Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.
The idea that any of these would normally worry an average young teen is hilarious to me. I grew up during cold war, USSR collapse, multiple wars in the region. At no point was I (or any of my peers to my knowledge) gravely concerned for our future. Because none of us yet had any idea what our normal future is supposed to look like.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
I grew up in approximately the same period and grim possibilities, along with local economic problems to a lesser extent, were certainly a concern for me and my peers. Other risks existed as well, kids in my neighborhood school died of drug overdoses, accidents, and medical problems. Others had to deal with poverty, abusive parents, or a family member behind bars. Back then middle aged people blamed television your any despondency among youth. I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
School shootings are such a regular feature of American life that every school holds safety drills for the risk. I don't think all children get to enjoy the same sort of carefree bubble that you did. Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems but many kids are far better informed than many adults admit, or want to be themselves.
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life […] Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems
Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 school shootings [1]. Certainly more than I’d like there to be, but in a nation with about 129,000 schools [2], I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”. If students are in school for 18 years, let’s say, to include pre-K, Kindergarten, and an undergrad degree, and the number of school shootings stayed steady for that whole time, they’d be in school for 918 school shootings, or a 0.7% chance that they go to a school which experiences a school shooting. Not common.
Yet the media reports them heavily, and that causes fear, and that fear is what drives schools to hold safety drills regularly to prepare students for these situations.
People are getting confused by the number posted which is badly distorting the discussion. 51 is NOT the number of intentional massacres of students or staff. It is the number of shootings on school grounds of all types _including accidents_.
Here is a real example from the list: "A student was shot and injured when a sheriff’s deputy’s gun accidentally discharged in a classroom during a law enforcement vocational training."
Another: "A male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting appeared to have resulted from a dispute between the students."
Read down the list and most are accidents, or take place outside the school (e.g. in parking lots) between 2-3 people. These are accidents and individual beefs between students. They have nothing to do with mass murder. They don't involve anyone outside the students concerned. You could be a student at a school during one of these "school shootings" and not even be aware of it.
It's why the _total_ number of deaths is only 40 (!) from those 51 shootings. 8 of those were teachers so the total number of student deaths was only 32.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of damage related to these events is caused by the media and institutions irresponsibly generating fear that creates real psychological problems and distorts decision-making. The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media. The reality is simply nothing like that.
The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media
Nobody is making that argument or getting confused by these numbers. The Edweek figures were linked by someone complaining about media influence.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent.
There are only a few such incidents each year but that is far from 'nearly nonexistent'. Perhaps you'd care to quantify what you consider to be the acceptable number of deaths from shooting sprees?
Every year in America 900 kids age 0-19 die from drowning.
3,058 teenagers ages 13-19 die in motor vehicle crashes. [0]
In a country of 332,000,000 people, if 32 deaths stemming from parking lot arguments seems to require a society-wide blanket of fear and dramatic political anger, you are just badly miscalibrated. You're thinking like it's a village, which is natural, but if you want to discuss broad issues at scale, you need to put on your adult-style numerical/comparative thinking hat. "One is too many" sloganeering is simply a path to stupidity at scale. It distracts badly from things that actually matter and we end up way worse off in every respect.
Also worth noting that based on these data it is more or less completely true that a random student doesn't need to worry about school shootings for their own personal safety at all. If you don't choose to get involved in armed parking lot arguments over girls or respect or drugs, you'll be fine. (However, please wear your seatbelt and choose your driver carefully!)
But in other developed countries, kids still die from car crashes and swimming pools. It’s less of a “one is too many” argument for me and more a question of “if everyone else is able to get this right, how the hell are we getting it so wrong?” Looking around the world really drives the point home that these are avoidable fatalities.
That's a great argument for policymaking, but that's not what we're talking about -- we're talking about whether the children themselves should be worried sick, literally, about it. They clearly should not. Obesity and car wrecks will kill far more of them, and dealing with those issues is far more preventable. Smash the soda vending machines in their lunchrooms, and you'll save far more lives, plus avoid traumatizing the vast majority needlessly.
Once again, there is a significant qualitative difference between accidental or medically-related deaths, and someone actively attempting to end your life. Failing to acknowledge this is a significantly larger cognitive blind spot than the frequentist posters above are complaining about.
It's not like there is a complete lack of advocacy about auto safety or school diets. You might remember that during the Obama administration there was a campaign for more healthy school lunches, preferring vegetables and fruits over salty/sugary snacks, and extolling the value of exercise.
My original comment mentioned school shootings as an example of an issue that teens are understandably concerned about, because while the probability is low it's also a fundamentally horrific situation. I'm rather surprised by the rhetorical contortions so many people are putting themselves through to argue that having several massacres a year just in schools is nothing to worry about.
It's something that something should be done about, but not something that should be worried about. There is a fine distinction. Take whatever action is in your control to make the situation better, then, having done that, do not keep ruminating on it pointlessly when it's just not very likely to happen to you.
Stop lumping people who don't want to fret about it in with people who actually think the gun status quo is OK. Of course it's not OK, and should change. That doesn't mean we need to obsess over it. It just happens to be an issue that is very effective at driving media engagement.
By all means, vote and write to your lawmakers -- this actually drives change. But don't waste much time doomscrolling and ruminating -- this does not help, and only helps enhance media company shareholder bottom lines.
The point is that kids these days are exposed to constant encouragement to ruminate, ruminate, ruminate. This doesn't translate into actual action, it just translates into anxiety and depression, and increased dividends for media companies.
Ah, I see we’ve talked past each other. I was speaking to the policy-making angle. I don’t have any good ideas about how to get the policy issues fixed while avoiding scaring the kids. I doubt that’s even possible, tbh.
But yes, let’s smash the soda vending machines as well!
How many of those countries have a democratic republic style of governance like the US? Perhaps it is more dangerous to live in a freedom-loving democratic republic, but the number of people clamoring to get into the US vs the lack of people trying to leave tells us there's value in the risk.
That's not to say we shouldn't strive to get those numbers down, but personally I think we should be focusing on mental health, of which social media has a huge impact. Banning the weapon - as is the common suggestion - is treating the symptom, not the cause.
But we also place too much emphasis on school shootings when, as demonstrated, other things are far more dangerous to kids.
I understand the motivation behind this argument, but I haven’t seen compelling evidence that mental health issues are the “cause” and weapon availability is the “symptom.” There are mentally ill people all over the world, many of whom attempt to commit mass murder but are not as successful as they are in the US. Try killing four people in a row with a knife and you’ll have a much more difficult time. Contrast that to my city, where a fourth person was accidentally killed because they were in proximity of a gunfight a few years ago (in a decent part of town too. Scary.) As large as it is, the same will never happen in Tokyo.
Strictly speaking on numbers though, the evidence I’ve seen weighs heavily on the side of weapon availability being the root cause, with countries and states with fewer weapon restrictions having more weapons-related deaths per capita. All this talk of “weapons aren’t the problem, people are” therefore strikes me as disingenuous.
I thoroughly believe in keeping rifles around because hunting is vital to my community. I remain unconvinced that handguns and automatic weapons are at all important to protecting US democracy (though I’m certainly willing to be disproven).
Statistics from places like Canada or Switzerland (which have and historically had lots of guns per capita) demonstrate that weapon availability itself does not cause such violence.
You compared Japan's rate of violence to America's, and conclude that America's policies must be the cause. This is wrong because you're comparing completely different groups of people. What you should be doing is to compare Japan's rate of violence to the rates among Japanese immigrants in America.
If you want to figure out which variable matters you need to isolate that variable. And if you do, you'll discover that results come from the people much more than the policy.
The difference between America and these places is that America harbors specific subcultures which glorify violence, gangs, drug trade, criminality and generally antisocial behaviour. If you're not involved in these subcultures, or in close proximity to them, you really have nothing to worry about. Hyper-rare stray bullet incidents "in a decent part of town" don't change this. (I recognize that some people can't escape these subcultures and suffer from them, but again, this is a subcultural problem).
Statistic don’t affirm or deny impact. They are facts. The rest is left to you. Why are you trying to exaggerate its impact by suggesting we suppress statistics (facts)?
It’s a political issue not mired in reality but instead in a desire to affect policy. They do it because it works. This discussion is an example of it’d effectiveness. People who will look to the statistics for context in other situations are quick to dismiss them here. There is no rational reason to be anymore concerned about school shootings in America than any other cause of premature death in children and quite a bit of reason to be less concerned. If you want to protect your children focus on drugs, cars, and military recruiters.
You are crazy. No healthy society has school shootings and it has no place in it. To accept anything less then a healthy and violence & gunfree place our kids can grow up in is insane.
It reminds me of the song, "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next." That said, I think prescription drugs are probably more part of the problem than is widely acknowledged.
I'm sure you mean well, but do you understand that even one school shooting in a year should be unthinkable? Do you not understand that ever child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety?
Yes, I understand. Do you not understand that every child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings, and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety, because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them? Look at death statistics for young people [1]. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.
Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting.
We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.
That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct.
The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here!
You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits.
An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
I still think it’s a very cultural thing, since even 0.01% per year would be a huge number for your child to be in a school shooting. Maybe it’s an “outsider perspective”, but school shootings is not even a talking point in most of the places outside of US, thus anything that’s above 0.001% is a lot.
You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.
Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
This is an asinine argument, as a per-capita comparison with just about any other country shows. I'm not endorsing the Edweek numbers (which were brought into this discussion by someone asserting that school shootings are not a big deal).
I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.
"It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random."
We agree about that. If you mean "it's not okay" OR if you mean "it doesn't happen often".
Per capita comparisons aren't informative because you should care about the ABSOLUTE risk, rather than relative risk.
The ABSOLUTE risk (as I calculate in another comment, charitably about 0.000043% per year per student risk of being killed at school) is extremely small. The fact that it's 5x Greece's or something is irrelevant, because both are tiny. If you're trying to answer the question "How do I make sure my kid grows up happy and healthy?" worrying about school shootings is a waste of time. The kid has a 22x higher likelihood of being killed by drowning, focus on that. Or responsible drug use. Or physical fitness. Or driving safely (or not driving!).
Another basic thing you might want to keep in mind is: kids don't die much. Their overall risk of being killed from ANY cause is quite low. If you're worried about maximizing happiness or something, I wouldn't even worry too much about death. Sure, teach them to swim and when they're little make sure there's a lifeguard, but don't stress about them being killed unless you live in a war zone. (And I recognize that too many people live in war zones, and that's a real problem that real people have)
The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.
Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.
Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).
Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.
And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).
For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.
If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood!
But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different
because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them
What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk.
There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.
Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. They should stop reporting on them.
Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head.
To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident.
School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering.
This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
My biggest fear is my kids dying in a car accident. I'd really prefer not to have to worry about school shootings on top of that, even if they are less likely.
Every single school has an "active shooter" drill. Some boneheaded admins even have a fake instigator come onto campus.
It's extremely disruptive to a child's psyche even if they are never unlucky enough to be at one of the weekly school shootings (which is a horrifically dystopic line that I'd never considered possible 20 years ago).
I bet you remember fire drills as a kid? Now they have those and Active Shooter Drills. It doesn't matter if actual shooting are rare if the fear of them is 'Drilled' into the kid's heads. I saw a paper that tried to measure the impact of first cell phone ownership on teen's mental health. What stood out the most was the whole cohort of teens were at fairly depressed emotional status, the ones impacted by early cell phone ownership even more so. We all here are relatively well educated and by extension fairly well off, we can't imagine what most of the generations following us are going through. I'm gen x so while the economic outlook was beginning to degrade there was still ample opportunity for simple hard work to succeed, that ladder has been pulled up to a large extent. We need a unified progressive taxation system, the current hodgepodge of regressive FICA tax and various credits, cliffs and the slew of tax breaks for investments have worsened class differences.
If you wonder why the rest of the world looks at USA funny, here's a counter point:
There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives.
By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and that would be "not regular"?
Christ.
As a parent in Australia, youth violence with knives as well as distracted drivers concern me. Guns? Not even on my radar.
I would caution you still. Enjoy that you don’t have the blight we have in the US - but also be on guard against any forces towards such politics. It can happen anywhere with the wrong element propping up harmful policies entering the political sphere.
Why do you care so much about school shootings specifically? Shouldn’t be the goal to reduce overall child mortality? In which case it doesn’t make sense to focus on school shootings. They’re a rounding error in child mortality. Compare actual death rates between first-world countries to see what I mean; the US lags behind its Western peers, but the presence of school shootings, which is generally referred to as a decidedly American problem, is not nearly large enough to make an appreciable difference [1].
It's about empathy. Publicly stating that you are concerned about children being shot shows empathy and boosts one's image.
Publicly stating that you are concerned about child obesity is dangerous because it's implicitly stating that people are raising their children incorrectly and making poor decisions, which is more of an accusatory than empathetical statement.
The "think about the children" crowd don't actually want you to think about the children.
Maybe because I'm from one of the countries that doesn't have school shootings, so everytime I see that shit on the news I think I sure am relieved I can send my kid to school and not have that particular anxiety hanging over me. It's just so senseless. It's less about the raw numbers and more about how bloody horrific such an event is for everyone involved.
> I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”
More than one a week during the school year definitely makes them a regular feature. I can think of one in my entire lifetime in the UK.
Frankly it’s not clear what point you think you’re making, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one you actually make. A close-to-1%-chance (I didn’t check your math) of experiencing a school shooting is now low, it is ABSURDLY high.
I'm generally in this camp of statistical importance when it comes to things like this, but the US is just about the only country where it happens this much. It shouldn't happen.
I would add that many of the "school shootings" counted in the edweek.org data are not what most people would understand to be school shootings. Things like Person A shoots Person B outside of a school, nobody dies, neither A or B are students, teachers, or otherwise affiliated with the school. Edweek is providing what are known as "advocacy numbers", in that they are stretching the truth as much as they possibly can.
Your kid's chances of being killed in a school shooting are about the same as being struck and killed by lightning (many more people are struck and survive).
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life...
No they're not.
> ...that every school holds safety drills for the risk.
They also hold drills for tornado, fire, etc. These aren't regular parts of life either; they are emergencies for which people can prepare for the extremely rare chance it actually happens.
We could debate the utility or practical implementation of active shooter drills compared to fire drills, but just waving your hands saying they are injecting horrors into children's heads is overblown. Most kids just find them a waste of time. Just like fire drills.
If you took all school shootings of all first world nations, other than USA, in the last 100 years, that number would still be eclipsed by the average number of yearly USA school shootings. Comparatively the USA is an extreme outlier, even compared to 3rd world nations.
But rather than merely gainsay, I'll support that by observing:
a) here in Australia we regularly, consistently, have zero school shootings each year. Can recommend.
b) you are probably misunderstanding the meaning of regular, and conflating it with frequent.
Halley's Comet is regular - at once every ~76 years. But obviously not frequent.
(I'd argue, as per (a), that the USA has too high a frequency of school shootings as well. If your tolerance for slaughtered children is higher than mine you may disagree with that claim.)
Maybe if you had the same attitude about bus fatalities this would be grounded in reality. If we relax the rules to school bus related fatalities there are almost an order of magnitude more.
And many more people die of heart disease than school bus fatalities, which is arguably more preventable. The point is that a school shooting represents an event that is so extreme, and so completely antithetical to society, that the members of any well-functioning society should have enough shared values to give such an event the level of importance it deserves.
I would think if the US had routine bus fatality counts an order of magnitude larger than other countries, then yes, that would be cause to be alarmed about student bus fatalities in the US as well.
Okay, so you've redefined regular, and are now surprised the person you're responding to doesn't share your unique definition.
It sounds like instead of just mistakenly using it as a synonym for frequent, you're mistakenly using it to mean something like prevalent or widespread or pervasive.
Either way you're responding to a perfectly valid claim by re-purposing the words used by the parent post and then arguing against that.
> I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
Speaking of which, when people bring these things up it's usually framed as "see? there's ALWAYS been some new media to complain about!"
But this isn't really true. The treadmill of new mass media really only began at all (in a very small primordial way) with the printing press, and in earnest with radio. Prior to radio, things really were very different, and did not change dramatically for hundreds of years. Radio brought about massive change and people did have a hard time adapting to it, although they did eventually, but ever since then, we've been on a treadmill where just as one generation manages to get a handle on how to deal with a new media technology, yet another one comes out, throwing everyone off balance again.
The idea that this is how things have always been for humans is ignorant. This is new to the last hundred years or so. Prior to this people had the privilege of learning how to deal with the world and pass on their wisdom to their kids without having most of their wisdom invalidated before they could finish raising their kids.
I did "lock down" drills all through my public education, but they never felt any more traumatic than a fire drill. I don't think school shootings are a defining feature of American life.
I think you are underestimating kids. Does the average child / teen have the same level of detailed understanding of the world as an informed adult? Likely not. But - I can tell you that on the elementary playground during the 2016 election, my kids and their peers were very aware of the threat to the kids whose parents had come (legally or otherwise) from Mexico as it pertained to the two candidates and parties. Heck, when I was that age back in the 80s, there was a group of kids very angry at my dad because he pushed through zoning / permitting regulations that their construction industry parents didn't like. Imagine as a 9 year old having to defend urban growth policy! And that was in a poor, shitty subburb.
In the past, it was a crisis of the present, with hope for the future.
Now, it's a tranquil present, with no hope for the future.
While the latter is materially better, psychologically it's far more damning.
Every single successful society survived on a story, or myth, of a better future. The current Western world is the only society that has fully abandoned that notion, and we are seeing the consequences. Every single political struggle, artificial conflict and strife is downstream of this fundamental disruption in this core societal promise.
Why would China have plans? China is well on their way to becoming the unrivaled military power of the world in the next couple of decades. All they have to do is wait and let the current trends play out. The only possible way to derail their ascent is a premature war--economic or otherwise--with the west.
