5 ms·

Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe. The study in

by bambax 5y ago

Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe. The study in question debates young teens, ages 11-13 and 13-15, well before college. In my experience as a parent of young teens, while they're sensitive to climate issues and of course "suffered" [1] during the pandemic, they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means. What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel. I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat (I don't use them myself, at all) but can't really outlaw Whatsapp because all communications go through it. It's an uphill battle but as a parent I'm extremely resentful to FAANG to put us all through this. [1] I put this in quotes because my kids quite liked the lockdown; they didn't have to go to school and could play in the yard all day. (Of course their experience would have been different if we lived in a city with no yard.) - - - Edit: Many angry replies; it seems my original post failed to make its point clearly. Let's try again. I was replying to a comment that said, in essence, that environmental factors (the economy, politics, climate change) were probably more to blame than social media as an explanation for teens' mental health. As a parent of young teens, I disagree on that specific argument. I think social media is much more to blame than anything else, for harming teens' mental health. But in no way do I dismiss the existence of said environmental factors, or their effects on the well-being of people, in actual terms as well as in consequences on our anxiety levels.

jackblemming 5y ago
With all due respect, please don’t trivialize how the pandemic impacted youth because your family was fine. Especially because many of their parents (if they’re fortunate enough to have both) probably lost their jobs.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them. And than we trivialize how dangerous it is for their well being being bombarded by stories of personal success over nothing (being a popular tik toker is 99.99% luck) and let them do it anyway, because having to actually talk to them, have a meaningful relation with them or simply entertain them is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. so we let the screen rise them.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    > Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them. I would argue that Youngsters are also more vulnerable, raw and new to the cruelties and realities of the world as they slowly get older. The only difference I see is that they become a mental bomb of mental health issues on a wide range of a spectrum. I do not believe a kid who sees their family lose everything during a recession comes out 100% okay. Especially when you factor in how the recession affects the metal health of parents and in turn children if the parents do no deal with it in a Healthy way.
mandmandam 5y ago
> they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means. Those things are heavily affecting teenagers mental health even if they don't give a flying about them. Poverty, uncertainty, and anxiety in the family home have serious and lasting, even generational consequences. The "I'm alright Jack"-ness of that statement is making me actually angry. You think forbidding the social media of 20yo's from your teenagers is making a difference? You put "suffered" in quotes? Gross.
mmarq 5y ago
What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? Those whose parents lost their jobs? Those that have been evicted because their parents could not pay ever increasing rents? Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? > Those whose parents lost their jobs? If you acknowledge that, you should also acknowledge that heir only window to the outside World was a screen where some a*hole from Dubai whose only purpose was selling themselves and the things they were dressing to their "followers" for money, was saying all day that "we're gonna be fine" and then we didn't, "we are gonna come out better" and then we didn't and they interiorized the idea that they will never make it, because they missed the train, they are only teenagers but social networks taught them that you go big or go home at the age of 13. No matter how much support they get from families, their validation nowadays comes from social networks, their peers and who their peers follow or what trend is popular ATM. Compare that to my father born in 1941, in fascist Italy, his father lost in the Russian campaign, his house occupied by nazi, met his father at the age of 6 and lost him soon after for an undiagnosed infection, lived through 3 World pandemics, in 1957 during the Asian flu lost his sister aged 18, started working at the age of 6, lived through political turmoil of the 60s (my father was a socialist), terrorism of the 70s, oil crisis in 1973, heroin epidemic of the 80s, AIDS pandemic (he worked in an hospital), war on former Yugoslavia in the 90s, two Gulf wars etc. etc. What saved him? He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before. Imagine putting him in front of IG and what could have happened.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    'Compare that to my father born in 1941' I am sorry but the idea that 'bad old days had great mental health is a meme. Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't? What about other mental issues and traumas? They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
"The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe" That's just not true, though. I'm over 40: My first formal 'current events' portion of a social studies class happened when I was 12, IIRC. The first gulf war was the current topic. Middle schoolers would be told now that they need to think about going to college, how doing well in high school is their only hope of a scholarship, and so on. They know about political extremism: They just might not use those words. They might know someone that is queer and see the hate they get. Heck, they might be spewing the same hate as their parents. They likely know about inflation even if they don't know what it is. Poverty - or even a tight budget - affects you as a child especially in the pre-teen and younger teen years. Parents stress over money, after all, and some of their peers might have struggled with homelessness, depending on where you live. At 15, I had started to care about politics. I mean, I knew they were a thing since elementary (and the mock elections they held), but I saw how it affected me. And of course they know about the fun things. You probably didn't successfully forbit FB and Instagram if their friends don't use it: This is more common with younger folks than their parents. Plus, if they are out playing in the yard (Which I quit doing during middle school and there was no internet) they might be too young to care right now.
