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.
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...
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.
In other words, being watched or tracked will definitely affect a kids behavior.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
Everybody, especially kids, deserves to have some alone time and actual agency.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/etan-patz-case-verdict-pedro-he...
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
You literally cannot win.
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.
> None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame.
I disagree. Cell phones come to mind as a major enabler here.
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
Not good enough thats mostly the US doing that
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.
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.
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.
If your peers aren't cruel to you, then spending time around them is extremely healthy.
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...
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.
I am not sure that is any different than it has been for any generation.
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.)
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...