-specific for years. While it wasn't explicitly accepting of atheists or agnostics, most troops don't really care that much about it. Religious service is not a required part of the activities, and by 2010 it'd been watered down to the point that you could barely recognize that you're participating. I was openly agnostic in my troop in Alabama. Moms were also openly encouraged to participate as leaders in the troops I was in. My mom was the backpacking merit badge counselor among other outdoor and survivalist activities.
The whole "exclusion of young women and homosexuals" sentiment can be taken a few ways. Obviously in 2022 it's a lamentable position. It's definitely rooted in the very American religious theme that sex before marriage is bad, therefore anyone who creates a situation where it's possible is also bad. So in order to avoid temptation, you must separate the sexes. Homosexuality turns that on its head because the boys can be attracted to the other boys.
No one had an answer how to resolve concerns, so no one changed anything. When the social progressive movement really got off the ground in the late '10s and was flagrantly demanding sweeping and immediate change to long-standing groups, they were kind of blindsided. Venture crew was a co-ed organization that allowed women to access the Boy Scout high adventure camps, but Girl Scouts was not an equivalent organization to BSA. It has a lot less national direction and troops were very different. Some of my coworkers in California have their daughters in it, and they sound like their having a similar experience to what I had in Boy Scouts. However, when my sisters went in Alabama, they were trying to turn them into proper southern housewives. Hence why they tagged along with my troop as "honorary Boy Scouts".
The appropriation of Native American culture other comments mentioned is also lamentable, at least the part where "white suburban dads jump around in costumes". For the most part it's not too bad, most of the call outs use their culture as an example of one that was more respectful of nature, in contrast with the European colonial worldview the US was largely embraced in their interactions with the Native Americans.
The genius and nasty aspect of Boy Scouts is that they integrated with other institutions. So they got to inherit the authority of the sponsoring institution, but they also inherited the negative and had a bias to look away from things. They also tended to be tight with local law enforcement, and alot of sexual abuse was never dealt with because of those informal relationships.
In my mind, this stuff isn't a political issue. My original point was that today, every one of these organizations requires that people in contact with children get background checked and have some level of training. That's not perfect, but at least known abusers are kept out. I don't care about political bullshit - whatever you believe whatever TV you watch, your children should never get molested.
Unfortunately, any category of organization where adults have authority over children will have some level of sexual abuse. Our daughter's fancy--and extremely progressive--private school recently investigated itself and concluded that it had protected teachers who had relationships with students over several decades: https://www.capitalgazette.com/education/ac-cn-key-school-in...
Indeed, studies show that sexual abuse in schools is extremely common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education... ("In their 2002 survey, the AAUW reported that, of students who had been harassed, 38% were harassed by teachers or other school employees. One survey that was conducted with psychology students reports that 10% had sexual interactions with their educators; in turn, 13% of educators reported sexual interaction with their students.").
Your points about the Boy Scouts are will taken. Coming from the opposite side of the aisle, I would say something similar about what happened at my kid's school. It was an outgrowth of the school's liberalism--specifically the male-dominated sexual liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s that tried to normalize sexualization of teenagers. Teachers would have parties and invite students--this is a K-12 school mind you--and relationships between students and teachers were open secrets. It's not that nobody knew, it's that nobody thought it was a big deal.
But the larger point is that sexual abuse happens in pretty much every class of organization, though the specifics are different in each. My complaint is that the media reports on sexual abuse in churches and Christian-oriented organizations in a very different way than when the same thing happens in secular and liberal organizations. And that's not actually good for anyone.
What's also interesting is that many of the kids that do get responsibility are the ones in really crappy situations. That is, responsibility is forced on them because of circumstances. So these kids might do poorly in school, but end up with a better work ethic than rich kids with education. Or they end up dead or in jail. It's all messed up and there are no easy solutions. We all just need to do better.
I mean, it is literally a game, he shouldn't feel the need to "fully commit." That coach just seems like a jerk, to me. Look for a lower-stakes league, maybe? Plus if your kid has put in a couple years on this super intense team, he'd probably be a super-star in a normal one.
Yes! My freshman biology teacher was extradited and imprisoned in Australia for this. [1] The Marianist Church knew and shuffled them to new congregations rather than doing the right thing.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/catholic-clergyman-bernard-hart...
Social media is such a double-edged sword.
It’s pretty easy to observe - when parents use a Skinner box (ie Youtube) to keep the kids quiet, the kids don’t develop the same social/coping/etc skills.