I do not think this is necessarily the case. Their population is ageing rapidly, with due consequences for the company between citizens and the CCP. Internal tendons between the rich coastal regions, attracting all the labor, and the hollowed out interior could cause issues.
I don't think their ascendancy is necessity assured.
I mean, barring legitimacy on 2023 doom-and-gloom rhetoric, those who grew up during the Cold War do have this generation beat when it comes to warmongery worries. Problem is, there was not nearly as much domestic disarray back then - and there was still a sense of unity.
> there was not nearly as much domestic disarray back then - and there was still a sense of unity
The more one looks, the less this appears to be true. Malcom X and the Black Panthers didn't arise because things were just peachy. MLK's murder wasn't just a stray bullet. When the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on their own city, it wasn't just an accident. When the National Guard massacred a defenseless crowd of students in Ohio, it wasn't because twenty-eight trigger fingers slipped simultaneously. All while McCarthyism ran rampant, dividing Americans into Faithful Patriots and Godless Communists, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a nationalistic furor gleefully fed by the upper echelons of government, media, and industry.
I ain't trying to say things are going well these days, but let's not forget how shitty the past was.
Things can kill your fast or slow, right now or in the distant future. You end up dead regardless, so you need to avoid them all.
Also, you seem to conflate locally and personally with globally and universally relevant.
Threats are diverse and not restricted to being simplistic. Proper handling necessitates serious effort on all levels and certainly isn't done by relying on tradition.
I've seen a lot of assertions that the rhetoric and agenda online or on social media exist from those places in isolation, and "don't reflect the real world". The problem with this line of thinking is that the majority of humans with access to the internet in 2023 use the information they acquire online as a means to build their real-world beliefs and values. This idea that social media/online doesn't reflect the real world isn't true; it has made our present-day beliefs of the real-world, and has seeped out of the monitor and into our individual psyches and collective consciousness.
That doesn't really sound comparable unless you actually grew up in the USSR (your comment is kind of ambiguous as to whether you're from the area or just grew up in the US during that time period).
The soviet era had the risk of nuclear, but there was still a good chance that would never happen. By contrast, most of the things OP mentioned are already happening.
> I grew up during cold war, USSR collapse, multiple wars in the region. At no point was I (or any of my peers to my knowledge) gravely concerned for our future.
Kids in our day got it through regular media. The cold war had a big influence on music at the time and shows like The Day After (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After) were on TV. I was very aware that we could be nuked at any moment, and later, that we were destroying the environment. We had the rest of the world's evils pushed on us by Very Special Episodes and After School Specials. I had plenty of other mundane concerns to worry about too, but concern for our future was always there in the background.
Kids today get it much worse since the message is that it's already too late and we're basically doomed.
But the USSR collapse was (at least outside Russia) a great thing. Eastern Europe was no longer colonized by Russia and in the West, the fear of nuclear war was gone.
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'
> A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100
Eh, climate change is a really big problem but you can't go around saying "the world is set to end between 2050 and 2100", it's obviously untrue and demotivating.
I have expressly heard conservative friends use such exaggerations and metaphors as "proof" that global warming is a lie liberals are spreading because they hate freedom (or something like that).
Most recent IPCC report stated that we are very likely to hit 1.5° in the next five years. If all our current policies hold, and we don’t continue to increase our annual emissions we will likely be looking at 2.7° - 3.2° at the end of this century. At 3° the oceans die.
I think it is safe to say that the world as we know it is very likely coming to an end between 2050 and 2100. We will be living in a far more inhospitable planet in 2050.
I appreciate that it's hard to communicate fuzzy concepts with lots of unknowns succinctly, but this seems overly-alarmist and simplistic to me.
Or maybe I'm wrong; do you have some reputable sources?
Here's one of mine[1], indicating (paraphrased) "5° by 2100 would result in a mass extinction in the next 300 years." And I'd note that even mass extinction is not the same as "the oceans die."
Agreed about big changes to "the world as we know it", though.
* sharks and bat rays in the SF bay were dying of a brain fungus that resulted from decreased salinity from the excessive rain we got a couple months ago
* the size and severity of algal blooms are increasing across the world
* this year's crab season was delayed (initially predicted to be nonexistent) because the ocean currents and especially the depth of cold waters changed so drastically from last year
etc., etc. These examples are only from this year. We could also point to starfish dissolving, coral bleaching, etc. which have been going on longer.
Temperature is only an indicator, but there are many other nth-order effects which result from the changes to the climate that also severely disrupt life processes. We can be sure that the ocean won't "die", but if biodiversity continues to tank the way it has been, we will see an accelerating rate of decline in the health of the oceans and consequently the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the ocean (somewhere around 1 billion people). Knock-on effects are hard to conceptualize but well worth fully exploring.
Just that the adaptation process might be too slow. I don't think the speed of evolution can keep up with us throwing new kinds of garbage into the ocean.
It's the same with mono-cultural farmlands. By reducing the habitation areas of animals, the population becomes so small that thinking "they just have to adapt" becomes a ridiculous statement.
Sure, but the change will be slow, and humans are fast. By the time that comes through, it won't be of use to us. Even if it were fast, there's no guarantee that it will be just as useful to us after the change, or of any use at all. Just because the oceans will still technically be alive in some sense does not mean that they will be as lively or at all the same as what we have now.
It is hardly even technically correct. Nobody disputes calling the late permian extinction event The Great Dying, even though technically not everything died. Life was disrupted in an unprecedented way, such that people agree this name is fitting. The same is true of a 3° horror scenario.
People aren’t generally affected by issues that are out of sight like those you list. A classmate saying something critical about an teenagers appearance will be 100x more impactful than the rainforests imminent disappearance.
People care about things relevant to subjects they have an emotional connection to already. This system of inference is different between individuals of course.
The relevant question should be, why do so many people care about ultimately meaningless stuff? That's what GP was on about in my opinion, people telling children authoritatively what is or isn't important while being obviously wrong about it.
Things like pollution, food price inflation, and craptastic government policies are far from out of sight because they impact families directly, even if teens don't fully appreciate all the ramifications.
I'm with you that these are major issues, and ones that impact my mental health as someone in my 30s, but I sort of doubt these problems are the main contributors to the mental health crises among young people. Social media and phones have had a huge negative impact on the amount of time young people spend together in person and have amplified the stakes of one's social life. Maybe I'm forgetting what it was like to be young but I'd guess these impacts are a lot more relevant to the mental health of children and teenagers.
> Social media and phones have had a huge negative impact on the amount of time young people spend together in person and have amplified the stakes of one's social life
Social media and phones are what youth had left, after adults systemically wiped out every inch of their development environment.
I'm an early genx; the last generation to grow up free of constant supervision. I went everywhere by myself and learned countless critical self-sufficiency and social skills - skill building that was utterly and thoroughly denied to my own kids.
That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions.
We couldn't have designed a more stunting experience, short of tossing kids in forced-labor gulags.
> That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions.
I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states? You'd think the states self-describing as "freedom loving" wouldn't interfere with parenthood as much.
> I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states?
It is fairly well the same everywhere in the US, red & blue states alike. There's no shortage of adults who are passionately stupid about kids w/o adults around. Maybe you educate one but there are millions more behind them.
At least one state passed a right-to-roam law. However, that didn't stop LEO from endlessly bullhorning false stranger risks or stop news orgs from thoughtlessly parroting it. The life-changing harm John Walsh has done to millions of kids is incalculable.
Generally conservative states are going to have the government more involved with how kids are raised as a method of social control. I'm in a liberal part of the country and I see kids walking/biking around all the time, while the conservative state I grew up in would almost certainly have the police at least stop them and probably take them home.
The 'parental freedom' stuff is really just the 'you're free to not ensure your children are educated'.
I'd maybe put the doubling of rent every decade up there at the top as the thing that causes the most mental health harm. I'm in my late 30s and remember moving to NYC in 2007, when seeing two bedroom apartments in Brooklyn for $1200/month seemed expensive but doable. Now I hear of young people paying that for a room in a shared apartment, or end up moving back in with their parents. Add to that other costs of existing plus their student loans and it's got to make young people feel on the edge all the time.
Not to say that social media isn't bad for mental health, it certainly is. But I've been out in NYC and seen swarms of young people at bars and clubs, it's not like they're not socializing with each other.
> I'd maybe put the doubling of rent every decade up there at the top as the thing that causes the most mental health harm.
I can't say you're wrong. In my formerly inexpensive state, we went from 1 typical income to survive (1993) to 4 typical incomes. Just in 2021, we had to absorb a 70% increase in rent - and we were lucky.
State 'fixes' to home/biz insurance are quadrupling policy costs while mandating more people pay for it. Renters are going to eat every cent of that.
That doesn't even start to touch on things like this year's sudden 40% increase to auto policies, the f.u. surcharge for living in this state.
Of note on the auto insurance: We carry fat comp/med but no liability. Any damage to our cars from weather is fully on us and not the ins company. This means in our case, the f.u. FL increase can not be reasonably said to be proportional to our risk of weather damage.
Where in Wisconsin? I'm a transplant, only been here 3 years or so, and luckily a homeowner now, but anything decent seemed in the 1500-2k range for 2 or 3 bedrooms.
Location matters a huge amount. If you are in Wisconsin and less than an hour from the edge of a big city (Milwaukee; Chicago; St Paul) you will pay a lot more than if you are out in the middle of nowhere.
Also small landlords with good tenants often don’t raise rents as fast as they should compared to the market.
It's simple - Brooklyn just became a trendy place in the meantime. And so, of course it's overpriced. Smart people don't overpay for things - the solution is just to live somewhere else. 99.9% of places are not trendy and thus not overpriced.
There are thousands of cities in the US, and maybe 10-20 of them are so popular that everyone wants to live there. Of course the prices in those places are going to be crazy - you have to outbid everybody else.
It depends on what you mean by 'overpriced'. Most people are talking about housing unaffordability which is not limited to trendy places. The house I rented in Kansas City Missouri in 2009 for $900 was bought by the owners in 2007 for $120k. Zillow estimates that same home would rent for $1800 a month and is valued at $269k. KCMO is not trendy or even a desirable place to live.
It’s not simple. If “smart people don’t overpay for things” I’ve got some news for you about inflation. And no, moving somewhere simply because it’s cheaper isn’t a solution that fixes everything for everyone in every situation.
Social media is just the medium for which doom/despair is transmitted. Removing social media might slow down the transmission speed, but folks will eventually arrive to the same conclusions mentioned in OPs comment.
Yep, this is how you get violent revolutions... people look at the average rent and an average paycheck/pension, realize they literally have nothing left to lose, and once they realize who's to blame, things (sometimes literally) explode.
Luckily (/s) we have social media to shift blame off of politicians to other groups of people, to fight eachother instead of the ones who profit from all this.
Also social media that cracks down violently on dissenting opinions and negativity of any sort. Try to find a non-mainstream political subreddit - they've all been banned.
Who does profit from all this? I know that all of the mainstream media corporations (NBC, Comcast, Disney, etc) are all owned by a small number of parent corps, with a small group of trusted leadership that hires each other.
What about other industries? Do leaders and founders of all these influential industries have anything in common? Tech, banking, media, the industries that influence our youth?
Unfortunately, most of our population in the US at least is not fit for sustained insurgence. I also doubt their willingness/capability to be trained. Most of the action will probably follow a power law. It may very well be that the most motivated folk will be those with something to lose.
There's a tiny percentage of those, compared to people either paying too much for housing, having adults "kids" at home, trying to get a bigger place, or get rid of roommates.
There are a few large investors in housing markets though, who have a lot more political power than a few karens in mcmansions.
If you look at literally any point in history, you're going to see what seems like "infinite problems". Even if you're 100% right that we face an unprecedented number of problems, this take still doesn't make any sense. You acknowledge that we have a lot of "real problems" that can occur simultaneously, but when it comes to social media, that is somehow a fake problem? The solutions proposed by controlling social media are very mild such as prohibiting phone use in class, and they aren't very popular. Yet somehow this is akin to the War on Drugs, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in several countries?
Slightly off-topic, but coming from a country where credit card interest rates are around 15% _per month_, I was amused to find people complaining about 22% _per year_ interests in North America.
I imagine rates are determined largely by the general state of the economy (if you currently have a job, how likely are you to lose it?), the amount of data the creditor can gather on potential debtors (what are your wages and current debts?), and the credit card company's ability to efficiently collect on debts.
I wouldn't be surprised if the collections process is easier in the US than in other countries. The economy is not great right now, but credit card companies can also limit your credit to make sure that you don't borrow more than they expect to be able to collect later. And they can see what your existing debts and monthly payments look like, which allows them to de-risk their lending.
I would guess that consumer credit is much looser in USA than many other places. Like I had changed a job and couldn't get a credit card with 1000€ limit. Automated system simply blocked it.
This looseness is great boost for economy, but on other side it also means credit risk and thus the interest levels must be higher to in general to cover those losses.
> This looseness is great boost for economy, but on other side it also means credit risk and thus the interest levels must be higher to in general to cover those losses.
But it sounds like US interest rates are lower than some other places, based on GP's comment.
The worst part is that social media is dangled as if it is an obtainable successful career for most as creators.. But everyone often has to work years before even making a dime FOR FREE.
People invest heavily in rapidly depreciating startup equipment like ring lights, PCs, Cameras, Microphones, only to find out that every site is rigged like a casino, and few people truly win (most get predatory contract offers), and now they're actually charging all creators for visibility while shrinking natural post reach, and inventing and fostering scams of all kinds (Crypto/NFTs) while child exploitation is rampant.
Social media is pretty much essential to growing a business now, but the problem is that it's under siege by opportunists that give little care about the toxic wide-scale emotional, mental, and financial manipulation that they now perpetuate and promote for profit. I don't know how or if it's ever going to be reigned in.
The ocean no longer is able to provide calories for the billion+ who friend in it as their primary source.
Other food sources are impacted by drought, supply chain disruptions, flooding etc.
Large scale migration triggers political instability, revolutions.
Raw materials and inputs fundamental to our way of life become more expensive to obtain due to supply chain disruptions, driving living costs up and creating political tension.
While i don't think the world or civilization to end, i think a lot of people discount how much line can get worse and more uncomfortable for billions, especially in the wealthier parts of the world.
This is major first world problems but: good prices are higher due to droughts and then flooding. Housing prices have risen in part due to reduction in housing inventory and supply due to flooding, wildfires and increasing fire insurance costs.
My recreation options are limited due to so many parks being closed to due to landslides, storm damage, fire damage or fire risk.
Taxes are increasing in my area due to the increasing cost of maintaining infrastructure due to both flooding and fire damage, storm surges and other sources.
In California, one of the wealthiest places in the world, climate change is already gently and subtly eroding our quality of life.
Things can get much much worse in the next few decades, and likely will.
I’m totally on board with the idea that drastic action is needed, but the motte-and-bailey[0] argumentation on display here is counterproductive - it makes people distrustful of the action plan, or worse, feel hopeless and apathetic.
[0] The headline says the world is ending, the smallprint clarifies that no, actually, it’s not.
The report is more about school age children while your points, while relevant, are more about late teenagers / young adults.
Better reasons for why school age children are so addicted to social media are more car centric suburbian developments and the general attitude shift to not let children play outside without supervision. This isn't for cultural reasons only, it's also caused by the increased homeless population and the drug epidemic: in many places, streets are indeed more dangerous than they used to be 40 years ago.
And there is an explanation for all that, partner. It's called: carrying capacity.
Nobody wants to see it but it is there.
Things are hard because they need to be hard, otherwise we would multiply out of control and devour the planet in no time.
If you give every person a house, lifetime supply of food, free education, guaranteed job, a vehicle, you would see the population going to 30 billion in 20 years. Then we would all perish.
Nope, the latest rate is ~20%, and that only comes into play if you don't pay your credit card bill in full, and I'm not about to get into the topic of financial responsibility: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TERMCBCCALLNS
> Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late.
"In 1960, the group of women with the largest share of first births was 20 to 24 years old (43%).
In 2018, first births among women occurred most often between ages 25 to 29 (29%)."
25 to 29 is nowhere near "too late".
> A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
I'm quite sympathetic to this view, since I think people tend to exaggerate how bad things are, to say the least. But on the other hand, a lot of these things are quite indicative that something's really wrong. Wages were already at a local min in 1980 and had been plummeting especially since 1971 [1].
But even in the "good" picture, you're looking at real wages increasing by about 10% over 44 years, while real rent prices increased more than 400% over the same time frame. To say nothing of dramatic cost increases in education, healthcare, and the introduction of countless new defacto necessary costs like internet and electronic devices. This is all obviously a complete catastrophe. In some ways it's kind of surprising that society has been getting along as "well" as it has, all things considered.
I suppose it's largely because we've managed to mythologize the past where somebody could do things like graduate college debt free on a part time job, and even have enough tucked away to get started on a down payment for their first house. That past simply no longer sounds even possible, let alone real. Yet it was.
On childbirth, don't forget the tails as the distribution shifts. 25-29 isn't too late, but as the average age increases you're raising the risk of various issues and you're going to have more people in "too late" side of the distribution. Add in egg-freezing and IVF turning out to not have such a success rate as predicted, you can wind up with a lot of disappointment.
OP is being rather... histrionic, but it doesn't do to overcorrect, either.
Wages definitely stagnated in 1980 (your chart shows $319 for both 1980 and 1998, for example, and it's visibly pretty flat for those two decades), and they've continued to be decoupled from productivity and corporate profits. "Trickle-down" turned out to be mostly pee.
The gap between productivity and wages has indeed grown, but that doesn't mean the same thing as Real Wages (adjusted for inflation) stagnating, as they have not done that.
Again, your chart shows two decades of stagnation, a small bump in the late 1990s, 15 more years of stagnation, and a bit of a recent runup (with obvious COVID outliers).
If you plot it with the Y-axis starting at 0 instead of 300, it'd looks even flatter. (See my link.)