There’s lots of study on the topic. The decline of toys and play is another related thing.
As always blaming the medium seems a bit short sighted. Who are the people controlling all these apps and social media sites? They're not run by aliens. And who are the parents letting this happen? There seems to be a much larger problem with society as a whole. The problem isn't the tech, it's how we use it. And if kids are developing more and more mental problems, maybe there's something wrong with the adults and how they run the world those kids are born into. "My child's brain is like a sponge", is what I often hear parents say. Feed them toxicity and that's what you get.
If this happened to my kids today it's very likely someone would be charged with a crime (rightfully so).
I have a sadistic stepdaughter who did similar-- on one occasion, I caught her catfishing lesbian girls and publicly accusing them of sexual abuse. From talking to a few of her (now ex-)friends, this was not an isolated incident. Enough of her lies caught up to her that she ended up changing schools, crying victim the whole time.
Kids these days know how to exploit privacy laws, be it HIPAA for their Munchausen-by-internet campaigns or anti-wiretap laws to conceal their targeted cyberbullying.
Evidence obtained from someone else's phone is generally inadmissible, so anybody positioned to discover such activity is going to have trouble reporting it.
On HN that's likely to be a popular opinion, given how many members here probably work in social media corporations.
I have lots of experience looking after relatives' kids in the UK and your points don't apply at all to them.
It's anecdata vs anecdata, but yours doesn't refute the article, and given your opinion may well suit HN biases well (we don't want to think of our work as causing mental illness) then I think the top voted comment needs a stronger counter argument than "my kids are like this".
It's not certain, but it looks pretty damn likely that social media has caused a dramatic increase in mental health problems amongst kids.
Maybe teachers could contribute something here with their experience? Parents see such a tiny sample size but teachers see 1000s of kids over a few years.
My teacherly anecdata (from about a decade of teaching) led me to think (in no particular order):
* Anxiety is way more prevalent and central to teen experience than most people realize. Definitely more so than I saw when I was a kid. You could say we use the language of mental health and anxiety to conceptualize experience more these days, and that's true to a degree, but it doesn't fully account for the prevalence or centrality.
* Social media is absolutely an amplifier of the problem. You can really just ask a kid -- they're often very self-aware about it. Many will say something like, "Yeah, I hate it, but you have to be there" or "I hate it but I'm obsessed with it."
* Further to the last point, kids are often a lot smarter about social media than we tend to give them credit for (and often a lot smarter about it than adults). Many are good at compartmentalizing online experience onto different platforms and different public or private or anonymous or real-name accounts -- since they've grown up with it, they've had more impetus to develop adaptive mechanisms. A lot of them create relatively private or close-knit digital spaces to retreat to when the big screaming public square gets overwhelming.
My own kid's a toddler, and I definitely worry about what all of this will look like for him. I want to expose him to technology and teach him to use and understand it, but at this point I'm super leery of exposing him to YouTube/anything with a whiff of social media any time in the foreseeable future.
Whoever implemented the surveillance of children should burn in hell. Since that probably doesn't exist the next prison with strong similarities should be chosen. You teach them that this kind of 24/7 surveillance is normal and I think they have enough problems with peer pressure through social media. You also teach a zero trust behavior. That can be good in a context and it can be really bad if it becomes learned cynicism.
I could understand it until age 10 perhaps but at some point you want your kids to be independent. If they aren't bots by that age.
There's surveillance (parental supervision) and then there's "surveillance" (corporate psycos / overbearing governments).
You want your kids to learn independence in a gradual and some what safe / controlled way (not too safe of course). There are still some things I don't want them exposed to at age 10. Unfortunately unsupervised internet isn't the best option here. Outsourcing it to tech is a really bad choice for sure. You need to be present as a parent to help them navigate and answer questions. If you aren't, then some youtuber (or worse) will do it for you. There's also an argument that being present as a parent has become harder than ever on average for economic reasons (double income, wage stagnation, inflation, etc.), and also the problem that many parents have no clue how to navigate the internet responsibly themselves.
Does posting this vague (pithy?) comment result in a reduction of horrific things occurring?
There's definitely things on the internet parents don't want them to access - this is normal, we don't want them going on there.
This 'surveillance' can be problematic but it's not 'dystopian'.
The 'dystopian surveillance' is for the more serious issues, people getting flagged for this or that etc..
'Age appropriate content' is fine, but nuanced.
'Surveilling everyone' is bad.
You also don't want moral busybodies at school make mountains out of molehills to make it more traumatic than the content they perhaps consumed and wasn't age appropriate. A while ago parents were oblivious to what content their children consume and didn't even have blocks. The children survived too although a bit more engagement might indeed be sensible.
As I said, it was criticism of surveillance, not blocking content or in general curating content for very young children.
1. My kids have slack in their schedule. No, they aren't going to Ivy League schools. That's OK. They will survive somehow.
2. This is certainly true, but it's a complete joke to my kids. They aren't confused. They just wonder why all the adults are. Teenagers already think adults are incompetent.
3. This isn't true at my school. My kids have made egregious errors and the school takes it in stride. They know they are kids. They understand kids make mistakes. It's OK. We work through it and move on. The cops are not called and nothing is escalated. At most, the send us an email and we talk to our kids and that's the end of it.
3. I have no idea on this one.
My children don't have social media accounts and never will on my watch. Even as teenagers they don't because they are not allowed. They could, yes, but they don't. However, I have boys, not girls. Perhaps that would be a non-starter if I had daughters.
Thank you! I think we need more people with this mindset speaking up. Everywhere there's this paranoid fear in parents that without a totally filled schedule, tutors, AP classes and more their children are going to be destitute. Not going to an Ivy League school is fine, and likely anyway; having free time to play in their own self-directed world is also fine (and healthy).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29905586-the-happiest-ki...
My kids also must avoid social media until they are 18. Heck, my older son had a feature phone until just two years ago, when he absolutely needed a smartphone for tools required for his position as a coxswain on his rowing team. Even then, he couldn't install apps, couldn't use a web browser. Since he turned 18, he's tried out some social media and other things, but mostly avoids them.
In the end, we wanted a way to keep in touch with them and see where they were as they began driving and working. That's NOT a healthy reason to get a kid a smartphone, BTW. That's just a reflection of my fear and insecurity.
Yep, I went through the same thing.
I was going to give the same pushback. My father-in-law is a teacher approaching retirement. He says that the only people confused by this are the parents. The kids are not confused at all except about what is so confusing.
It'd be interesting to know how OP is "seeing" this problem, whether the kids are relaying it literally or if OP is interpreting or what.
When I have no stress (on rare occasions I’m able to detach from my problems), my desire to use my phone at all is non-existent. So I think you are right that’s it’s difficult to attribute causality when kids are constantly under stress.
This study, in fact, appears to only assess correlation. Haidt also strikes me as someone guided by a maverick worldview (he’s a serious thinker usually and I’ll read anything he writes)
My parent comment was based on my experience as a teenager, compared to the very different way my teenage children are monitored and evaluated for mental health. It's night and day.
This sounds like the old ‘everyone was blind back then, but now we have glasses!’
So you can break yourself out of the loop. And maybe your kids will be inspired by it. Or maybe it skips a generation.
Plus, it was a seismic event. We went from little social media in 2000 to ubiquity by 2010. We should have seen one big rise to a new steady state not a continually increasing problem.
https://www.worldline.technology/post/over-2-5-billion-peopl...
It's the War On Drugs all over again.
We understand addiction enough to be able to say that a person's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states are the greatest causes of addiction and not the drug itself.
Social media leads to an increase in a cortisol and dopamine. It also increased oxytocin by a large margin. Behaviors linked to its use are similar to that of other substances that increase those hormones directly.
The phrase "war on drugs," at least to me, is about all the collateral damage caused by criminalizing drugs. No one is criminalizing Facebook usage.
Can you fill in the blank? I actually have no idea what you are referring to here.
There was a lot of rap and hip-hop with lyrics that prominently and repeatedly used that word. I wondered then about what happens when non-Black fans sing along with such a song on radio or streaming or at a concert.
I did some research and it seems that a small minority of the artists think that people who sing along should sing all the words regardless of race, with most thinking non-Blacks should not sing that word. Some in the latter group also feel that it is a losing battle to try to stop it.
I think those that want to stop it can succeed--for now. If I ever feel the urge for example to sing along to some rap or hip-hop song I'll have no trouble remembering to skip the N-word part. I've long known that this is a word I should not be saying except under special circumstances where it is clear I should say it and that singing along is probably not special circumstances.
That works for me because I'm adult and when I learned the word as a kid I learned it as a derogatory term.