Okok but I think kids just use social media to connect with each other, because it’s easier and more common than meeting up in-person, especially today.
Plenty of other things to distract yourself from existential dread (video games, movies, streams and shows, actual drugs) and learn about that stuff (the news).
There's a certain kind of privilege embodied in your post, not sure the name, that allows one to think that he/she has had it worse than all prior generations. Ignorance of history for sure, but it's combined with a closed-minded and selfish attitude as well.
i agree except for the GMO part. modern diet is pretty ill though. some of your points are slightly exaggerated but not by much. as someone now in their 40’s, affordable housing has been the biggest source of stress on me. worked my whole life but still had to live with housemates and couldn’t save much if any money. finally got a higher paying job at a pharma company in the bay area a few years ago, still can’t afford to buy a house or have kids. and even if i ever do get a decent place, it’s still not really enjoyable because so many other people in the “community” are on edge living in less than desirable conditions.
our elites are desperate to maintain the Monopoly they have had for many years on the ability to insert ideas into the minds of young people, which they have done for decades through the educational curriculum... now that social media is so ubiquitous and older people are getting onto it, there is now another stream of ideas being fed into Young minds.. and the elites have nothing to do with it, which tears them up.. the elites understand something that normal people do not, which is that young people are shaped and molded by the ideas put in their heads.. the the child is the father of the adult, as the saying goes, and Proverbs 22:6 tells us, if you show a child the way that he is to go, when he is old he will not depart from it..
so that is how the elites transformed society, and divided society among the different factions and thus maintained control... by changing society via educational propaganda fed into Young minds... the elites have long had a monopoly on shaping society by shaping Young minds.. the elites fear that ordinary people will soon wake up to the power and potential in social media for older people to feed their ideas into the minds of younger people and thereby put a stop to The divided society the elites have created
I work at a fancy private school and partially am have hosted numerous events for parents on kids and social media.
We have been banging on this key for easily the past 8 years, with varying levels of emphasis. The response from parents has also been universally consistent: A lot of nodding, and, ultimately, very little action. There has always been a small but consistent group of parents who stand firmly on their decision to delay giving their child broad access to social media until later, and the vast, vast majority who can't be bothered to. I haven't noticed the scale tip in any direction in all these years.
I've worked in tech for 20+ years and I have 4 young kids. We allow our teenager use of a locked down smartphone, with a clearly explained zero expectation of privacy. We don't allow any social media on the phone itself. YouTube and other sites can be used under supervision for agreed on lengths of time.
Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
It is a LOT of work. But so far, it has paid off. The more responsible the usage, the more freedom we give. When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
As a young adult who was recently a teenager, I can't help but feel concerned about the potential dangers of having no expectation of privacy from our parents, especially when it comes to reading through our text messages.
While I understand the intention behind it, this practice can easily lead to conflicts and strained relationships.
Teenagers are at a stage in their lives where they are trying to establish their independence and develop a sense of self. By invading their privacy, parents risk undermining their trust and creating an atmosphere of constant surveillance. This not only hampers the natural process of growing up but also sends a message that their thoughts and personal space are not respected.
Yes this seems trivially true, even just looking back at my own teenage years on the family computer.
I don't think the remedy is more helicopter parenting. It suffices to limit screen time across the board and empower kids with knowledge surrounding the risks of over use.
My partner's mom read her diary at ~11 and then got mad at her for writing about her frustrations with her mom. She then grounded my 18yo nibbling a couple weeks ago for writing the same sort of frustrations on the notes app on their phone (she's the legal guardian). My partner became withdrawn from her mom and kept all of her social life to herself, hidden from her mom.
Yep. This is exactly what happens. I already had a strained relationship with my parents but when they invaded my privacy - I decided to lock it down way harder and cut them out entirely from my life. I'll pickup a phone call from them every few months but that's all they get.
It's a great way to ruin relationships with your kids. Keep at it, HN know-it-alls.
I have vivid memories of my parents barging into my bedroom when I was or was not there to do absolutely anything they wanted. They also opened all of my mail. I haven't talked to them in 15 years.
This is just anecdotal but I remember when I was growing up there were always a few kids in school who had extremely restrictive parents like this (strictly controlled their TV, phone, time with friends, searched their rooms, etc.)
On the surface, it seemed like it was effective and they had model kids. But in every case I can remember it resulted in the kids just becoming much better at finding ways to rebel (in increasingly escalating ways) that the parents couldn't catch, until they got a knock at the door from the police, or their kid was pregnant, or overdosed, etc.
On hacker news, well-adjusted, highly-educated, able to think for myself, found healthy outlets for "rebellion", and I have healthy relationship with my parents that feels more like friendship than dictatorship.
Anecdotally, I got in trouble occasionally as a teenager, but those moments of trouble were considerably less rebellious than friends of mine with helicopter parents.
> Anecdotally, I got in trouble occasionally as a teenager, but those moments of trouble were considerably less rebellious than friends of mine with helicopter parents.
Kids in trouble are often kids developing ambition. I'd wager the disproportional punishments (arrest+record over getting yelled at and shooed off) are what do actual harm.
That'd be me. With adults out of the way, I learned to be self-sufficient and I learned how to navigate complex social situations on my own. In short, I learned how to think. Whatever stuff in my life worked out well - I can trace it all to that.
My 5 kids had always-present parenting (because independent growth became effectively illegal+impossible). Being it's such a counterproductive situation, it required strictness to pull it off.
You're a parent of 5 adult children who all live under the same roof as you? Honestly I don't know whether to congratulate you (my kids all love me so much and all get along) or commiserate (none of my kids are independent).
I was pretty much allowed to do whatever I wanted. Overall, I was punished only once in my teenage years (was told I had to skip a ski trip because I came home very drunk one night, at 15 or 16 yo). All in all I'd say I did pretty good, I'm already FIREd at 42 years old.
I think the approach should highly depend on the kid. I for one was good at academic subjects and also reasonably concerned about my future to put in the work at school (I never ran off with the circus etc.), so hands-off approach worked well with me. It might not work as well with someone completely different.
From my experience, the kids who had very restrictive parents were the least well adjusted by the time they had freedom in college, and they really let loose in a much more extreme way than those who had been afforded more freedom & privacy when they were younger.
> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
> IMO parents are reluctant to intervene because they either don't know where to start, or struggle with how much work it is.
There are also parents who disagree with this ideology and would find this an invasion of their child's privacy. I'd caution against the thinking "we find this valuable and if people don't do it it's because they aren't willing to put as much work in as we do"
The mantra we use with our kids is "We will try and respect your privacy but we aren't bound by it." As I often tell my son, "It's your room but it's my house."
And we make it extra clear that the moment they go online, they have no expectation of privacy. Better they learn that someone's snooping now than be surprised when it's Google/Facebook/NSA.
I think most children find it significantly more invasive for their parents to be snooping through their messages, than to have that information being collected in some government database.
That's a fair point, and I don't mean to insist that my way is the best way. It works for us, it surely won't work for all. But I am certain that with some effort on the part of the parents to be intentional, a good system can be reached. Our system continues to evolve, and with time and additional responsibility/freedom, will evolve eventually to us as parents handing complete control over.
that imposition of a lack of privacy just seems like a sure way to not only make them seek actual privacy elsewhere - moving their communications to other devices, and just doing stuff outside of "surveilled" devices or any devices at all, but to make it so that they won't ever share their actual private matters.
they will have their problems - just, outside of your reach, and they will not talk about them with you. (why? any reason, ranging from 'you don't get to surveil me - i'm going to have my privacy', to 'there's a looming possibility of blowback - I don't want to deal with that (or just, being afraid of that), so i'm just gonna keep my appearances neat (while doing real stuff elsewhere - and keeping that to myself')
I feel pretty strongly based on my own (distant past) experiences as a young person that children need spaces where they have privacy from their parents. I think of the child who for whatever reason doesn't entirely feel like they fit in with their family and the internet is an outlet where they can explore the side of themselves that they don't feel comfortable sharing. When you strip someone's privacy and autonomy, you inhibit their ability to authentically be themselves. Now of course there is a balance and any parent does have the right to set boundaries, but I think it's important to consider the cost. My mother set some
arbitrary boundaries not entirely unlike the ones you've described, but in a different era. While I respect that she was well intentioned, she caused more harm and resentment and, as others have pointed out, probably pushed me towards worse behavior out of her watchful eyes. In other words, she couldn't actually shelter me but she was able to engender resentment and acting out in response to her well-intentioned desire to protect me that ultimately hurt our relationship. I'm not at all saying that that dynamic exists in your family and I'm sure there is lots of nuance that a HN comment can't express, but I have concerns with people blindly applying these types of rules and boundaries on their children.
I know you mean well. But I strongly urge you to reconsider your parenting here.
You should not be going through your teenager's text messages... that is absolutely insane.
My parents were kind of similar and I had a very negative experience growing up as a result. I still remember my mom throwing out all my NiN CDs I had bought after she read the lyrics. And all my DnD material because Satan was controlling my brain through it.
As a parent you should be teaching your child to be independent and learn how to make the right choices themselves. Micro managing every aspect of their lives is the absolute wrong approach.
how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures,
how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
we don't know from the singular fact that they're reading through teenagers text messages how heavy handed that monitoring is. Maybe there's a recurrence of satanic panic, but we don't actually know that. That you had that experience with your parents is awful but it sounds like parents are more likely to be their kids DnD DM than anything else these days.
Every generation of parents seems to have some moral panic. It's a way for those people to feel like they're in control (because losing control is scary and uncomfortable). But, well, news flash, teenagers are all about rebelling against their parents and it's perfectly natural for parents to lose most, if not all, control of their teenagers.
So do you leash your kids and monitor every single one of their actions? Do you really think that is the solution? Parents have tried this for millennia and it never works. Some go completely overboard and shelter their kids, who have mental breakdowns when they enter the real world. I've seen it happen first hand with home-schooled/overly protected friends.
You throw out an extreme anecdote. Remember the war on drugs? It was the same thing. Oh, your kids are gonna do crack at their friends house if you are not careful. Drugs are everywhere and kids are melting their brains. Yes, extreme things can happen to anyone, you can get hit by a car and die, that doesn't mean you ban your kids from crossing a road.
How do you teach them the right choice? Well, this is the art of parenting, and is hard. There are many approaches here. My approach is to treat my teens with respect, have frank conversations with them, and set some clear boundaries and expectations (you must do your schoolwork).
I also try to set myself as a role model for them by living my life to the same morale standards I'd want them to. I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't drink lots, I don't go on random hookups (all things which I see common in men my age). I work hard but also try to remember to have fun and laugh.
It's worked so far. They are confident and happy and will confide in me things they are struggling with. I know they will do things that I wouldn't be happy with and will be unaware of, but that is the risk inherent in life and they will learn from it. All I can do is try to set them up for success best I can, and impart my limited wisdom.
> how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures, how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
> how do you teach them what the right choices are if you don't actually see their choices? if your teenager is texting on TikTok with a 40 year old man who's asking them to send them underwear pictures, how do you find out about that except by reading their text messages?
General rules, like:
-Assume everything you send can at some point become available to everyone, forever.
-Anyone saying "don't tell your parents" is definitely up to no good and should not be trusted.
-On the internet anyone can convincingly pose as anyone.
etc.
Also children usually converse with their peers, so you'll be going through messages of quite a lot of other people's children. Do you have the consent of all the people involved, including their parents?
> -Assume everything you send can at some point become available to everyone, forever.
Forever is a hard concept to grasp for a kid - I was doing stupid things in my 20s that could have had forever consequences. Much worse than something available online forever. I was lucky and had none, but this argument wouldn't work on me
I can understand being this careful with young children's usage of a device but giving teenagers zero privacy (to the extent of going through their personal messages) seems wild to me.
Maybe it's how you raise a generation that understands you shouldn't post a single thing online that you don't want the whole world to know about. Prior generations have entirely failed to understand that, certainly (cf. Zuckerberg's infamous "dumb fucks" comment—which, go figure, we know about because he sent it as an instant message)
Ha, yeah, reinforces the idea that if you don't have crazy-good opsec you better not post anything online—including in places as relatively-safe as IRC or direct messages—that you don't want in the newspaper, with your name next to it.
I still cringe at the immature garbage we did in college over telnet and unsecured NIS/Ethernet Unix boxes not questioning whether anyone was recording packet traces for posterity. Luckily disk space was super expensive back then. :-)
> but giving teenagers zero privacy (to the extent of going through their personal messages) seems wild to me.
Why? Teenagers are kids too, or have we forgotten that? They are actually worse than kids in some respect, still immature but with changing body and new hormones.
It may seem weird to them at this time, but hopefully they’ll appreciate when they grow older - or even if not, at least one did what they could.
teens won't just 'want' privacy, they will get it, one way or another. and if it means excluding other people (like parents) from their communication loops, then so be it. thinking that 'you can let them know that you read their little messages, and that takes care of some things', or 'sure, they may want privacy, but what will they really do?'(literally anything incl. getting a burner phone lol), is just unrealistic. it creates more problems than it solves - well, if ending up with teens who won't talk to you about their actual private matters (and problems) and just keep that to themselves while putting up appearances, is even a problem for you. like, sure, they won't ever talk about their problems with you - but in a way, that means they have no problems (as it appears to you). so "problem solved".
the realistic expectation, is that they will talk about some things and do some things, and you will not be part of those things (just by the nature of things, and whichever way it is, whether you're trying to surveil their chats or not, or just letting people have their own privacy), and all you can do is just hope that when something happens, they will be more inclined to talk to you and ask you for help, than not. setting it up in a way like 'i'm scanning your communications - and if something happens, it's gonna become a thing to deal with' - is not gonna help with that. it's setting up for it to be like 'i'm gonna try to avoid having anything out that could be seen by parents and become a thing'. not even 'avoiding getting into trouble' - but just 'avoiding writing about that trouble, or talking about that trouble with you'.
Not everyone has such a combative relationship with their parents as you apparently had.
It it is possible to be firm on dangers, still be understanding and calm, and let them have face-to-face conversations with privacy... even a beer once in a while or whatever else harmless thing that might excite them in other ways. Pick your battles in other words.
talking about privacy is different from imposing reduced privacy on someone. so i'm not sure why you're bringing that up like 'that's the thing that's been talked about all along, and it's not bad' (and it isn't, conversations like that can be good, lest they end with a 'and that's why we're monitoring every word you say in chats on a phone', which is the, not even so much 'bad' part per se, but it's just gonna have 'unintended, lasting consequences'), and throwing that in along with a wrong assumption about my life. that kind of 'well damn, not everybody had it that bad, geez, what are you complaining about' shit also just sounds like victim blaming (or rather, target? though, imposed surveillance can get to the point where it's so overt, saying someone's a 'victim' might not even be a stretch), which is also another important aspect to this topic.
My Parents gave me no privacy when I was a teenager. Guess what I learned? I learned that it was easier to lie and hide who I was than to be honest. I got better at lying and deceiving because it was a necessity. It was easy to get around their rules eventually; after all, I was a child with unlimited time and desperation to live my way. None of the children in my family talk to my parents anymore and most left home before 18.
> It may seem weird to them at this time, but hopefully they’ll appreciate when they grow older
I have been raised differently, and with certain values. It is frustrating but ok to forbid or limit things, and to talk about issues.
But to snoop through one's private messages or similar communication, that's completely disgusting and I would have what? Appreciated? No, never forgiven (works both ways btw, the trust). Especially at teenage age.
I guess I shared voluntarily more with my parents and voiced issues than I would have in such circumstances, can just repeat: dis gus ting.
I'm not going to comment on the specifics of your process. There isn't always a right or wrong to handle this stuff.
Your comment and the parent point to the theme that matters to me most: do you care to understand/show interest in what your kids are doing. Forget about social media - just think about TV. You can park your kid in front of the TV and forget about them, converse with them as they watch, or something in between. Your kids also need quiet/down time as well.
Again, not to say I'm right, but I try not to litigate what is happening so much, and instead I try to just be an active participant in whatever my kids are doing. The counter where you restrict or limit or challenge doesn't always work out better in the end.
I can't help but think it's in significant part survivorship bias.
I mean, I've seen this sort of controlling behaviour carry over for three generations(that I know of) among my relatives - the person to (hopefully - the jury is out on that) break the chain moved countries.
> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
> When bad patterns start surfacing, we rein it in.
Can you elaborate on what sorts of things you'd ask about, or what bad patterns are? I'm not a parent but if I were I think I'd have a hard time drawing the line in the right place.
You're either going to have your kids resent you or stunt the maturation of their independence (the whole point of the teenage phase). You think you're doing the right thing but you're going to most likely create hyper dependent young adults.
I disagree, but I have the advantage of knowing the whole story of how they are raised, while you are extrapolating the entire experience from a couple paragraphs about reading text messages with my child.
>> Once or twice a week my wife or I will go through their text messages with them and ask questions about anything that seems off.
Holy crap.
Maybe you’re aware, but things like this are commonly cited reasons by young adults as to why they’ve never again spoken to their parents after they were able to escape them, sometimes even voluntarily becoming homeless to get away.
> There has always been a small but consistent group of parents who stand firmly on their decision to delay giving their child broad access to social media until later, and the vast, vast majority who can't be bothered to.
For the latter group, do you feel like it's always willful ignorance? For example, some parents think you're talking about TikTok, when (as I'm sure you know) it often starts with Roblox/Minecraft chat and associated Discord servers.
What tools have you found useful to help parents understand and manage this?
Every time this topic comes up, many of the responses here are about how it is pointless to try and impose limits on social media (or anything for that matter) on children, as they will inevitably circumvent them or something like that. To me it comes off like mental gymnastics to excuse a failure to actually parent.
The same could be said for teen drinking, smoking, casual sex, and drug use. Those who are dead-set on doing it will always find a way, that's the energy of teenage rebellion at work.