But now that the N-word is in popular music that plenty of non-Blacks listen to, there will be kids who grow up from the start with that in the music they listen to. It will be a word they naturally learn as part of normal language acquisition without learning the most negative connotations.
I bet it will be lot harder to get that generation to not use it when singing alone, or to not adopt it with the positive meanings that it sometime has when used in rap or hip-hop.
at a concert, he invited a white girl to rap the song on stage. of course she went full with it. he stopped the track after she rapped nigga a few times during the track l and began to.blame her on stage for it. of course the whole crowd went with it.
i mean. what a god damn motherfucker. seriously. i dont want to know what the girl was going through mentally. it must have been horror.
the obsession with the n word is crazy anyway. of course i dont use it in mh regular life..but when i quote a rap song, i quote it literally ofc.
Pretending not to understand this is being willfully ignorant at this point.
FYI I'm an immigrant from Africa with 3 daughters but I've instilled in them the values I was raised with, that everyone is deserving of respect, dignity and are precious in the eyes of God.
What is there to get?
“[born with] no preexisting moral guilt” — Is that some attempt to re-frame ignorance?
I have teenage kids and they sure as hell have been raised to understand, from a young age, that while they are in an unfairly advantaged group today, a few generations ago and they would have been rounded up, stripped of everything they worked hard for, and put in camps. And yet, even that fate was objectively better than other groups at the same time. What you call “moral guilt” I call empathy. Maybe this is simply what you mean by “virtue signaling”, but I want my kids to always look for those around them who are stumbling, unable to get back up, or who may just not have enough, and then to give help. But they won’t see them without empathy for those situations, and they won’t have that empathy without an understanding of the struggles.
edit: also want to make sure that "teen mental health" includes the 75% of kids that are not straight, non-disabled white boys. If those kids are included then this probably isn't a reasonable explanation.
Not a physical card in this situation, but there are stories that some kids in other schools actually give out physical cards.
I don't want to ban you because your substantive points are interesting and welcome, but this sort of internet attack is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Ignoring that fact or obsessing over petty things like not having a pass to say the n-word doesn't help anyone or accomplish anything productive.
Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
Let it go. You got a million other places to open this debate.
Have you ever seen Mister Rogers, or grown up poor or in a bad neighborhood? Kids have to worry about adult problems all the time. They often don't have a choice in the matter.
Leaving them to learn about the adult world only when they become adults is cruel, and beyond the point at which they will have ceased to care unless they were taught to at an early age.
>Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
I never said anything about hate, nor does the linked article make any implication about "hate cycles," but it's telling that you immediately tried to make that link.
Why is his son singled out based on his skin color and unable to do things that his peers are officially sanctioned by the school? Not sure what that sounds ok to you? That seems like regular ole racism to me. That's a bit insane don't you think?
> officially sanctioned by the school
You interpret the anecdote as involving something official? I interpreted it as pertaining to social norms being enforced by only the students themselves. Kids hassling each other for "playing nonexistent white/straight/male cards" or "playing a card they don't have" is quite different from authority figures imposing equivalent policies. I mean, on some level the subject of the enforcement is in a similar position regardless of the nature of the enforcement, but we should at least agree on what we're dealing with here.
Kids and teenagers need stability and trust. As adults, we’re bad at fostering that environment in our institutions for a variety of reasons.
Considering your overall comment, my initial response is, well, in school I did, and everyone else constantly did, things that pissed off the people in charge. Pushing the envelope has always been part of being a teenager. Exploring the boundaries is how they begin to understand society and their relation to it. Enforcing rules and making teens see why some actions are okay and some are wrong, is part of the whole idea of teaching and nurturing and bringing up healthy adults.
However, I'm not sure how any of this applies to "diversity".
In any case, I get the overall sentiment that there is not enough stability, but doesn't this just stem from adults in fact not agreeing with each other on what the rules are/should be? What can be done about that? Adults will always disagree on basic principles, because having a personal point of view is part of being human. Perhaps the earlier kids learn that, and that they have to start forming their own opinions, the better.
The important thing is to guide them on forming those opinions, for example helping them be informed opinions instead of "gut feelings", helping them distrust what they read online for instance, and helping them pick up clues on when to trust or distrust a source. It's too bad that even adults are bad at that, though. (I include myself here.) I think the problem is also that we are _all_ learning that skill these days, not just kids.
What's an example of diversity that you are punished for?
There is definitely a level of doublespeak here, although i'm not sure if teens are really annoyed by it
EDIT: As usual with the social justice crowd: no discussion just downvotes. It makes a lot of us feel like there legitimately is no argument for your position.