Whilst I do agree that it's a failure to parent to a large extent, locking things behind restrictions can also make people want it more without them understanding why they're being restricted from having something that clearly makes a lot of people happy.
I go back to my teenage self, and if instead of treating me like an idiot, people explained the pros and cons to it, and helped me to understand it, I might just not want it for myself. In the same way that I had teen pregnancy and accidental overdoses explained to me, I understood the risk-to-reward ratio and why people were concerned enough to try and educate about it.
FWIW, whilst I don't take drugs, I do believe in legalizing them because punishing users makes precious little sense instead of helping them kick the addiction and get their life on track. However, legalizing of drugs equally doesn't mean I think people should seek them out, but those who are going to take them are probably going to take them anyway, and that should be something we can deal with in an appropriate and compassionate manner.
No one is suggesting to deprive your kids of social media without explaining the dangers. But I also think its a fallacy that I see all the time when the situation is boiled down to only two options: restrictions with no justification and treating your child like an idiot pet, or explaining why its bad but not actually imposing any restrictions and letting your child choose for themselves like they are an adult (which they aren't). A middle ground exists of treating your child like a growing human being in which you put in place restrictions to protect themselves from themselves, while also explaining the importance and motivation of those restrictions.
> those who are going to take them are probably going to take them anyway
I also think this is a common fallacy. As you said, some individuals are dead set on using drugs, participating in risky sex, teenage drinking, or utilizing social media may circumvent any restrictions you place on them. But there is also a large proportion of the population who isn't "dead set" on using those things, and are only interested enough to use them if convenient, but if otherwise restricted or disincentivized will move on to other things. Its certainly a far more nuanced equation than "People will do whatever they want, regardless".
I agree. The key thing is this: people vary drastically.
What is effective in preventing x person from doing something bad for themselves isn't going to be effective on y person. This is where parenting styles must vary in order to be effective.
> The same could be said for teen drinking, smoking, casual sex, and drug use.
There are things that have been shown to have an effect on teen drinking, smoking, casual sex, and drug use. And things that have not.
Parents forbidding it is definitely not in the effective category.
It is wild to me that the GP's analysis of what might be done begins and ends at "we've run programs asking parents to forbid social media use, and they just can't be bothered to!"
I think you have to consider the broader peer group. If all the anti-social media parents and their kids become friends with each other, it will be far easier to avoid peer pressure compared to regular society. Same with drugs, sex, smoking, etc, if your kids have good company and friends, avoiding harmful things is much easier.
It doesn't really matter if they circumvent it. The problem with social media is not exposure, it's overstimulation/"addiction". If you put an inconvenience between the kid and the stimulus, you're already more than halfway there. If they need to use a desktop and a VPN to go on Instagram, they can't spend as much time on it.
Likewise, the kid will smoke less weed and drink less beer if they have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it. Most of the studies showing harmful effects of drug/alcohol consumption on teenagers identify subgroups who used multiple times per week or every day. Interpolating these effects linearly, they usually become very small below once per week.
We aren't even close to this though with social media. We are still at the 1930s attitude with my grandfather and cigarettes.
He smoked cigarettes for 50+ years starting at 13 in the 1930s. No one gave a shit about smoking then.
Why you being so ridiculous? Let the kid smoke his cigarettes. Making such a big deal out of nothing. From what he told me it sounded like cigarettes then were on the level of having a sandwich. Literally as normal as waking up in the morning and the kid checking their phone. What is the big deal? What could possibly go wrong?
> Likewise, the kid will smoke less weed and drink less beer if they have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it.
In my experience/observation, how strict the parent is at trying to forbid drug and alcohol use doesn't actually have much correlation with whether and how much the kids use drugs and alcohol. Or if it does, it's a negative correlation. The kids with the biggest problems always seemed to have the strictest most punitive parents, whether as cause or effect. I am pretty sure plenty of research backs up that an effective way to reduce teen drug use is _not_ to have parents just try to be really strict and punitive about it.
Sure, there are a few parents who are totally absentee or abusive (say, giving kids drugs) and it can be related to kids with drugs and alcohol problems. But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it". And I don't find the kids whose parents try to be stricter or are scarier about it are in fact any less likely to have problems. I wouldn't be shocked if the correlation is the opposite.
> But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it".
Feel free to share your research and sources, because this sort of assertion seems to get made all the time, but I haven't actually seen anything supporting it.
>Sure, there are a few parents who are totally absentee or abusive (say, giving kids drugs) and it can be related to kids with drugs and alcohol problems.
You seem to be arguing for the same thing as I did. The status quo regarding social media is for parents to be "totally absentee" as you put it, while the usual approach to alcohol is "don't let me catch you". It's very rare for parents to take a permissive approach regarding teen alcohol use, especially considering it's illegal to do that.
>But the vast majority of kids with drugs and alcohol problems indeed "have to hide it and jump through hoops to get it".
The vast majority of kids have to jump through hoops to get alcohol, period.
>I am pretty sure plenty of research backs up that an effective way to reduce teen drug use is _not_ to have parents just try to be really strict and punitive about it.
"Results indicate that parental permissibility of alcohol use is a consistent predictor of teen drinking behaviors, which was strongly associated with experienced negative consequences."
"Reduced levels of later drinking by adolescents were predicted by: parental modelling, limiting availability of alcohol to the child, disapproval of adolescent drinking, general discipline, parental monitoring, parent–child relationship quality, parental support and general communication."
Of course, the more important factor is not discipline of the child by the parent, but discipline of the parent by the parent. Parental use is the strongest predictor of children's use. So we should also consider that parents who use social media too much may influence their children to do so as well.
>For example, some parents think you're talking about TikTok, when (as I'm sure you know) it often starts with Roblox/Minecraft chat and associated Discord servers.
US psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said there is an interesting distinction in impact between cooperative online play, e.g. gaming, and using social media, e.g. posting on instagram and reading others posts. He says the data shows the former can benefit a child's social development while the latter is absolutely toxic.
I don't think it's ignorance as much as "well, that won't be my child." Also, its a much more appealing alternative when it is the path of least resistance. I suspect, too, we don't really have a sophisticated enough conversation on the distributions of the outcomes. From my experience working with teens, I think it is probably the case that the media outcome of having broad access to these is strictly worse than not, but probably of a small magnitude, but that there is a long tail of negative outcomes that no one believes will be their child.
I do a thing where I get a chance to meet with lots of smaller group of kids, and I let them ask anything tech anonymously. it is absolutely eye opening, and it becomes very clear that adolescence for a lot of them is much, much harder to navigate because of these tools they've been given. What I do sometimes is just share with parents some of the questions I get from the kids, and that has been the only slightly effective thing I've seen. To me the biggest issue is that there's a lot of "not my kid" sort of sentiment, and I think letting the kids' voices speak through to the parents sometimes helps hit home to them that they may not have a full grasp of what these tools introduce to their child's life, and that yes, their child could also be one of the ones who struggles with it more accutely.
Does the school allow cell phones in school? If so, why?
Relying on parents to somehow prevent their kids from doing what all their peers are doing, I'm not surprised this is a fight parents choose not to have, or don't know how to win, or don't have the energy for.
Can the school "be bothered" to try to do something at the school level, that will effect the entire peer group, instead of hoping that parents will find a way to swim against the stream? There might be other ways than simply prohibiting phones. Or maybe the school "can't be bothered" to try?
We don't until the kids get to high-school. But you'd be hardpressed to notice this: right before they step on campus, or right after dismissal, they all come out. But during the day, they are, in fact, hardly seen.
What reasonable action could be taken on the parent side?
I feel like apps should be regulated to for example, only show up to 20 videos max on tiktok per day to prevent doom scrolling. I don't think preventing kids from accessing social media entirely is viable or reasonable.
Children have been around for 7 billion years. Only the last 20 years have children grown up with social media for even part of their childhood. Do you truly believe it has now become that critical to the childhood experience? Especially given avalanche of research demonstrating its harm?
The last 20 years haven't just seen an increase in social media usage though; it's seen a decrease in socializing between kids outside of school. It's easy to remove access to their socials. It's very hard to replace that with a function social life outside of school. That's a recipe for resentment and rebellion. That's not going to happen without input at a every level of society to bring back that mall/skate rink/play park culture that has all but disappeared. We need to stop calling parents irresponsible for not watching their child's every move. That's where the difficulty lies.
> it's seen a decrease in socializing between kids outside of school
Because of social media. Sports teams and after school clubs didn't go anywhere. Parks didn't go anywhere. Malls are in decline but the period of time they were an active social location was the 80s and 90s, which is a blip in the grand scheme of things. Community centers still exist, churches still exist, libraries still exist, basements and backyards and living rooms still exist. My neighborhood is full of young children who are always playing at the park, at each other's homes, at the pool. Yes, if you hand your kid a phone and a social media account to occupy their time, they will struggle to identify non-social media ways to interact with their peers. That doesn't mean those avenues no longer exist.
I agree with you that parents shouldn't be required to watch their child's every move, and I would go further and say that our modern society in general is actively working against parents ability to parent their children properly. But when it comes to social media, the facts remain: social media isn't remotely crucial for a child's growth or ability to socialize with their peers, they may in fact socialize better without it, and regardless, its extremely damaging and risky to their mental and emotional health.
Exactly my point. Because of social media. It is both the reason people stay at home, and the reason we have nothing to go back to. I'm not suggesting social spaces don't exist. I'm suggesting that the culture and people that exist in them has disappeared. The genie is out of the bottle, and won't get back in.
Sports teams and school clubs haven't changed, and good parents take substantial advantage of them, sure. Community centers are all but dead in my town. The local youth centers I attended as a child have shut down. Churches exist; in my town, everyone who attends them is 60 and over. Libraries exist; they are near empty, or full of people quietly studying. Not a place for a kid to socialize. The local spaces that children used to hang out after school are empty, because everyone is at home playing games and using social media, and kids don't want to stop using them because the local spaces are empty. There's no winning.
These places are different than they used to be. The avenues exist, but there's no-one on them. If I told my kids to go play outside with their friends like people did in the 90s and prior, they'd be on their own. I'd need to start a societal revolution in my town with at least 50% of the other parents to get them to coordinate in sending their kids out as well. It seems like if it's not a validated group activity like sports or clubs, then people just keep their children at home.
If I didn't watch the Simpsons, play Nintendo and listen to the local alt rock radio station when I was a kid, I would have had very little in common with my peers. Same situation today, just different media. Turns out, shared experiences facilitate bonding. Who knew?
Funny, I didn't watch the Simpsons or listen to alt rock radio, but I had no issues socializing or finding friends. Turns out no one thinks the Simpsons or and alt-rock are essentials to children being able to properly socialize with one another. And yet people are arguing that social media, despite all its harmful effects, can't be withheld from a child without damaging them.
My parents did not let me watch Simpsons or any other American media, and I think it hampered my socializing. You either have to fake it to be in the conversation at school, or you just stay silent while everyone is talking about music/movies/tv show.
I basically learned how to lie, sneak around, and keep two separate worlds going, as long as I needed my parents’ financial support.
How much of youth culture while you were growing up was shaped by the Simpsons and alt rock, and how much of youth culture today is shaped by the internet and social media?
I would argue that almost all of Gen-Z culture today is driven by internet communities and social media, and raising a child without access to online media will make it difficult for them to relate to many (not necessarily all) of their peers.
My point is that the Simpsons, like social media, is a single potential shared cultural experience out of many. I'm not arguing against shared cultural experiences, I'm simply arguing that social media isn't the only one out there and is therefore replaceable. Anyone who thinks the modern human experience has nothing outside of social media or the Simpsons should perhaps unplug, and as they say, "touch grass".
Not sure why you are down voted but this is really a really really big issue.
This is why "large scale action" e.g. from school or better regulators are needed and why parents only can act very limited.
Don't force social isolation on your children just because idk. "this game is bad". Even if they social circle is "good" and doesn't start excluding or harassing them because of this (totally can happen, you can't really choose with whom you are in a class) it still is leads to a subtle isolation which might by itself not cause any mental issues, but can amplify existing issues, prevent mental scare from being healed etc. And such issues don't always come from "big bad thing" sometimes small bad things wrongly processed as a child can be enough to cause life long mental issues if the child has never the chance to reprocess/recondition/overcome them.
EDIT: Just to be clear doesn't mean children should have unchecked social media/game/etc. access.
It can in many circumstances. I live rural and we don't have a land line. It's hard to get the kids over to their friends as much as they want. My solution is to talk to the other parents. We all agreed to no tik too. I turn our wifi off after bed time. We have a phone contract with our 14 year old that stipulates the usual be nice and don't live on your phone rules.
They swim, ski, kayak and play school volleyball and badminton so there's lots of opportunities for that sort of interacting but I think it would be pretty harsh to cut them off of their phones. If I could get 3/4 of their friends parents to agree I would for sure until they are 16.
social isolation isn't a yes/no question it's a gradient
and in many situation it is pretty much guaranteed to at least cause slight degree of social isolation, in some (like very rual) it might cause a large degree of social isolation
similar having a phone isn't a yes/no question, things like parent control exist, even through they often slightly suck
Not being on Tiktok is not social isolation nor is it mentally devastating. I think many here are projecting their own addictions when they make these hyperbolic assertions.
And conversely without understanding the isolations modern children experience that your counterassertions fall short explaining the current situation we're in.
If your solution is "go play outside with other kids" and the park is empty because all other kids are busy doing isolated things or on tic tok, then you have a problem.
What's frequently missed is that most organization of meet-ups, birthday parties, talking to romantic interests, going to concerts et al, all happens on social media and in group chats now, and has done for the best part of fifteen years in the West. For the prior generation, if you aren't online, you aren't cool, and you won't know about cool things that are happening.
The current generation seems to have a fascination with dumb phones and eschewing tech obsession if the media spin is to be believed versus the numbers on social media apps. Both can be valid things that are occurring though, but I'm willing to bet that the dumb phone movement is a small one or a LARP for elitist cool points.
>What's frequently missed is that most organization of meet-ups, birthday parties, talking to romantic interests, going to concerts et al, all happens on social media and in group chats now, and has done for the best part of fifteen years in the West.
Yeah, no. People still talk to each other.
I leave it to you to exercise some adaptability and find suitable workarounds. This is a small problem. I guarantee you that you solve harder ones on a daily basis.
Got kids? Enroll them in youth sports. You'll meet and talk with other parents at games and practices. It's how I ended up joining an indoor soccer league.
Check out your local recreation center. It's how I joined a local fencing club.
Check out meet ups in your area. It's how I join a language exchange group that meets weekly.
Check out your local library. They often have book clubs, kid and adult events, and more.
There are tons of options that people used before social media which still exist today. It's trivial to find them. The biggest problem is that many people don't want to move out from behind the screen.
Meet ups. Hobby clubs (chess, cycling, etc.). User groups (Linux, Mac, Python, etc.). Take some lessons for a sport. Take a fitness class. Art classes. Group music lessons. Volunteer for non-profits. Find a local artist group, a local woodworking group. Local business groups like a chamber of commerce.
Basically, find anything which interests you that places you in a context where you bump into the same group of people regularly. From that, connections with develop.
For many, the biggest challenge isn't finding a place to be but actually getting themselves out there in the first place.
As neither a parent nor a teenager, I find this a weird one to leave with me. I merely repeated some valid concerns, to which you presented no solutions, just snippiness.
What workarounds am I looking for? And for whom? Why aren't the people concerned looking for their own workarounds?
I don't think you really understand the extent to which restricting kids from social media can isolate them from their peers.
Even if you have a teenager who is social at school and through extracurriculars, many meaningful social interactions are happening online or through social media.
For example, almost every team/club these days has a "group chat", where kids spend time bonding outside of practice / organized events. Even if your child shows up to every organized event, they still may feel isolated due to being excluded from the conversations happening outside of practices.
Also, social media is the predominant force that is shaping Gen-Z culture. Being excluded from such a large driver of your peer's culture can definitely create feelings of isolation. Imagine if you had grown up in a household where music wasn't allowed, and how that could have made conversations with your peers more difficult. And social media is a significantly bigger cultural force than music was when you were a kid.
These are just a couple of examples, if you'd like I can list more ways that social media is semi-necessary for many kids to avoid feeling excluded.
I'm not saying this is necessarily always a bad thing (there are definitely strong arguments to be made for abstaining from some elements of society), but I would make sure you're communicating with your child and that you understand their social situation.
Countercultures always look really small. If everyone was actually doing it it wouldn't be much of a reaction to the prevailing culture of everyone being connected and having snippy political discussions in neighborhood discussion groups.
All of this organization doesn't actually happen on social media in my social group. We pretty much all just text each other, and everyone I know and care to spend time with does this. The people who are utterly reliant on Facebook to organize their lives have filtered themselves out of my friend group.
When I was young, the kids who played little league were, how do I put this? Dicks. It's not about shoving two like-aged children next to each other and yelling "bond!", it's about a child being able to navigate their own social life and, hopefully, find and bond with people they relate to. Limiting the activities a child can participate in, especially when those activities are widespread among their peers, will of course limit their ability to find their people and form those bonds.
Feel free to actually make a point instead of cryptically alluding to one.
Obviously, there are a finite number of activities in any community. Restrict the number of activities available to your child, restrict their capacity for finding and forming bonds with like-minded people. Simple as that.
They can deal with it. In middle school, I was called a faggot, relentlessly, for not owning a Jansport backpack. I am 100% serious. They'll find friends, I'm pretty sure of it.
But if they don't have social media, how will they see other kids calling them names for not owning the right backpack outside of school? Think of the harm to their socialization!
I was called plenty of unpleasant stuff, including that. I didn't find any friends and I left at sixteen because of it. I'm not so sure. At thirty, I'm still fairly socially isolated outside of work.
I flatly refuse any argument that assumes buying your kid a smartphone and allowing them on social media will solve their problems of social isolation. If a child is socially isolated from their peers, that is sad, and I personally do not know how to help them. But I still don't buy the argument that FB, Insta, TikTok, etc. are the solution because, what, their peers are on them?
Also, if some of these kids are being bullied, social media can exacerbate the problem. I allude to this in another comment where I speculate that if my mother had bought me the backpack, I think these kids would have still bullied me over something similar.
At least with schools there was the school day and trip there and home. After that you were probably alone and not constantly connected even on weekends.
hmm.. by the time i was a junior in high school i remember everyone just carried around a binder and a book for their next class or two.
i can't remember if it was because having a backpack became uncool, or the school mandated no backpacks because of columbine.
i do specifically remember trenchcoats were not allowed and one very likeable and somewhat popular kid had to give his up (that was sort of his "look").
If that is suffering than every child will always suffer, because an very normal part of childhood is someone finding a reason to bully someone else. It's part of developing understanding of social structures and your place in them, some kids will inevitably decide they must be at the top of the pecking order in their little personal hierarchy. You physically cannot prevent children from making up ways to pick on each other, there's like a doctor Seuss book about this for heaven's sake.
This isn't saying "stop trying to prevent bullying" but rather "if you are afraid of your child being bullied because they aren't on social media, them being on social media will not stop them from being bullied" and social media makes bullying worse because now it follows them around instead of possibly stopping at 3pm
Children suffer. Adults suffer. Everyone suffers. I'm left with choosing which suffering my daughter will incur more of, either suffering "isolation" in making it harder for her to find friends by disallowing her from using social media for some time, or suffering the body image and other mental health and emotional disorders that could come from too much social media use at an early age. To some extent, I would love to give her the choice between the two herself, but most parents are going to be protective about certain things and make decisions like these for their children.
Also, my point wasn't even that I suffered therefore she should as well. My point was that children will bully each other over the most capricious shit imaginable, including whether or not you have the right backpack. At the time, I wished my mom would have just bought me a Jansport backpack (she wouldn't because we were poor), and now I look back on it as silly (and I'd guess those same bullies would have found another reason to make fun of me, like not having Nike shoes).
Further, having a smartphone and Instagram or Tiktok account aren't magical antidotes to social isolation at a young age.
But yes, I overcame my own suffering fairly easily.
A key difference here is that Jansport backpacks don't come with the additional baggage of huge risks to mental and emotional health, self-esteem, and increased suicide risk. It's interesting that you are framing immersing children in externalities as the choice to avoid suffering.
I had 14 friends on myspace back in its heyday. I could not play runescape because my computer was too old. I had dialup until 2008. It actually was not mentally devastating. Hell, I still have all those friends and we barely have a way to communicate NOW. When you go to school 8 hours of every day and see your friends, you don't really need a stupid app to interact with them. Hell, blocking out social media doesn't prevent you from texting or messaging your friends! Discord though is social media IMO, anything that forms a "group" that can have leaders and followers and bullies is social media.
> you don't really need a stupid app to interact with them
Yes, you do, because they will not want to interact with you if you're not on the preferred app. This is the case even with adults: I somewhat regularly meet people who will flatly refuse to talk to you if you don't have a green bubble, or an Instagram account, or whathaveyou. These are educated professionals in their 20's and 30's.
> I somewhat regularly meet people who will flatly refuse to talk to you if you don't have a green bubble, or an Instagram account, or whathaveyou. These are educated professionals in their 20's and 30's.
I don’t have time right now to go into details but it was surprisingly simple, from a filter rules perspective, to create an “iMessage only” access point.
So there is no isolation from peers, but also no other usage of the device.
We turn it off completely at 9pm.
Edit: oh, the other important detail is that they have no-data SIM cards. Tello sells text and talk only sims for $8/mo or whatever. Weirdly, when they are away from home, apple finds a way to tunnel blue bubbles through (sms only) … not sure how … bottom line is, at home, it’s iMessage or nothing.
How are they isolated? If kids are involved in sports and extra curriculars they will have plenty of social interaction. Nothing on social media is good for young minds. Everything is a pitch trying to sell some sort of viewpoint. I'm the parent, I'll provide morals and insight into topics I think are important that aren't or shouldn't be covered in school. I don't need Jim.lottahoes78 teaching my kid anything.
> Everything is a pitch trying to sell some sort of viewpoint.
What about cities? What about stores? What about TV? What about magazines? What about the radio? What about school? What about music? What about books?
Whilst I agree with you, where do we draw the line? Personally, having worked in advertising/marketing for over a decade and grown completely disenchanted with it and pivoted to just doing creative shit, I don't think we should advertise to kids, period. It's exploitative and gross.
I agree with you. Marketing to kids is wrong. I think social media is more insidious though. They are not selling products they are selling view points and often at the expense of others. Believe this or you're a Nazi. Don't drink this beer. Social media is the battlefield of the culture wars and I don't want my kids to be casualties.
It's fair to call out that if one kid doesn't have a phone and everyone else does, it may be hard on them. Phones are a way to be "in" and in the know, if you don't have one then you may be on the outside looking in.
A few things.
1. Fuck being on the inside. Work with your kid and their self-esteem and their friends to realize that shit-talking and drama online is shallow, painful and makes you a worse person.
2. Work with the parents in your kid's social circle to talk to them about social media impact, and maybe make sure that in-person time after school is happening. Alternatively, "just" get your kid involved in after-school programs that require social activity. Band, choir, sports, hobby clubs.
3. Don't cut off social media/computing entirely. Abstinence from it full-time would be really hard to enforce. Yes, look at putting parental controls. Yes, consider limiting which apps they can have. Put time limits on it, and yeet any unapproved devices.
I dont really think them not being on social media is akin to 'Isolation' from their peers. Thats really overblowing the situation. There are hundreds of other ways to meet your friends.
I don't get why a lot of this discussion assumes children can't communicate with peers without social media. Calling and texting are still a thing. So is coordinating during school to plan meetups after school. Besides, I think very few people are saying children should have a total ban on all forms of social media and communication. We need to find methods to restrict/reduce social media and then ease those restrictions as the children mature, with a focus to minimize the negative aspects of social media usage and still allow communication with peers.
For example, when our children were small, we didn't allow phones or social media, but allowed them to text/call friends with our phones. As they got older, we introduced Google Voice via family desktop computers so they had their own number for texts/calls, but given that it was on a desktop computer, it had limited usage. After that, we introduced a family smartphone that was shared among our younger children so they could text and have some limited social media, mainly group chat apps based on their clubs/sports. Once they became teenagers, we allow them their own phone, but still had restrictions on apps installed, types of websites available and time spent. Gradually over time, we introduce new apps, discuss app usage and review how things are going with the goal of increased independence over time.
For managing restrictions, we've used a lot of things, but never found a perfect solution. Bark works pretty well for signalling us of potential problems while giving our children a level of privacy. I use a Firewalla router to manage home internet access restrictions and Google Family Link to manage mobile devices. Both are mainly used to restrict time-based access (no middle of the night access) and for temporary restrictions to allow us to focus on things like homework and family events.
I can see why a lot of parents put no restrictions up or just ban too much. It takes a lot of work to create a nuanced set of restrictions that gradually give more independence as the child matures. Unfortunately, we've seen friends of our children who have had a lot of issues due to totally unrestricted internet access. We need to find and foster more middle grounds for easing children into social media and related technologies. Neither full unrestricted access nor total bans are helpful.
Aren't there at least a few studies that indicate better long-term mental health outcomes among kids who don't use social media until later in life? Sorry for the lack of citation, but if that is true, wouldn't that pretty much obviate this problem? If, on balance, the outcome is better, then whatever short terms shocks they may experience are better than the alternative.
This is why regulation is useful even though it's imperfect. If it's against the law for under 18s to use social media, parents no longer need to justify allowing their kids access because all of their peers allow it. By necessity, more traditional means of socialization will reemerge.
Sure there is: Identify the degenerate behaviour and punish it. Whatever that may be and 51% of us can agree on. If that's tik tok, all social media, YouTube, infinite scroll, use generated media websites, drug misogyny and degenerate sex promoting lyrics, violent fps games, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, ads aimed at children, pictures of swastikas, hormone altering medicine, or whatever, so be it.
If you don't ban it at the source and society-wide, then parents are left with very little means to protect their children's development and growth into good individuals that reflect their beliefs.
I don't get how we're being so laissez-faire and willing to just "see where it goes" when it comes to our society and our future as a species. We're at a critical juncture right now and need to make a decision; we can't fence sit any longer while the winds of peer pressure randomly drag us wherever and based on nothing more than who shouts the loudest or who cancels dissent the best.
You may be right. But free speech and free markets have done a lot of good, along with the bad. Trying to rein them in gets a lot of pushback, because the alternatives have been pretty terrible too.
“Teenage suicide is at an all time high… I sure wouldn’t want my kid to stop being terminally connected to those kids and whatever could possibly be causing that!”
Then you are either older, lucky or never introspected.
I assume lucky for a moment.
The problem is less that conversations are more delayed or ad-hoc but more that they can potentially miss out on "group events". And that is where the problem starts. Because they also can't join in on conversations about that event, etc. This means while the rest of the group will frequently have situations where they emotionally bond you get are not included and in turn get subtle unintended socially isolated.
If you are a socially very adapted child you can probably compensate this just fine.
If you have other more important friend groups it probably also doesn't matter too much.
If there is a group of people (not just a small minority) in the same situation as you in the same social circle it also probably is fine.
but if not it really can hurt, and you likely only notice how damaging it was for your social life after the damage is already done and hard to recover even if you now convince your parents to give your more leeway
and that's under the assumption the social group in question is "nice" but you e.g. can't choose the people you go to school with and a not so nice social group can use this to intentionally exclude it or use it as a starting point for bullying which often is only addressed when it has gone out of hand to a point where a parent or teacher stepping in can't fix anything anymore
and sure above's arguments often matter much more for e.g. multiplayer computer games then for "having a phone", through not having a phone also means e.g. not having a camera and not being able to make and share group photos with your social group
instead of denying access to a phone, social media, etc. it's better to control it in a careful and reasonable way. E.g. don't forbid the playing of idk. Fortnight, but explain the problems with it and maybe limit the hours and similar a child can spend, but allow the child to decide when to spend them and allow some degree of saving up hours etc. Similar for social media, etc.
Same applies for going out etc. as far as I can tell it's best for you child to allows it a wide leeway just not unlimited and properly educate them about dangers.
> Then you are either older, lucky or never introspected.
That sounds a lot like when kids say "you just don't understand!" to parents restricting their activities.
The reality is that the parents usually understand fully, but also understand other aspects that the kids don't yet.
> that they can potentially miss out on "group events".
I doubt this is a common or inevitable consequence. First, kids spend a great deal of time in person with their peers at school. Even if something is only planned online, they can still get the details by asking in person. Second, they can use a home computer to do that stuff. A phone isn't mandatory.
> not having a phone also means e.g. not having a camera
If that's important to a particular child, give them a camera. They do still exist.
> it's better to control it in a careful and reasonable way.
I agree. But you can't really do that if they have a smartphone. You can do that if they have to use a computer at home to go online.
I fully understand that kids will consider the lack of a smartphone to be essentially social suicide. They'll feel like it's an existential problem. But it's not. Good parenting often requires parents to do things that kids think are abusive, but are actually necessary to give them the best shot possible at having a good, healthy adult life. One of the main jobs of a parent is to gradually introduce children to reality. Emphasis on "gradually".
> I doubt this is a common or inevitable consequence.
I think if you speak with a psychotherapeut which keeps up with the current state of research/sience the answer would be: no many parent have no idea what they are doing, and it is VERY common. It's common enough that some people claim abusing this dynamic is the main source of income for Fortnight ...
> If that's important to a particular child, give them a camera. They do still exist.
this fully misses the point, it's not about making photos, it's about sharing them and slightly about funny filters etc. and do you think a parent who doesn't allow their child to have a phone would allow them to chair photos without a lot of friction?
Absolutely true, but not relevant to the point that I was trying to make. Kids often claim that parents don't understand the kid's point of view, but parents usually do. That was all I was saying. I wasn't claiming that parents were experts on parenting.
> it's not about making photos, it's about sharing them and slightly about funny filters etc.
I understood the point. You can do that with a digital camera. It just takes extra steps and is less immediate.
> do you think a parent who doesn't allow their child to have a phone would allow them to chair photos without a lot of friction?
Maybe not all, but many absolutely will. I did with my children, and I wasn't unusual in that. The issue isn't sharing or talking with friends, the issue is unfettered exposure to social media.
Every kid through history was horribly isolated before we got smartphones and social media, I guess.
They're already spending the best hours of every weekday for like 3/4 of each year with their peers. More, if they do any other activities that involve other kids. Seems like quite a bit. I'm skeptical that they'll be harmed if they can't catch up on the latest bullying-memes, creep shots of other students, and tips for getting old guys to send you money online (all real examples, and none of them one-offs—trends) at 1AM on a school night.
Putting aside that this time estimates can vary widely depending on culture, that there was covid, and that a lot of this time isn't spent doing things with their peers but in a classrome which also might happen to contain their peers I thinks it's still a flawed analysis.
Because if you look at the time they can choose what to do, like in brakes between classes or in brakes in the classe (e.g. PE) a bunch of it is spend talking, like talking about the latest trend, the grate experience they had yesterday etc. All of which the child with too strict parent can't proper join in. Then after school they join again, but today often over internet instead of meeting physically, and again the child with the too strict parents is left out.
I'm not sure if you living in a fundamental different world then I am, but it's really hard for me to understand how this is hard for anyone to understand. (If you live in the US I guess this might very well be true.)
This never was a discussion about fully unchecked phone usage. The best practical solution for something is most times some some in-between solution.
> The best practical solution for something is most times some some in-between solution.
I'm very curious as to what you recommend for an in-between solution. It seems to me that either the child has a phone or they don't. How is it possible to effectively restrict their use of the phone short of not allowing them to have it unless a parent is present?
Parental controls of the phone. I.e. the child physical has the phone but the parent virtually owns/controls it.
Which sadly are currently often sorely lacking especially for younger children and even for the limited functionality often need too much technical understanding (e.g. knowing that "adult-content filters" tend to not work and at least for young children whitelists are preferable while sadly also often cumbersome).
Our main trouble is that there are like 30 Web- or streaming-capable devices in our house, not even counting ones that are packed away, and getting the balance between "usable by adults with little friction; locked down for kids" right on all of them is a real pain. Only the Apple-ecosystem stuff is relatively easy to manage, as far as that goes.
Worse, some of them are school devices that we can't manage. And having to physically manage device access is another annoying, never-ending task.
I hope you understand and just decided to pretend not to that _social_ isolation is not about physical isolation or boredom or having free time with nothing to do.
While the "simplest" way to archive social isolation is to be physically isolated you can be social isolated while having people around you 24/7.
If we continue down this road, not letting your kid smoke pot with their peers also counts as "subtle social isolation". Some things your kid should not do!
Not sure if it's reasonable, but a very simple answer is to get your kid a feature phone, if the intent is to be able to stay in touch/emergency contact (we let our kids bike to middle school and it was nice to be in touch). We didn't get them smart phones until high school.
Though if my kids are any indication, it's still 50/50 - one is on tiktok/snapchat/insta constantly, and the other could care less.
Some parents in our social circle have been getting their kids smart watches. This allows talk to text and phone calls, but pretty much no internet. These devices are also good for parental controls like allow listing phone numbers (first thing our friends son did was make crank calls :)
I frequently recommend the apple watch with cellular to families... it has nice built in support to be set up for a child, the watch form factor is nice for lots of kids (harder to lose), and you are still getting a premium product (important for the families that I work with).
Yes, but I thought they still required pairing with a iPhone to set up. Once set-up is complete they can be used independently, but my impression is that it requires pairing to an iPhone, at least initially.
I think in the future, we should look into device-level age verification. You scan your Driver's License on your iPhone once; and after that, your iPhone tells the website that you are 16 and over without providing any other information unless the user expressly grants it. This solution would not make everyone happy, but politics is all about tradeoffs.
By keeping everything on the device-level, we would hopefully reduce the need for third-parties, ISP-level filtering, or providing too much information. The downside is that for open-source phones, in order for the system to be secure, there would likely need to be a similar Age ID check at checkout for any device that can bypass said filter. This would not be the first time that the US Government strongly "encouraged" device manufacturers to build-in rating system equipment (remember V-Chip?).
And as for "some kids might bypass it," I don't really care. Speed Limits are easily and frequently bypassed, but that doesn't mean it would be safe to get rid of them.
> You scan your Driver's License on your iPhone once
And who's checking that ID? In what form is the record of it being kept, and where? I would not use a device that had this sort of requirement. There's too much surveillance as it is.
The solution to this with children is easy -- don't get them a smartphone.
> And who's checking that ID? In what form is the record of it being kept, and where? I would not use a device that had this sort of requirement. There's too much surveillance as it is.
I would do it on a state-by-state level. Your phone verifies your age with, say, the state of California one time, and then it's set and California has no idea what you visit or why.
And if you don't like this due to hacking risk; remember that the State of California literally has your photo, social security number, address, height, weight, gender, and more. Hacking risk increase is minuscule from what it already is. And not just California - any state can look you up if they want; otherwise, how would traffic tickets or arrests for interstate drivers happen?
> The solution to this with children is easy -- don't get them a smartphone.
Or we ban children from possession or purchase of smartphones under a certain age. Which, I would be favor of, but may be too politically unpalatable.
Yea! What could go wrong asking the government to record your identity to your technology!? Surely YOUR favorite party will always be in power and this power would never fall into the hands of the bad people.
> remember V-Chip?
Remember it didn’t work and was only pushed for by a bureaucracy that eventually did nothing but make regulation into the TV market and surely some Clinton connected suppliers of the IP very happy?