Gee, I wonder why people are downvoting an obvious fascist stooge.
[1]
> Twenty-nine police officers in the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia have been temporarily suspended after their unit was found to have shared extreme rightwing content on a WhatsApp group.
> Images shared by the officers, most of whom are members of a unit in the town of Mülheim an der Ruhr, reportedly depicted Adolf Hitler, the swastika flag, a collage of a refugee inside a gas chamber and the shooting of a young black person.
[2]
> A far-right extremist has confessed to murdering a pro-refugee German politician who was found dead outside his house on 2 June having been shot in the head.
[3]
> A gunman killed nine people in two apparently racially motivated shootings at shisha bars in the German town of Hanau, police said. The suspect then killed himself, according to officers, after also killing his mother at his home.
> [...]
> The Bild newspaper said the gunman had expressed extreme rightwing views in a letter of confession he left behind. A video in which he explained his motives is believed to be part of the investigation.
----
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/17/german-police-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/26/far-right-susp...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/19/shooting-germa...
The Nazis in Germany have absolutely no political influence and no real cultural influence. The whole ideology is literally illegal there and people get fired just for talking about it.
What's wrong with anticommunism? Maybe his constituents don't want communism either.
It shouldn't be controverial to say "This is a space that's welcoming for everyone, unless you start obviously making people feel like they don't belong. It's not ok to harass or attack someone because of their skin colour, or religion, or gender, no matter what that is."
Also I am super confused by your rhetoric. Earlier on you mentioned that people have spread intolerance of, say, transphobic women or people who have wrong definitions for women. But in your second paragraph you also say you want a space where it’s not okay to make people feel like they don’t belong— a transphobic person obviously makes a trans person feel like they don’t belong… so… wouldn’t it make sense to be intolerant of transphobes by that logic? Can you explain plainly what you actually mean with concrete examples, maybe with a behavioral rubric, of what you want?
If you're confused by my rhetoric, that's ok. I'm confused from time to time.
>It shouldn't be controversial to say "This is a space that's welcoming for everyone, unless you start obviously making people feel like they don't belong. It's not ok to harass or attack someone because of their skin colour, or religion, or gender, no matter what that is."
But where is that controversial though? That's what we have now.
I'm sick of people getting sucked into right wing YouTube and then trying to rope me into the most boring imaginable anti-cancel-culture shit on one side, and I'm also sick of the surprising reality of what they're pissed about actually sometimes happening, possibly as a result of both groups' own polarization. Not a lot, but enough to vibe me out from being around them, not remotely enough to be prejudiced against any particular identity. It just happens sometimes, it's a form of social grandstanding, and it's very tiresome.
When someone express white pride I can't interpret it the same way because there hasn't been a time where the structures were so that being born white made you inferior to someone born black purely based on skin color.
So the difference is the history and the context.
However if I wanna be proud of being middle class white person today, that would raise a lot of eyebrows and not a few people would assume I'm a "white supremacist". You cannot be proud of being white. Doesn't matter what your country history is, or what your personal context is.
My hypothesis is that American history has been conflated with "white" history so now all white people are privileged and oppressed black people and have no reason to be proud.
I fully expect it to raise many eyebrows. Anything dependent on context on the internet will be used against you.
But yes, I don't even expect an European to describe race in terms of "white" or "black". Those are contextual to the American continent.
> However if I wanna be proud of being middle class white person today, that would raise a lot of eyebrows and not a few people would assume I'm a "white supremacist".
Maybe I misunderstood, but this comes across to me as "Even though there have been no black slaves here, I still can't say I'm proud of being white"
And my point is that Europe, despite not having black slaves, still has a very good reason for that (the time a European white supremacist tried to conquer the continent).
I'm not from Germany, I'm for a poor east European country that never was part of any empire and never conquered another country. Why can't I be proud of my heritage? Why do I have to hide the fact that I'm proud of my heritage because English and Americans enslaved African people? Also wasn't it white people that then fought to abolish slavery? Wasn't Wilberforce white? Wasn't Lincoln white? Didn't British ships then police the international waters to stop the slave trade? Why do you decide that being white means "the ones that started the slave trade" and not "the ones that stopped the slave trade" and assign a negative connotation to it?
But I fail to understand your argument in this last phrase. Your argument is because someone in Europe was a white supremacist, then nobody in Europe can be proud of being white (aka proud of their heritage)? Because the mustache man took advantage of the German people living in really poor conditions and being miserable after the first WW and brain washed them into committing hideous acts, being born a German now is forever a curse? You can never be proud of your heritable before and after mustache man? What exactly is the algorithm based on which you decide if someone can be proud of their heritage or not?
We should teach this to all children and encourage them to feel this way. We should not teach some children that they are inferior or carry the the guilt for crimes committed by others just because they share the same skin color.
We don't have White history month because every month in the US is White history month. Same for Gay pride month but no Straight pride month. Or National American Indian Heritage Month, National Deaf History Month, and many others.
Youth culture seems dead.
I remember being a teen and early-20 in the 90s-2000s and there were things like a hippie festival circuit, raves, goth culture, club culture, and so on.
I keep hoping I'm just old and don't see it, but I remember back then it would seep out and get covered by the media and get chatted about on the nascent Internet. I see nothing like it today. Sure there are concerts and IDM shows and the like, but they don't have a mystique. It's just entertainment, not a coming of age subculture. Subculture is dead.
I think this is a factor from personal experience. If I hadn't gotten into the rave/club culture in the late 90s I'd probably be dead from suicide.
These cultures were where kids that did not exactly fit the popular mold would be able to go out, make friends, have experiences, and have a sense of belonging. I still miss it to this day.
I didn’t say it in my OP above but I have heard young people bemoan a lack of interesting culture that is “theirs.” Hip hop, IDM, etc are all things from GenX or earlier, though obviously with a fresh coat of paint.
If any of us are commenting on this using anything that we know from when we were kids then we are already out of touch
The above is further amplified by communication between children and adult strangers being seen as a big no-no.
I feel this is very true, I'm still in my twenties. When I was a little bit than ten, I remember that things like "teenage rebellion" and unbearable young people were still a thing.
I feel like a certain stereotype of the teenager of the 90's has completely disappeared.
Being a teenager a few decade ago was all the rage, even in self identification, I feel now people just go through 10 to 20 progressively, with maybe their set of problems but nothing as typical.... like I did. In fact I think I just saw it died when arrived in this age.
He's one of the leading authorities on the matter, and your take is...nah, not true.
Clearly, most people didn't bother to read the PDF, check additional sources or do a basic background check on the author, whom is a well known authority on the matter.
With just a headline as input, people confidently disagree with the conclusion. Completely dismissing the research. And by posting such disagreement in a way that is relatable to all parents and by wording it in a fancy way, it seems an insightful comment, so it gets traction.
Superficially, it looks a healthy and intelligent discussion. In reality, almost all of it is way off and baseless. There's no truth finding. It's just Reddit with more steps and fancier language.
The other half of comments is people projecting, with random thoughts on housing and inflation, as if a 12 y/o gives a shit about that.
My take is that social media is often a coping mechanism for mental health issues, and therefore in reports like this, correlates with mental health issues.
They have your kid for the majority of the working day, that's more than enough time for work. When they're home the last thing they should be doing is school.
Eg math problems solved in class would be solved as a group so everyone learns the process, and homework is for problems which use those same concepts, but require more careful thought. Most of my math skills were solidified by solving challenging problems like that at home. Simply learning the concepts in school was not enough to build a deep enough understanding, but adding in a good homework component took me from having trouble handling basic algebra to unwittingly deriving basic calculus in an exam when faced with problems I didn't realize weren't intended for me.
Homework as just mechanical work intended only to take several hours per day is pretty stupid though.
As another point, how many of us truly shut out work when at home? Many of us still end up spending a few off hours a week programming personal projects or just reading up on and learning new technologies. I think homework serves a similar function for kids.
I'm sure depression is more acute in that population but even poor teens are growing up with social media.
I'm from Europe but I grew up and have lived in different cultures/countries which have a much more relaxed attitude towards life. Reading your comment actually made me anxious.
I think the problem is bigger than materialism.
0.6% of children skipped a single meal in a 12 month period. 0.9% of children got hungry at least once in a 12 month period.
alternatively, you and your children are considered insecure if in a 12 month period they answer yes to the following:
A parent lost weight
Adult(s) cut size or skipped meals in 3 or more months
Relied on few kinds of low-cost food to feed child(ren)
Here is the actual USDA survey data that supports that fact:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10995-021-03320-2
more background:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
You know when your family is poor. Children share that mental and emotional burden, and it will follow them through life.