It had about a 10% usage, tops, according to the people that pushed for it and made money off it's regulatory implementation.
No is the answer whenever someone proposes “the aught to be a law”. There almost always aught’n’t.
V-Chip was actually great for the small niche of parents that cared enough about their kids, had a large amount of cable TV channels, thought some of them were inappropriate, and were willing to put in effort to read an instruction manual.
The problem was that generation was so fucking lazy they refused to read a paragraph of an instruction manual to stop the "12:00" blinking on their VCRs, and spent all their time blaming everyone else for the problems they were causing, like violent videogames.
This is way too complicated. You could sell children's iphones that reliably report "user is under 16" and make it an offence to supply an adult phone to a child.
> I don't think preventing kids from accessing social media entirely is viable or reasonable.
One solution to this is to have a public computer in the house that the children can use. As they age and become more responsible you can give them more computing privacy. In the mean time you can kind of get an idea if they're developing bad habits and address it.
And, letting them use it only after 20:00, encourages them to hang out with friends after school (instead of running home to play games alone all afternoons and evenings).
Don't discount multiplayer gaming as socialization with friends. My mother hated how much I was on the computer, but I had ample friendships and computer related hobbies and learning, and well my entire life is spent on a computer. That's just how some lives are nowadays.
If they are just queuing with randoms or spending all their time watching a stupid twitch streamer, that's not socialization though. I don't think you can actually form connections with other gamers anymore with the way modern matchmaking works.
There's something to be said about missing out on other dimensions of social life when socializing online. I would argue that it's not a substitute and poor preparation for the human condition.
It’s not social media though; it’s the shit show they see through it.
That’s not going anywhere.
Exploitation of young agency to prop up value stores and ideals of elders is what awaits them away from the screen.
Setting themselves aside to clean up the toxic mess of dying generations awaits them.
This may come as a shock but I don’t feel an obligation to your existence specifically.
Look at the public dismiss public healthcare and demand the kids work just as we did; we censored TV coddling their sensibilities and office jobs to protect the hallucinated value of private corporations.
I feel as much obligation to the “American Civic Life” hallucination as I do a more traditional religion. ACL has just taken hold of the biology religion did; causing people to hallucinate I owe them recognizing some spoken meme like “this person has high net worth.”
That’s thought policing. Western society is a police state and it spends billions on hypernormalized messaging to insure it stays that way.
Not one person on this forum is an obligation to me. You’re all hallucinating authority.
Just like the parents you’re complaining about, you’re going to ignore the idea you have real obligation to yourself and society owes you nothing.
Vain coddled primate; do it my way! … No. You’re not a divine mandate. Grow that potato.
It feels to me like smoking. A generation was there at the start of social media, got addicted and now can’t quit. Their kids see them doing it and they do the same. Eventually they’ll realise the negative side of it and they’ll try to stop their kids from getting in to it (but won’t quit themselves).
Anecdotally, yes. We have some students who are very vocal about how they perceived having a more structured early use of social media once they get to nearing the end of high-school. Having said that, I'll caution that this is hardly any sort of statistical evidence, as its that students who suffered because of it (because of not being ostracized, not part of the cool kids who have phone, etc.) didn't feel bothered to come forward in my work.
The one VERY CLEAR correlation that I see, though, is that families who are EXTREMELY intentional about this fare far better. More than the minutiae of what age they did or didn't give phones, which apps to allow or not, etc., the families that I have seen have lots of success are families who have dedicated time for these conversations and have made them a habit in their family. The ones who I have seen struggle have been of the "set it and forget it" mentality, even the ones who try to just "install an app" that will just do the parenting for them.
I think we are on the tail end of a generation that grew up without internet trying to govern generations that did. The single question that helps me decide whether someone is equipped to address the underlying problem, is asking if they understand the differences between good and bad social media. The difference between good and bad social media is based on the target audience and how potential dark patterns implemented or addressed.
As someone that grew up with social media and the internet from the moment I could read, I struggle to understand how social connections worked before it. Broadband become mainstream in just the last ~20 years. Social media that quantifies someone's popularity absolutely affects teenagers' mental health. But social media also means support groups on reddit and places like HN.
The surgeon general wants to explore and understand the way different social media affects mental health. But the way this issue is presented by NYT, and in general, categorizes all social media as the same. This framing is going to make younger generations ignore these "warnings" as out of touch, because it is. Similar to how my parents call every game console or video game, "playing the Nintendo". These overgeneralized discussions make most people dig in to their already held beliefs. This also gives overbearing parents fuel to invade the privacy of their children, which harms children's mental health, and leads to trust issues, more than social media ever will.
I quibble with the notion that there is "good" and "bad" social media, at least as you implicitly defined.
Facebook was amazing when it first came out because it allowed people to keep in touch easier and share photos with each other. It also is arguably the progenitor of "bad" social media with tallied likes/reactions and algorithmic skinner boxing of posts.
Unfortunately, it boils down more to usage than whether or not a site is a "good/bad" social media. And even a good one can turn bad if it gets too popular and the culture dies (reddit)
I don't really know how to feel about it. To me, it feels like smartphones. I recognize the utility but at the same time know that the manufacturers/developers are intentionally designing psychologically addictive patterns to keep me engaged, and am inclined to utilize it less as a result. Which in turn limits the utility I get out of them!
We live in an environment of dark patterns and sophisticated engines designed for addiction.
Our attention - and our kids attention is being extracted and resold.
The algorithm-ization of social media feeds to promote addictive behaviors optimized to maximize addiction triggers for the personality of every single individual + the maximization of paid content (sometimes ads, sometimes secretly promoted) has long replaced the feeds serving the interest of the user.
The enshittification of social media is in place and the platforms are basically competing to squeeze the last few remaining drops of our attention, already having collected and monetized most of that resource.
Good and bad social media doesn't have to be rigidly defined along brand/product lines.
Facebook can be an extremely helpful and useful tool for keeping in touch with your friends and something that is addictive and harmful to your mental health.
> But social media also means support groups on reddit and places like HN.
As a father of 3 young children, my view is that social media like reddit, tumblr, discord, facebook, instagram, twitter should be out of bounds for anybody younger than 16. I would really like them avoid until their very late teens, early 20s but I know this will be impossible. The risks far outweigh the benefits, perhaps a social feed monitored by a parent is fine, but never unsupervised, the damage is real and kids can be pulled into niche subjects that may form their personality in their teen years with no sight to the long term damages. Call me square I don't care.
HN and other forums with a somewhat narrow interest/focus are fine by me, in fact I would somewhat encourage them to read and participate in these activities. People here tend to be more genuine about their interest and they tend to keep it narrow--just look at how little traction political discourse gets on this site, it's refreshing, people on this site are intrinsically focused at the task at hand.
Social media is a method of communication at its core. Excluding kids from social media now also excludes them from social interactions. Being excluded is also damaging, and we no longer live in a world where not being on social media is practical.[1] It's better to teach them how to identify problematic content from a very young age and guide them. Blocking access will not accompish the goal you are hoping to accomplish. I think the demographics of who falls and shares misinformation and fake news demonstrates my perspective.
"It is possible that an entire cohort of Americans, now in their 60s and beyond, lacks the level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online." [2]
> As someone that grew up with social media and the internet from the moment I could read, I struggle to understand how social connections worked before it.
A lot of comments in this thread remind of cigarette companies dismissing health concerns with tobacco.
In my circle of friends and family I've seen the majority of them go from being people you could talk to and spend time with to people that just stare at their phones constantly, I've heard others say the same about their circles. Parents let Youtube raise their kids because they don't want to get their eyes off the screen themselves. You could be on a luxury vacation on a yacht in the Mediterranean but they never get off their damn phones. There's no way that's healthy.
That's not even getting into how social media shapes your mind at a young age. I have two teachers in the family and they both say that kids have become borderline retarded since around 2010.
The multi billion dollar attention economy wants to dodge responsibility by holding an unrealistic standard of evidence for their externalities but use your common sense. Humanity has never had anything that constantly demands your attention, are we just supposed to pretend it will have no effect on our mental health?
It's hard not to notice that this is essentially the same argument people made against TV ("the boob tube").
People just stare at the TV constantly. Parents let the TV raise their kids. People watch TV even on vacation. TV has made kids stupid.
And it probably goes back further -- can you believe the parents letting radio raise their kids? Don't get me started on the children who spend all day staring at words in a book. I have a teacher friend who says cuneiform carvings have made kids stupid since around 1000 BC.
Now obviously overconsumption of any media can be unhealthy, but there seems to be a lot of fear-mongering over social media that isn't well-justified. It's just "old man yells at clouds" for the digital age. Lots of broad assertions and very little evidence to back them up.
Smartphones are incomparable with other forms of media. You don't have a TV within 3 feet of you 24 hours a day that you can pull out at any time. A TV doesn't ding to get your attention. TV channels aren't individually tailored for you to suck in your attention and hold it for as long as possible. There are fundamental limitations to TV which do not apply to smartphones. It's the same with radio.
I grew up with TV, the number of people spending almost all their free time on a phone completely dwarfs any TV consumption I've ever seen.
Television WAS terrible. I have many older relatives who are basically zombies whenever one is on. It has crippled their ability to critically think, it indoctrinates them, and leads to numerous health complications
Just because a population has been adequately addicted doesn’t mean the addiction isn’t a problem
Now fast forward to today and realize that these modern digital drugs can be many many times more potent than your TV of yesteryear
“Lots of broad assertions and little evidence to back them up”
Friend I think you need to put down your screen and take a long hard look at what the world is and where it’s heading
Here's a different take on this perspective. It seems to be demonstrably fine that most people occasionally drink some alcohol. But obviously, if everyone was drunk all the time, society would collapse.
Similarly, we could instead say that yeah, maybe TV had some negative effects, but there's no TV outside, at work, at school, at least not usually. And at least for TV, you turn on a channel and watch it. Also there's some pretty good stuff on TV. How many scientists were inspired watching Star Trek as a kid? But I'm sure there were kids who did watch too much TV, and it really did have a negative impact on them. It's just that eventually norms were established yadda yadda that mitigated the severity of it on a societal scale.
With smart phones and social media, maybe we're scaling up the sorts of negative effects that people were worried about with TV, to where it really can have some disturbing effects even on a societal scale. And maybe we really should be worried that we're effectively conditioning children to have shorter attention spans due to the emergent properties of a smartphone with multiple different social media apps firing off notifications with very short form content. And the rate of adoption has been so huge, that if it is the case, we might already be fucked pretty soon.
Edward R. Murrow, "Wires and Lights in a Box" (1958):
One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. ... this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation.
Newton N. Minow, "Television and the Public Interest" (1964):
Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has
an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with
leadership. In a few years this exciting industry has grown from a novelty
to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It
should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and
magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world. ...
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it.
Television technology is inherently antidemocratic. Because of its cost, the limited kind of infomration it can disseminate, the way it transforms the people who use it, and the fact that a few speak while millions absorb, television is suitable for use only by the most powerful corporate interests in the country. They inevitably use it to redesign human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form, that nicely fits the artificial environment. Television freewayizes, suburbanizes and commoditizes human beings, who are then easier to control. Meanwhile, those who control television consolidate their power.
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Quill Press, 1978, p. 349.
You can look at phenomena such as radicalisation, "QAnon orphans" (or Fox orphans, or right-wing talk-radio orphans), at instances in which new and emerging media played a significant role in radicalising populations (radio in Nazi Germany, under Father Coughlan in the United States, in the Rwandan genocide), the printing press's role in the Reformation and 30 Years' War (see especially Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1979: <https://archive.org/details/printingpressas01eise> and vol. 2 <https://archive.org/details/printingpressas02eise>, also McLuhan, Robert W. McChesney's work generally, Chomskey & Herman, Neal Postman, Socrates, Ecclesiates, and many, many more. (I've compiled a bibliography, which could use some updating, here: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...>).
Keep in mind that a major factor which makes pre-transition views seem so quaint is that we are living in the world those transitions created. Our world is normal to us, and generally comfortable, acceptable, or at least known, and the concerns seem ... antique. Because in fact they are, and the world from which they were voiced was destroyed and no longer exists.
I've noticed that some of the funniest people I know have started using Tiktok in the last couple years, and their sense of humour has completely vanished. Now they just send me these dumb short video clips that are more cringe than funny, and it seems like they can't even make a good joke in person anymore.
While I don’t like staring at my phone constantly while I’m around others, have you considered the possibility that people simply enjoy whatever are on their phones more than talking to and spending time with you? A lot of people just want to be left alone, when you think you’re “having an interesting conversation” or “having a good time” or whatnot with them, it’s entirely possible they’re only doing it out of politeness.
Excellent perspective, not only do the corps have unrealistic standards of evidence, but when they’re questioned by political leaders they outright lie. ex fb claimed they didn’t design their software to hack the dopamine/serotonin systems and the politicians just said “ok”. like what?
We’re living in times where no one is held accountable. Literally billions of lives are being destroyed or seriously damaged for relatively minor profits (per damage caused anyway). When will it change? The populace is so powerless and the politicians are so evil… it’s perfectly understandable why nihilism is so embraced these days
Social media is poison for young minds. My oldest is going into middle school. I'll get him a phone but he will not be allowed to use social media. This includes YouTube. There is no need for it. We already track his iPad use and will do the same with the phone. He does sports, boxing and math tutoring, if he needs more social interaction he can hang out with friends. There is literally nothing on social media that I think a middle school kid needs exposure to in order to become a successful, good, and well rounded person.
You have the ability to help guide them through social media by helping them understand good and bad. I understand that you might have different beliefs, but social media plays a very critical role in young kids communicating with each other. Covid catalyzed them embracing social media to stay in touch. Youtube also shouldn't be considered social media.
I appreciate your viewpoint but strongly disagree. Children today suffer vastly increasing rates of depression and suicide. I link most of it to social media. My kids talk to their friends just as kids have done for generations. If social media is playing any sort of a critical role in a kids life it's because the parents are not doing it.
YouTube is absolutely social media no different than Instagram or TikTok. Even something like Mr. beast who is generally a good guy can warp and expose kids to a suddenly transexual and borderline pedophile character who abandons his wife and child. Anyone can post anything. My goal is to limit what my kids are exposed to in much the same way parents did before social media. It just means I have to be involved which is something we should all strive to do.
Putting aside whether I agree or disagree, did you ever consider sitting down with your kids to teach/coach/guide them through what social media is, the content on it, what's valuable or not? And if you decided not to, what criteria did you use to make the decision? Did you waver in that decision, or do you take time to reevaluate it on a regular basis?
Or is it instead that you categorically believe all social media is rotten.
I used to be on social media a lot. Everything I saw made me believe it is rotten to the core, especially for young kids just figuring out who they are. I'm hard pressed to think of a single positive thing a child could gain from being on social media. Social media is set up for predation at it's core, everyone is playing the likes and followers game. No one likes your post or people attack you and now it's a vector for depression. It's an echo chamber. It amplifies the worst of us. It's full of pornography. Especially if you are a young teenage boy looking for it. So overall for me it's a net negative. I can talk to them about it when they are older, and in highschool
I think you're right about the objective quality of most of what's there. It's garbage. I have two girls under age of 5 but this topic will inevitably bubble up to the surface up to the age of 5. We actually pulled YouTube out of rotation for my older one because, much like you fear, one video slightly off the path played more than a couple times directed the algorithm down a black hole of nonsensical kids videos.
I'm telling myself - with time to go - that at I need to know what's going on in social media to help them understand what their friends might be allowed to do or not when we get to that point. And I'll monitor phones/iPads. Not yet sure about full bans on all of social media but we'll see where things are in that moment and evaluate.
Let me flip side this around: do your kids come to you about apps/social media/etc. with curiosities? Surely they hear about things. How do you redirect?
For me the worst part of social media is the echo chamber algorithm. You click on something, algorithm decides you like it and the next thing you know the earth is flat. You can't understand why anyone doesn't think the earth is flat because everywhere you go on social media you are being told it's flat. As far as you know everyone else is seeing the same content you are. Switch out flat earth with your negative item of choice.
Luckily enough my kids don't ask about social media yet although I do ask them every few weeks if their friends are on it. Some of them have YouTube primarily for video game tutorials. One of my kids friends has more but he is in a single parent household and pretty much left to fend for himself. Any games my kids play I generally playa couple times myself to validate. Their main game is Fortnite, groups of their friends play together.
Told my oldest he can have a phone next year when he starts middle school but it's my phone and he can use it as long as he follows the rules. Have not defined what those are yet for him or me.
I really think social media leads to depression, bullying and change in beliefs. I'd rather sit down with my kid when it's time, discuss with him why he can't have whatever I am saying no to and have him be mad at me for a bit rather than he gets involved in something detrimental.
I don't spank my kids so it's always come down to discussion. Has worked well so far but tomorrow is another day.
I can appreciate that you are trying to be proactive about parenting but I disagree with your moral puritanism. Kids who are completely sheltered often don't end up as well adjusted adults in my experience.
I hear what you are saying but I'm not seeking to isolate my kids at all. Today's "moral puritanism" is yesterday's raising kids to understand right from wrong and what makes a good man. They hang out with friends, play on sports teams, take academic extra curriculars. The only thing I limit is social media. Social media is not a nice introduction to different views, it's an aggressive shotgun blast with the worst kind of people peddling their views for likes and followers. kids don't need social media to be well rounded, removing a negative influence is not sheltering.
Serious question, what does it mean to be a good man? Or at least, what/who are you pointing your son to in this regard? I fear we don’t have many forums or role models for being a good man, which is complicated by, IMO, the chorus coming from the left which seeks to demonize “toxic masculinity”. As an atheist I’m seriously considering if we all need some more Jesus in our lives, or some figure (real or not) who can espouse snippets of Good Man conduct.