The kinds of food they eat will, in the majority of cases, lead to obesity and diabetes.
Please just build a social media platform just for kids. We don't need weird adults playing in the same sandbox as little kids. We also don't need helpless adults dancing in the same recreational teen dance.
I'm surprised we even allow this to happen in the first place. Go figures.
1) How come adults don’t have the same issues with mental health? (I think we do)
2) If adults face the same issues, is this not life preparation?
I’ll grab the lowest hanging fruit, cancel culture. How many careers were ruined because of this? Is all this control on speech causing damage we’re not even aware of yet?
This was the same for a long time. The main difference now is that they are also very targeted by ads on social media.
They are also manipulated purposely by our enemies. Take TikTok (owned by China). In China it promotes being a scientist and athlete to kids, off at 10pm. In USA it promotes how to set your farts on fire and drink your own piss.
By "kids" you mean upper middle class suburban kids. Working class kids aren't overscheduled in this way. The bulk of kids in the US don't live the life you describe, and for the most part are under supervised. Your anecdotal information is tainted by the bubble you live in.
#1 - don't have a say in this as a parent, like don't enroll your kid in those things if you / they don't like it? Or is there a lot of pressure?
Personally I do think social media is more to blame than we realise. As a parent of toddlers I'm a bit worried about what the future will hold for them.
I think this is also applicable to adults, although it’s effects could be less since smartphones weren’t prevalent when current adults were children.
I am sorry, that's an absolutely naive way to look at it. The fact is that it is being increasingly recognized that current Social Media networks are a stress inducers in kids and thus causing mental health issues in them. It is in fact not a great medium to communicate with someone too - if any kid prefers to talk to a friend through social media, than in person, it indicates social anxiety issues that need to be addressed, as otherwise the dependence on SM will actually aggravate the symptom. Not to mention parents should be teaching their kids not to share personal and private feelings on SM with questionable privacy policies (and lack of laws) that will one day be used against them publicly, directly or indirectly.
> School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.
Sounds like all our childhood (with slight variations) before social media. Now add social media to this mix as one of the daily rituals / chores and you will begin to partly see how it can add to the stress in teens.
Everything you’ve mentioned is highly limited to the US.
Asian countries, for example, have been reducing pressure on kids in terms of schooling and exams over the past decade or so.
People whose livelihood depends on social media don't want the culpability of their company's work. C'est le monde.
It is shocking ly addictive without any real benefit.
Watching funny or weird stuff for 2h or seeing opinions from some weird people did not add anything to my life
I deleted the app to get out of it.
The zero tolerance you mention refers to the punishment of a particular situation not that the school doesn't tolerate anything. It's not a contradiction just another use of the word
As for diversity is good but blank, what blank?
They compare notes on Facebook and realize that everything is pretty shitty. They see the memes put together by people who have and have not done the research that decry the condition of the environment, the condition of employment, the condition of their fellow man. And honestly, a lot of the negativity is simply true.
There's a huge risk that we confuse the medium for the message... If people who watch television at the same rate that young people consume social media are more optimistic, it may not be because things aren't actually so bad... It may merely be that bad news drives away television advertising dollars and viewers.
And not to inject too much of my own pessimism, but I'm not sure a governing body whose membership has a mean age of 64 (!) Is constitutionally ready to wrestle with the notion that long after they're dead, the legacy they will have left the younger generation is a very depressing one.
I think I would always have had an issue, but I can quite directly point to the pressure cooker environment of getting into University. It is "not enough" simply to be good academically (which I was), you also needed to be a well rounded person, so you better use all your spare time doing activities to signal your well-roundedness!
I don't feel I was explicitly trying to do this, but I also, being 17, didn't really say no - I mean how do you say no to a bunch of career advisors telling you "you have a chance to go to the top university!!!" etc.
In such an environment, there's little respite, because there's always some kids telling you what they are doing.
I don't think social media in and of itself is to blame, but what it does, in concert with phones, is remove any and all "downtime" from this messaging. There's an encouraged perfectionism, so young people are bombarded with images of how _great_ everyone else's life is. Not only are kids pushy/perfect in the canteen, but now they're pushy/perfect at 10pm on your mobile too.
I struggled very badly with this at university. By that time I was a guy with panic attacks trying to keep up with a course, and I wanted to do all the normal stuff too like party. Of course since I _couldn't_ always do this it ended up being interpreted by most people as "let's not invite him". Social media wasn't directly responsible for this situation, but it is definitely a negative contributing factor. When you're far from home doom-scrolling facebook and all the stuff you missed that you're being left out of, this is really not helpful.