The value of a "good man" must be set by the parents. It can change based on who those parents are. If parents don't define what it means then the kid will figure it out based on other influences. The negative of this is often seen when there is an absent father. In that case unfortunately the mother has to work twice as hard with no support.
For me, (athiest as well) I'm slightly right of center or probably right smack in the middle of what used to be the center a decade ago. I don't think there is such a thing as toxic masculinity.
I teach my kids that to be a man means:
being kind to those less fortunate than you or even to those that you disagree with. I teach them that if someone puts a hand on you or someone you care about then all bets are off, fight until they can't continue or you can't. To lose is to risk death when not in a controlled environment (boxing ring, etc).
Don't be a bully either physically or emotionally.
No one is better than you. Never let anyone shame you for what you are.
Always try your best.
Look after the people that rely on you.
You live the life that you earn.
There is more but that's the gist. Essentially boys look at their father to learn what a man is. If he is absent or does not give them attention they will seek validation else where.
Note: I'm not an expert, just a guy doing the best he can with 2 elementary school age boys.
Fighting is not good to teach. Have your boys litigate instead. One awkward fall in a scuffle and your head could land bad on a curb and then its over for you, wouldn’t even take much of a fight just a misstep. Then who knows how things might look for you in a court of law if you do walk out of that fight. Plus theres no way to be sure the other party doesnt have a knife or a gun.
My kids are in elementary school. I started my kids in boxing when in 1 week my youngest was sucker punched while jogging in P.E. and my oldest was put in a choke hold from behind for no reason by a bigger kid. They didn't fight back because they were afraid of getting in trouble. So even without fighting back they can get hurt. Told them I was putting them in boxing and that no one has the right to touch you. Some one puts their hands on you, break their face. Any consequences are mine. Lying there saying please stop while at the mercy of someone beating you to death because you didn't fight back or tried to litigate with someone is not great either. Someone goes after you, do your utmost to ensure they can't do it again. My kids understand that now.
Escalating introduces dangerous variables. I’m sorry your school is rife with bullying but honestly, the correct move in these cases is to just run away. Like I said, making a move to continue the fight prolongs the risk you are taking for a bad fall that could break your neck. Its all too easy.
Respectfully disagree. If you spend your life running away it changes your psyche. It changes the way you interact with the world, fear becomes the driving emotion. As my dad, who used to lead special forces groups used to say, it "leaves little grey marks on your soul". As long as the odds are not against you, stand and fight. You do whatever you think is right though, I understand your point and where you are coming from.
Social media is an important way for kids to communicate to a group of people outside of their immediate friends. Kids born before broadband did not have the option to communicate in the same way, and trying to live that way now will do more harm than good. It's similar to trying to using a dumb phone that is not capable of group messaging as your only form of communication. Mental health issues are very complex and social media is only a communication platform at its core.
YouTube is not social media because there's no real network of friends. You have creators making content for users to consume. There are comments under videos, but there's no friends feature or direct messaging. Anyone can't post anything. The rest of the world is going to continue to use social media, limiting access won't change that. My perspective mostly agrees with this Unicef report.
Respectfully, do you have kids and if so how old are they? At what age did you give them social media? Social media is absolutely just a communication platform but it allows anyone to communicate their biases and view points to your kids. It's very much not important. Kids can grow up to be well rounded and happy people without it.
I am giving you perspective from someone that had social media limited. Not having a social media presence caused other kids to leave me out of things. I missed a lot of context on drama that happened online, and was always late in learning about things.
I don't have kids but I have been tutoring kids for the last 14 years, since I was basically a kid. I do individual tutoring for mostly high school, and occasionally middle school kids. Some of the have been with me from 7th through 12th grade, and a couple have even asked me to help them prep for finals even after starting college. They end up trusting me with things they wouldn't tell their parents, because I'm still someone they see as an authority figure. Because of cultural reasons, the kids I've tutor think of me and address me as an older brother. I've noticed covid catalyzed the shift to using digital platforms to keep in touch.
I don't have children, but empathize with the feeling of wanting to be protective. It took a lot of effort to make sure some of kids I tutored weren't taken advantage of by people like Andrew Tate. Telling them not to watch didn't help, pointing out the problems with Tate's message and taking time to dissect it did. Doing that also helped them learn how to identify similar manipulation tactics from other creators. It's important to separate the platform from the users.
I think we disagree on the importance of teaching kids how to use these tools. It feels sort similar to countries banning people from accessing AI tools like ChatGPT. The ban won't slow down AI development, those banned countries are simply left behind.
That's the thing, social media is full of people like Tate pushing all sorts of views. All the things you missed out on with social media that you rightly describe as drama were not important. I don't even have that much of an issue with Tate, he's just obviously trying to get people to pay for his membership. Some of the ideas he pushes are far less dangerous than the other stuff being pushed out there. I do disagree strongly with you taking positions and counseling kids that you are simply supposed to be tutoring. Ask your parents is a perfectly acceptable answer. You were essentially using your position of authority to push your viewpoint on impressionable minds. You may think you were doing right but in reality it was not your job and you were undermining parental roles. If I discovered my kids tutors were doing this I would react poorly.
Their parents trust me to talk to their kids about things they didn't feel comfortable about. Their parents ask me to look out for their kids and implicitly understand that I'm told things that they aren't. I think it's a cultural difference in the role of education between Asian cultures and others. I was even occasionally asked by parents to take a bigger role than I was sometimes comfortable with, for certain things. I was not undermining the parent's roles. I understand your reservations, but they're misguided at best. The parents were who encouraged their kids to call me big brother and have shared their appreciation to me privately.
>Not having a social media presence caused other kids to leave me out of things. I missed a lot of context on drama that happened online, and was always late in learning about things.
> Mr. beast who is generally a good guy can warp and expose kids to a suddenly transexual and borderline pedophile character who abandons his wife and child
Can you expand on this? Who are you talking about?
It also can be a 'profound life safer' to youth people which live has been saved by the internet warn.
It also helps a lot with democracy as it's much harder for autocratic states (or governments aspiring to become such) to censor and mute the news about their bad deeds.
The main problem I'm seeing is not "social media" but how exactly it is implemented, often stuffed full of dark patterns designed to lead to addictive behavior and nearly always with no consequence to people which try to use it for scams (targeting young people) harassment and similar.
IMHO we need laws to ban "dark patterns" and "engineered addiction" as well as a system to handle and reduce harassment and other abuse. That alone might make enough difference to make any further steps unnecessary. But to be safe early (and reoccurring) education about social media, social media hygiene, and media manipulation would be excellent additions. Just not seeing most governments doing the later point, as it probably would mean them not getting elected again in the future.
Another "problem" is that the internet in general allow young people to relatively early see how messed up the world is and at the same time how the people in power often double down on it to gain more power then to fix it. This can lead to a feeling of helplessness and despair young people preferably should not be exposed to. At the same time denying them access to the truth doesn't seem right either. In the end despair and helplessness are like poison, it is what drives people to suicide and it is also what often is a major factor for weather or not a "bad situation" becomes a trauma or not.
I see a lot of this argument when social media is brought up. A lot of people generally agree with the idea that there are a lot more supportive environments available on the web than in a traditional small town with narrow ideals. I would argue though that the statistics do not bear this truth out: if having these communities and support groups are so necessary, then why is suicide and mental health worse now than they were prior to the internet?
I'm starting to question that idea too. It seems like, just as often, these supportive environments on the web like to spiral down into an attitude of "ONLY this group supports and likes you; the rest of the world is hostile to you. Literal Nazis lurk outside your door ready to murder you. Better just keep posting online, and be sure to warn any new members about the Nazis outside their doors."
as far as I can tell this seems to be a very US thing, through somewhat exported from there through YT/TickTock/etc. (especially to other English speaking countries)
similar to this "over the top social justice" I'm mainly seeing in the US
honestly I have no idea what is going on with the US but it looks really really unhealthy and dangerous not just for the US (not just the points above but also many other points, like religious extremism, or the distribution of fascistic mindsets (but not Nazis) and others)
like being able to realize how messed up the world is, or how bad your own situation and future chances are can have a huge negative impact for a child which doesn't really have has much power (or at least it seems so for the child) to change anything until it's too late
at the same time while there are a lot of support structures in the internet and I have meet people which likely wouldn't be alive today without that there are also many bad places and people in the internet
and the way TockTock (and similar but lesser degree YouTube) work can easily lead to a situation where people can intentionally target young people, most times without any consequences or risk for themself
additionally there are factors unrelated to the internet but more related to the fact that "the west" moved from a economical boom time to a sequence of one down turn after another with few good long term outlooks
For example when I grew up with the feelings that I can make mistakes, especially in my youth, and have chances to recover. Even if I had messed up to a point of not geting a school degree the outlook was still one where I could recover from it if I put effort in.
But when I speak with kits today they often say they get the feeling they aren't allowed to do any mistakes, they have no second and third chances, no time to experiment, and hardly any chances to recover. They have the feeling that even if they don't mess up in the internet they might be punished for small mistakes they did in their youth years later.
This puts a _lot_ of pressure on them.
Then their is how poisons the climate change debate is for children, on one hand you have the people which just don't take it serious at all, but even a small child can relatively easily research that that is pretty much nonsense. But on the other side you often have people which go into extremes like "humans will die out", "it's already nearly to late", "if we don't act now we are all domed". Which is also somewhat nonsensical as while climate change will most likely make the quality of live for humans in general way way worse the chance for direct extinction is limited (sadly not non-existing due to hard to estimate chain effect, and many especially cost cities and even some flat countries will most likely not survive if we look at it realistically). That is depressing, but that isn't what makes the debate poisonous. What makes it poisonous is that you get told you can change it by "being a better human and not doing this or that". Except that this is pretty much a lie. For one especially if you are less wealthy you often don't have a realistic choice in many cases. For the other a lot of problem areas for climate pollution are not in the reach of what some normal person can effect through their buying decisions, even if most do so. But telling someone "they" can change it while it pretty obvious doesn't seem to work and looks pretty hopless is _extreamly_ poisonous to the mental state of a person if they believe it and care about the outcome, especially if they are young and inexperienced.
So even more pressure, perceived dark future and hopelessness.
Then us potentially heading into another cold war or WW3 probably isn't helping either.
Sometimes not knowing can be bliss.
But even without access to a phone can a child still grow up in a innocent world today?
I deleted all social media around the end of 6th grade. This was around the time that instagram was just getting popular, and I had made it at the start of the school year when I got my first smartphone. I remember thinking I was spending too much time on it, and I realized it was stressing me out for absolutely no reason. I decided to get on social media again in my junior year of college, after having essentially no social media from 6th grade til 2nd year of college.
Honestly, I wished I hadn't deleted it. It made me feel like I had missed connecting with my friends, I sometimes look at my friends old posts and feeling a little left out. And there are countless people I could probably still be in at least a little bit of touch with. And I know I'll get people saying that its pointless because I'm not friends with them irl, but I still kinda enjoy seeing what even acquaintances are up to these days on social media. Social media is a part of life now, and forcing your kids off it isn't gonna automatically make them live healthier lives. Let them make their own decision at least, they really are smart enough.
So much of life happens online these days: college, the workplace, dating, etc. Kids need to learn how to communicate over the internet because they're going to be doing it for the rest of their lives, and social media really does help with that.
> Honestly, I wished I hadn't deleted it. It made me feel like I had missed connecting with my friends, I sometimes look at my friends old posts and feeling a little left out.
You’d still feel left out even if you were on social media too, and you’d have that feeling 10 fold. The only reason for that feeling is social media pressure and not actually connecting to people IRL. If you did connect to people IRL you did the right thing and what you’re experiencing is just a surface level illusion.
I get it, I agree with it, but I also grew up with unfettered access to the Internet during a period of time when the World Wide Web was growing and maturing and you saw a lot of stuff you shouldn’t have as a kid.
It seems like extreme helicoptering to restrict your children from things like this that are in the world and it’s an easy way out. Hey! All of a sudden you don’t have to parent. Some software can do it for you.
I’d prefer to teach my children right from wrong instead. Not shelter them from it.
I think the difference is we found that on our own. Maybe you showed a friend or two. Maybe you were the one to introduce your friends to ICQ.
But those things are nothing like the hyper connected hyper expectations of being constantly online and being part of “current thing”.
I get your goals, but I’m not sure as parents we can compete with an absolutely all encompassing relationship with a screen, where the best in the brightest in the world are working constantly to make sure your kids sees x, believes y, repeats z.
There is a strong chance that the only way to win is to not play.
The internet that required users to purposefully sit down at a functional desktop PC and bear with significant latency to interact with it is quite different from the internet defined everyone with a touchscreen in their pocket. Yes, there were crazies and degenerates on the old internet, but there at least was a modicum of thoughtfulness and sense in much of the user generated content.
Because of the functional difference, using parental controls on the most addicting apps and sites during younger ages starts to make sense. Getting your child to conform to your value system is not the important part, what's arguably more damaging is the negative effects of emotional and mental addiction to social media and its trends, along with addiction to touchscreen usage itself - kids raised with touchscreens too early often lack the patience or self-control to read books, indulge their own imagination, or even watch a movie.
I too was allowed free reign on the internet in the early 00's as a child and teenager. I saw the shock sites, and browsed /b/ with schoolmates. However, the computer I used was a shared computer in the living room, not my own room. And I still fell into game addiction that affected my academic performance and mood until parental intervention. It's worth looking out for.
Now that drugs and cigarettes are passe, social media is the latest thing to be hyped by sociologists, health experts, and the media as a crisis. Same for vaping. Every generation has its crisis and nags. In the 90s it was in regard to violent lyrics in music affecting the youth and causing suicides (even though the problem was vastly overblown). These people want to take away our fun.
I consider Hacker News social media but I think it’s pretty benign compared to others. Below my threshold of caring or feeling that I need to correct my behavior.
Has anyone had any luck getting schools/districts to publicize this type of info? It seems like there's a coordination problem, where X% of parents would not want kinds to be on social media for a long time, Y% of parents who want their kids on social media, and Z% of parents who would prefer no social media but don't care that much.
If everyone knew how large the X+Z percentage was, there could be a large enough group that most kids wouldn't be on social media, and they wouldn't feel bad about it or miss out on most social activities.
But as it stands, Y% have their kids on social media, Z% go along for the ride so they don't miss out, and then X% have a tough choice to make.
It would be great if schools had presentations for parents (and kids) that talk about these potential harms, and encouraged families to make decisions in the long-term interest of their kids. This could have the side benefit (for the school) of reducing smartphone usage, which distracts kids during school.
I'm thinking of talking to my kids' school about this, since they spend so much time/money on all sorts of presentations/trainings already, and often for stuff that would be less impactful. I'd even encourage them to tell students that parents use phones too much, and they can feel free to bug us to have no-phone time. That would get the kids invested in the concept, and make it less likely they fall prey to smartphone addiction.
This one is a no brainer. You can see people blatantly lie on social media about how amazing they are then run into them in the office and see them just as miserable as the rest of us. Kids are just going to believe whatever they see their favorite influencer do or whatever they say and this goes for everyone on their social media. It's just an echo chamber of anxiety, immediate dopamine release and unrealistic expecations of how the real world works. Wasn't there an article not too long ago about how they watched ONE video about suicide or something similar and tiktok just filled their page with suicide content? Anyone that gets fed the same thing over and over is eventually going to feel some sort of effect. A kid will feel the same but worse since the critial thinking skills arent all there yet.
Not taking any chances here. When mine are old enough I'm blocking all SNS in my home at the network level and applying parental controls to their mobile devices. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg and all of the charlatans who've followed in his footsteps.
There are so many contradicting studies from experts that I have lost interest. Too much of anything is bad. But how much is OK for kids? I see very young kids exposed to content, philosophy and culture that's
not native to their parents.
I'm picturing energetic and socially conscious "hip" 20-somethings doing a country-wide elementary school tour where the whole school gathers in an auditorium to watch them rap about the dangers of social media.
Thinking about myself and what I remember. What worked for cigarettes was, graphic demonstrations of health issues along with lots of real proof. The government and society made it inconvenient to use it everywhere.
I don't they held back, I remember getting shown rotting lungs, the effects of lung cancer, holes in the throat, yellow teeth. Lots of death statistics.
I have lost patience with articles about kids and teens and "social media" that make no attempt to define what social media is. It is no wonder parents won't seriously - particularly when the follow up advice is "don't give your kids phones" as though it's all or nothing.
Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts?
Hacker news?
If we can figure this out then we can have a productive talk about kids and phones and pros and cons. Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media? Can kids call and text? Can they access Wikipedia? Can they play Minecraft? Can they take photos? Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.
>I have lost patience with articles about kids and teens and "social media" that make no attempt to define what social media is. It is no wonder parents won't seriously - particularly when the follow up advice is "don't give your kids phones" as though it's all or nothing.
This article is about social media, and doesn't suggest an all-or-nothing approach of not giving kids phones. Hell, a ctrl+f for "phone" brings up 0 results.
>Could we please get a list of social media kids are using and their relative levels of harm? If it's mostly Instagram then say Instagram and parents can uninstall that app. Is it Facebook? (I didn't think kids were using Facebook) Is it TikTok? (I'm not sure I'd classify TikTok as social media) Twitter? Reddit? Roblox? Shared google docs? Group texts? Hacker news?
If you go to the NYT article and follow the link to the 19-page report in the first article, you can find this[1] in the second citation. This appears to suggest that, at a minimum, social media includes YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. These are, to my mind, obvious choices, but maybe it's not so obvious to others?
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anyone mention group texts and shared Google docs being considered "social media", and it's often mentioned and acknowledged on this very forum that HN can be considered social media.
>Do I have to point out that phones have more uses than social media?
No, because contrary to you saying that "saying 'no phones' is throwing the baby out with the bathwater", nobody has actually said that here. A ctrl+f for "phone" in this thread currently brings up 12 results, 9 (well, 10 now that I've edited this sentence in) of which are in my comment and yours, and the other three aren't about banning phones outright, in fact two of them are about taking the more nuanced approach you've suggested.
>It shouldn't be hard to have intelligent, thoughtful discussions on kids and the internet. For some reason, no one ever does.
You have some fair points. Some of my criticism is not about the linked article but about the inevitable follow up discussions that usually have a heavy dose of "why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?".
Am I in the minority of not thinking of TikTok and YouTube as social media? Perhaps it's only in my head. I mention shared google docs because I've actually seen bullying behavior in shared google docs - it's an easy way for kids to talk to each other with their school laptops outside of any other supervision.
> Am I in the minority of not thinking of TikTok and YouTube as social media?
I'd say they are "social media", but they aren't the most problematic sort. By default there is little or no interaction with their circle of "real life" friends, so the issues that tend to arise around social media are largely mitigated.
All that's really left is the safety concern, and we mitigate that by requiring that they not expose their real name, their face, or their geographic location at anything more specific than a regional level ("I'm in northern Arkansas").
> why are these lousy parents giving kids phones anyway?
They're lousy parents who give their kids phones, not lousy parents because they give their kids phones.
> This appears to suggest that, at a minimum, social media includes YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Tumblr. These are, to my mind, obvious choices, but maybe it's not so obvious to others?
Like everything "parenting", I feel like it's a bit more subtle/situational than a simple list.
We have two daughters, the oldest of which is 14. We recently bought her a cheap pay-as-you-go Android phone to take with her when she's out at events and such. She's been great about taking it, but at the moment it's sitting on a shelf in her room with a dead battery and no service plan. She just isn't interested in "having" a phone.
On the other hand, she has an 11" 5G/LTE iPad Pro. Both her mother and grew up with unfettered Internet access from a relatively early age (~13, in 1997) and agree that it was a huge net benefit to us. That's the overall approach we've taken, with one modification: unlike _our_ parents, we're savvy to both the tech and social aspects.
They aren't allowed to have social media accounts tied to their names without them first coming to us and talking about it. They both have YouTube accounts (and post very frequently, with more followers than their parents), but they're under aliases and they don't show their faces. If they really wanted a Facebook account or something - they won't, because that's "for old people", but for the sake of argument - we'd figure out a way to satisfy both of us.
I require that they keep all of their passwords in Bitwarden, and I have access to the vault where they're stored. This serves multiple purposes: security, ease of access across devices, and access for us in an emergency. We let them know that we wouldn't access their accounts without them present except in an emergency, and they trust us to follow through with that.
Instead, "social monitoring" is done when we sit down, about once a week, and let them talk about what's going on in their digital lives.
Finally, we have fairly comprehensive logging set up on all of our devices and access points. I have a list of the top 5k or so "problematic" sites - including, obviously, porn - and a cron job that scans our logs for those hostnames. If something comes up that concerns me, I let my wife know and speak to our kids directly and privately. The theory here is if they're old enough to sit down and talk to their parents about a given piece of content, they're old enough to consume it if they choose to.
We've only felt the need to have those conversations a handful of times, and while sometimes awkward, it has had the effect we intended: they're spending their (prodigious) time online reading, watching mostly instructional YouTube videos, and creating content.
... and yes, before HN points this out, I'm well aware that there is no such thing as a system that cannot be compromised or bypassed. I'm not even trying that hard: the logs are written to a USB drive connected to our home router, and the router's admin password is written right there on a label. If they figure out how to SSH into the router, modify the logs, and cover their tracks... well, I don't think there is much that would make me happier to be honest. I'll take "hacker mentality" over "has never seen a porn video" every day of the week.
I suppose I'd call it a video sharing platform. "Social media", to me, has an implication of media that is shared within a social circle. Facebook is social media because the intention is to share information with friends and family. No one is posting on FB hoping to have it go viral and make a pile of cash off it.
TikToc is content creators sharing their videos with the whole world.
> TikToc is content creators sharing their videos with the whole world.
Seems like a "social"ly focused way of producing/consuming a particular kind of "media".
In all seriousness, I think the defining characteristics of social media for me include:
- a social graph, I can follow other entities, and they can follow me
- bottomless, user produced content and feeds
- interactive commentary and messaging between users
- promotion algorithms, where the endless content is filtered and promoted, potentially leading to something going "viral", including by those who aren't in my immediate social network
- a focus on sharing content between users
- some form of voting, liking, or reacting
I don't think something needs all of the above to be considered social media. Some things ride the line quite a bit: a Discord server, if small between friends, probably doesn't qualify and is closer to a group chat. A large Discord server with lots of users who don't know each other? Probably counts. HackerNews, and other message boards? You could make an argument either way, but in HN's case, I'd say it is social media.
I think you're underestimating the draw of para-social relationships. That's what powers the "social media" part of TikTok. I think it would be disingenous to suggest that TikTok is anything other than social media.
I will agree if I'm in the minority on this one, but it confirms my larger point - "social media" isn't a useful term. If some apps are putting our youth at risk, tell us what those apps are. Give a top three. Help everyone out.
It's true. This meta-analysis was posted a while back on HN with this key quote:
"In social media research, we focus on “how much social media did a person consume?” and we plan our experiments accordingly... Most don’t even distinguish between platforms, as if Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are just different kinds of liquor. "
Like I wrote in a comment back then, it's like blaming "computers" or "the internet". Vague to the point of useless.
Well imagine this experiment. You take 100 kids and put them into the animal enclosures at a local zoo. Some are put with sheep, some with birds, some with sharks, and lions and others with elephants. You notice that more of these kids these die than the control group that went to the zoo but outside the animal enclosures. Conclusion: wildlife dangerous. What you cannot conclude certainly is which wildlife is dangerous, there simple weren't enough participating kids. Maybe the reason the kid put with the lion lived is because lions are safe, or maybe it was because the lion was just fed. That would take a follow-up study to find. And what about kangaroos? The zoo didn't even have so we would have to try to extrapolate.
If I'm doing the zoo study with 100 kids, I might turn it in for my 6th grade science project and enjoy my A.
If I'm the Surgeon General of the United States, I'm doing the follow up study. As far as I can tell, that follow up study hasn't been done with kids and social media.
Obviously people are abusing non-free software and centralized web services both to spread propaganda and to separate parents from their kids. People not involved in the industry have an extremely difficult time articulating what they experience there though.
I think it's wrong to be upset at them.
>Saying "no phones" is throwing the baby out with the bath water
I completely disagree. Outside of the top maybe tenth percentile of focused/competent people smartphones are a net negative. They're practically designed to be. I don't own one for that reason.
I argue social media is a profound risk to anyone. It's an entire industry that's made to exploit every insecurity and vulnerability within a human psyche. Nervous about vaccines? Sure, you can go to your local doctor, but in the meantime you ask your fellow parents on Facebook and suddenly someone tells you that not only do these vaccines have the potential to fuck up your child for life, that doctors are totally in denial about it and no one in your friend group has ever had to deal with measles but one or two probably claim to have a vaccine-injured child, so do you really want to risk it?
This happens over and over again for anything. Vaccines is just one known example. I'm also talking about gay people. People who have sex before marriage. Immigrants. People with suspiciously dark skin tone. Body image. etc.
The internet has opened up the world so we don't just need to trust our local doctor, mayor, school principal, parish priest. That's a great and empowering thing.
I don't know why you're making that guess when both are obviously bad in totally different ways.
Cigarettes, which social media is sometimes compared with, are still bad for adults, and the rules for them are for a minimum age of purchase rather than to ban for everyone.
It's also illegal to partake in cigarettes in certain areas, even for adults. Cigarette packaging and location is also regulated. It's not like adults have unfettered access to things that harm them. It's illegal to drink and drive. In some places, it's illegal to drink in public, or it's illegal to sell alcohol beyond certain time periods. I'm not saying that these things are right, but that if we're going to compare social media to harmful substances we shouldn't misrepresent the access to harmful substances adults actually have.
I would suggest analogous rules should be determined for social media.
I am not particularly confident what such rules should look like — I don't think there's an easy equivalent to drunk driving, but perhaps "smoking in a confined public area" might be close to "trolling on forums that people need to use to get normal life activities done"?
But they are their own thing, and need to be treated appropriately.
Preventing teenagers from doing things that adults can do is pretty normal. They can’t drink, smoke, or drive until they’re old enough - at which point we decide it’s their life.
To some extent, if adults want to drink from the firehouse of poison we let them.
To other extents, we section those who inflict harm upon themselves or are a danger to others. Our social norms are fairly inconsistent on this and it's easy to make a case (though not widely accepted) that the sort of maladaptive social media use by older adults is both a form of psychic self harm and a danger to society.
That’s a particularly hot take but I think it’s interesting. Lots of actual honest to goodness damage to the very fabric of society in recent years was done by adults using this tech, not adolescent girls.
I understand Protecting The Children, but I can also sympathize with them pointing to us and saying “What the F have you been up to old man? Done destroying the world already? Lets focus on other things rather than controlling us for our supposed own sake.”
Replace "social media" with "alcohol" or "sexual activity."
If you are a child, limits are a very good thing. If you are an adult, take responsibility for the stupidity of your own actions.
Also, please don't do ad-hominem. For "boomers flaming antivax conspiracies," there's plenty of blame to go around and more than meets the eye. Our health experts also did crap like this that got people who listened to them killed: https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en
The warning is correct, I'm really quite sure that any sane individual readily observes that being chronically online isn't exactly good for you. They'll notice this in others but most also have the self-awareness to see the problem in themselves.
Providing "guidance" on adequate use sounds so naive though. It's like telling an overweight person that the guidance is to eat less. Trust me, they know this already.
I just made a comment on another HN story about social media and mental illness, and a game/sim project I'm building to address it. in some (hopefully) constructive way:
Every time I see this notion pop up (which I 100% agree with), I think back to how YC published a list of potential startup ideas from current YC participants. One of them was a social network for kids. Just terrible and I'm so glad we've come to realize their harms.
Advertising can also be a 'profound risk' to youth, leading to the same issues that social media causes - insecurity, low self esteem, addiction to unhealthy products - and social media, business-wise is mostly just a platform that connects advertisers to their target audience.
I doubt the surgeon general would directly call this out in the USA, since we're one of the few countries that allows pharmaceutical corporations to market directly to the public (and social media seems to be a big part of their advertising budget).
It should have been obvious from a parenting perspective. How did we become such idiots that we need healthcare professionals to tell us (which we do need)?
Do you want your child exposed to any arbitrary adult or other child, doing or talking about or showing any arbitrary thing, and in an environment that encourages and celebrates unconstrained sociopathic behavior?
It should have been an easy call for any parent long ago, and adult social media needs to be treated like a bar or R or NC-17 rated movie - not a place for children.
Bars that don't keep out children are considered nuisances to the neighborhood and shut down. Did you know that in some (maybe most) places, if someone leaves a bar and trashes the neighbor's car, the bar is liable?
They said the same about early cellphones. They said the same about walkmans. They said the same about rap music. They said the same about TV. They said the same about comic books. They said the same about rock and roll. Go back far enough and they said the same about the printing press. Ok boomer. Can we please first address the real issues?
It is always something. How many times can they cry wolf until we stop taking them seriously, stop giving them taxpayer dollars for research? Anything that people find enjoyable must have some huge consequence for society or individually. People are not allowed to have fun. It's sorta like secular puritanism. It is out of control.
Do you believe that you realistically can change grown ass, old adults? They had plenty of time to realize and should have known better. I dont think there is a hope for them.
> Remember that the NIAID and the SG both came out against masks early in the pandemic with the head of the former saying that he did so knowingly to control mask supply.
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected." - Fauci
> What are your specific concerns with the advice given in this warning?
Social media upturns traditional government controlled information transmission. E.g. the US government built its case for the Iraq War partly on fake information run by the NYT (by the currently media-respected journalist Judith Miller).
Control of information transmission by attempting to FUD alternative means is a way to consolidate opinions - a way to manufacture consent.
Just like in the intentionally deceptive mask comments from the NIAID, it isn't fact that's in question. It is motivation and intent, and the severity of the condition.
In the mask case, they misinformed the public on purpose so that they could perform some societal engineering.
You made a lot of comments here, and it is tradition on HN to downvote every comment if you dislike one in a thread so if I respond to them all, I'll get rate limited for being severely downvoted but since you asked for sources:
> Are you claiming that public health authorities are seeking to “manufacture consent” broadly?
I am claiming (and have receipts for the claims) that public health professionals will provide advice that is damaging or risky in order to protect something else. They will intentionally mislead you so that some imagined total outcome is better. In the past, their attempt to do so resulted in personal harm or death for many (perhaps in the millions) because they're bad at managing the total outcome too.
Essentially, they're like a GPS system that intentionally routes you down a slower route so that you won't slow others down on the fast route. Except on matters of much greater import.
As always, don't forget to ask: "cui bono?"
Response again: Ultimately, I acted as I thought responsible through the pandemic. Which, for my age group, was rapidly not masking and aiming for low dose frequent exposure. So each time I did the opposite of what was recommended and never tested positive despite following a 2 week schedule since I was traveling and didn't want to get anyone else sick.
But a lot of people listened and died. So, it's up to you whom you'd rather follow: yourself, incentives aligned, or the guys who'd kill you and your loved ones to save others. I choose me.
> I am claiming (and have receipts for the claims) that public health professionals will provide advice that is damaging or risky in order to protect something else. They will intentionally mislead you so that some imagined total outcome is better. In the past, their attempt to do so resulted in personal harm or death for many (perhaps in the millions) because they're bad at managing the total outcome too.
Ok, I’ll bite. Relative to what alternative, exactly? Is this a testable claim?
## Actionable? Testable?
Or is this a historical comparison of the US public health advice against the best case advice in hindsight?
Can I compare advice from an alternative “private health” source that has my interests at heart?
In other words, going forward, do you have a source or algorithm (e.g. to combine different sources of advice) process that you think is more reliable?
## Your Decisions and Outcome
And you offer yourself as an example of doing opposite. That’s fine, but be intellectually honest that this is ‘at best’ a sample size of 1, and you didn’t really do the ‘total opposite’ of masking and exposure, did you?
Conceptually that is undefined — opposite here could mean so many things. Practically speaking, you didn’t share a tiny enclosed air space with obviously contagious people, did you?
## Subtext: apparent overconfidence
I think what I’m picking at is what appears to be an overconfidence and a lack of testable claims.
It’s fine to be skeptical of public health advice, but you seem to go further. I can’t really tell how far you are willing to go.
## Ensembling (like ML)
In my view, the key is gathering evidence and reasoning over it. Don’t throw out a source of information when you have a fairly good characterization of how it operates. Even flawed sources add signal.
## You Can Help Most of the People Most of the Time
Yes, public health make mistakes. And they aim to prioritize public health, not my health in particular. They should.
For most people, most of the time, following the advice of the CDC is a good ‘default’ starting point. Deviate at your own risk.
## We are the Idiots My Friend and we’ll keep on fighting ‘till the end
Somewhere around half (maybe more) of Americans make glaring errors regarding basic facts and critical thinking around public health. This is why almost all people should follow public health advice, even if changes a little bit every week — and even if the agency got it wrong last week.
Many of these people fall prey to politically motivated reasoning or conspiracy theory quackery.
## Impossible Standards
If people held themselves to the same standard that they are judging the CDC, they would not have a shred of self confidence left. Can’t stick to a diet? Can’t seem to keep your shit together? Yeah. But expect the CDC to predict the dynamics and mechanisms of the coronavirus and its impact on global health and supply chains. It is ludicrous. People by and large seem to be designed to complain about not themselves.
The pandemic was really a level of unprecedented change that few of us have seen since maybe Vietnam, the AIDS outbreak, or WW2.
> Social media upturns traditional government controlled information transmission. E.g. the US government built its case for the Iraq War partly on fake information run by the NYT (by the currently media-respected journalist Judith Miller).
I agree with much of this: the PR foundation for the war in Iraq was based on cherry-picked information and a large degree of media manipulation. However, the media outlets also were not blameless; there is considerable fault to go around. Many journalists were too trusting. Knight-Ridder may have been the only major journalism team to get it right. (Fair?)
> Control of information transmission by attempting to FUD alternative means is a way to consolidate opinions - a way to manufacture consent.
As a method, yes. The logic is sound. But to prove it happens, we must investigate. When it is a large explanatory factor? In what specific situations?
I agree it applied to the Bush administration’s handling of claims of WMD in Iraq.
But I’m not clear on how it applies to the social media guidance for children.
I think it would be ‘reasonable’ for social media companies to lobby public health officials to water down the government criticism of them. (But I’m not clear if this is along the lines you are thinking.)
To put a fine point on it: Are you claiming that U.S. public health authorities are seeking (or under pressure) to “manufacture consent” broadly, in this sense; namely, to counter social media only because it challenge and undermines government information?
Are you saying U.S. government attempts to “manufacture consent” only for selfish purposes (to control the dissemination of information), without caring about the veracity of such social media claims?
Another motivation is more plausible: public health officials intend to protect public health, (as constrained by the powers their agencies have)?
A lot of social media information suffers from being false and misleading. It is a proper role of government to have official channels to put out vetted information. Ideally, these channels would be true and well supported by evidence.
We can and should be skeptical of such official advice, but it should be treated seriously and be given some weight.
We also must be skeptical of claims of a broad motivation to “control information” overrides a public health agency’s primary professional responsibility.
Even if there is significant motivation, where is the ability? The federal bureaucracy is quite sprawling and hard to control. Such attempts to do often lead to resignations, legal battles, and/or leaks.
…
I might even agree with the ethics that suggest getting masks to key personnel is worth some degree of public deception. I’m not sure. A lot of disaster and emergency triage involves tough choices. When we’re acting ideally, public officials don’t have to lie or mislead.
In any case, the effect of deception is a loss of trust.
Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.