So what I think is that social media will reinforce people who are naturally self-confident, but it will not help people who have issues. I suspect every experience is slightly different, but the inability to escape constant reminders of your own inadequacy, if interpreted that way, is a problem.
Or if I can sum it up, it is simply the same old social/peer pressure, extended to 24/7.
What helps a lot is a moderating influence, a reminder that it is OK to be just normal.
I am also very, very glad I grew up when I did. All my early teenage years were free of any of this - we had MSN and texting and all the usual teenage angst, but you never had mobile doom-scrolling late at night - at best, you could text until you ran out of credit. I feel sorry for young girls particularly growing up with Instagram.
However, I agree that social media is just one factor. Pushy parenting, or pushy schooling, is also a huge risk, as are all the traditional risks like teenagers being horrible bullies to each other.
Addendum: the net impact of pushing me to go to a top university so hard was that I did not go to a top university, and dropped out of a pretty good university officially at the end of the first year, but unofficially I was "done" 6 months in anyway. Absolutely none of this career advice and "enrichment" activity helped me achieve any kind of potential, it just made me miserable and blow up with the stress of it.
It is a myth that kids have to do all of these things. Sports should be extracurricular activity, i.e. outside education. You don't need to do sports to be healthy or to learn about team work.
And volunteering? Volunteering is called community service if you're a criminal. Why punish kids like that? They will soon have to be grown ups, let them have some years to remember positively.
2. applies to adults too, and has always been true.
3. has always been true.
Social media maybe somewhere frustrated kids go, but it is also a place where the shit starts or festers.
If you think it's a fault of the society and parenting, hey everyone, stop making your kids suffer.
Work ethic doesn't come with being overworked as a kid, work ethic is something you can rationally explain as being beneficial for the individual and the group, and I would dare say that work ethic is strongly correlated with physical health.
You have to remember that the teens going on social media now are meeting a cesspool of nonsense that has been there for over a decade. The cesspool was long in the making before they showed up, and by older individuals, themselves arguably a product of our messed up society.
Capitalism, marketing, fanning the flames of consumerism, maximising profitability — these things feed down into society and create bad parenting habits and bad habits in individual measures of self esteem as well.
I happened to look at Instagram the other day someone was showing me their account on their phone, and the sheer amount of commercialisation was horrifying to behold. People of all ages will eventually be quite unable to determine art from advertisement, because they will have been bombarded with so much kitsch advertising that they'll equate the two.
People are more or less just turning themselves into adverts as well. And those that pay attention to it feed into a sort of tribalism. Each brand forms a tribe of supporters. I've noticed this with fashion, food, music, and more.
And if people are being pushed into social media, it still occurs to me that social media is pretty much the last place I would want kids to end up. People are impressionable and naive, and for them to end up somewhere where blatant falsities and conspiracies are viral just can't be good.
I'm not suggesting free speech be stopped, but the problem is that journalism used to be profitable because it was a source of truth or at the very least a source of feasible opinions.
But it has turned out to be more profitable to instead churn out bullshit, and profitability is all anyone cares about.
And this is to say nothing of the implications of having all this data about people and what they do, flying around between tech-marketing giants that could probably afford to buy countries if there were an appropriate mechanism...
Social media is nothing but bad news. It's not confined to kids either, you may have noticed my use of the word "people" not "kids". Many adults are just as impressionable and easily taken in by the same bullshit. They're just as glued to their mobile devices. They're just as dysfunctional. And they will go on to raise kids.
Dysfunctional parents raising kids in a dysfunctional society results in what? Probably dysfunctional kids.
Some will prove resistant and able to carve themselves their own identity and think critically in the face of it all, but they will probably be vilified or at least ignored or considered crazy.
1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.
2. Everything is conflicted and unclear. Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Diversity is good, but being ____ is bad. So many areas where what we teach and preach are the opposite of what policies and actions actually do.
3. The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement. Have a kid send you the wrong selfie and get charged with a sex crime. Get a bad grade and you are off the volleyball team, and you won't make the team next year - so done forever. Misbehave and you'll be arrested by the resource officer and face time at juvi, and potentially a conviction that will be held against you for a very long time (in some states juvi convictions count against three strikes laws).
3. Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.
It's really hard to be a kid right now, and that needs to change. We need to lower the stakes, the stress and have something that resembles consistency.