- fullstop 5y ago
  > The first gulf war was the current topic. Our view of that was from the news, as well. The events in Ukraine are much more real-time and on social media. They see stories of children separated from their parents, of parents murdered, or all of them being killed in bombings. These atrocities have always happened in war but now they are barely filtered and easily accessible. "If it can happen to those children, it can happen to me."
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    I didn't even consider that when I wrote the response. I mean, I remember seeing the bombs on television and being a bit worried about it, but I imagine it seems a bit more 'real' now and there is so much more available.
conradev 5y ago
I was 12 when I started using Twitter (shh, don’t tell them https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/29/twitter-is-locking-out-those-who-change-their-birth-dates-users-say/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/29/twitter-is-locking-out-th...) I was 14 when I had to loan my parents some money, and was acutely aware that I would not be able to afford college. I read the news every day and was smart enough to realize that things were not going so great (according to the news). To say that kids are blissfully unaware of the world they are born into is just wrong. Social media makes it even more apparent. This awareness helped me make the right decisions for myself (deciding to not go to college, for example), but I am fortunately mostly optimistic. The weight of the world crushed some of my peers.
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  I think it would be safe to say the majority of kids (at least in America) don’t share that same experience. Also, I’m not saying that to try and discredit your experience, I’m just acknowledging the counterpoint may not generalize well to the majority of teenagers in America.
  - fullstop 5y ago
    I would disagree with this statement. My kids are 13 and 18 and are both acutely aware of what is going on in the world right now. They have friends who know that their parents are struggling and that they likely won't be able to afford to go to college, something that they had previously been told was absolutely necessary. When I was a kid, I barely knew what was going on in my friend's lives. Today they are all on Discord, etc, and they talk. A lot. They absolutely know what's going on in the world. It weighs on them.
  - conradev 5y ago
    My story is certainly different than most, but Many kids in my high school had to make tough decisions around college – weighing the universities they could get into against the costs of said universities The classmates who decided to do pre-med in-state versus out of state to get better tuition because a full doctor’s education is expensive The few who got into Ivy leagues but ultimately decided against it because they got some financial aid, but not enough The ones who graduated college and decided to get into consulting not because it was their passion, but because it paid well. Even harder is when these kids’ parents are not well equipped to help make these tough decisions, because they never had to make them themselves. You can suspend it for quite a while, but at some point reality kinda sets in and you’re faced with tough decisions.
Zenst 5y ago
recessions - see parents with less disposable income so teenages get less things global pandemic - saw a couple of years of curfew at a time when teenages thrive outside and conditioned them towards a more online life and exposed and engaging more with the news of the day rising inflation - again multiple impacts, less pocketmoney is depressing at any age housing - quality of home, shareing bed space with siblings are never helpful for anybody education getting more expensive by the day - fear of the future as teens, exams and beyond start to become more and more in focus and the prospects of life are also taking hold, can be a bummer, more so with the cultural changes of 2 years pandemic. But many factors and to pin them upon a singular aspect is hard, also geographic and more so financial backgrounds play a factor that needs to be eliminated to see a more common root cause. But hey, social media since Elon brought twitter a seen a resurgance in news about it, so more and more social media focus aspects will pop up and been a lot of ongoing debate and concerns on rollover for a while now as is. As an anicdote how things have changed, a friend in his mid 40's was at some event and found some marbels so was playing a game with another friend for nostagia and some teens came up asking why you throwing stones about - as they had never seen marbles, let alone played it. Yet for decades and decades prior, everybody would instantly recognise marbles. Times change, not saying people who grow up playing marbles less prone to mental health. You find everybody has some aspect and there own coping ways. Perhaps it may well be a case that we are looking into things like mental health more in a more detailed way and then looking at patterns of our times. After all, earthquakes have increased but equally the sensors in play to measure them have also increased so you have to balance out the more you see and compare to seeing less with less in the past very varefully as easy to see patterns that may not be there and come to conclusions. After all, TikTok has been around less than any teenager era, let alone generatioins to get a clear picture. But then, isn't social media for many mental health issues across generations, with it's echo chamber avenues and bombardment of all you care or dislike, it can be a dangerous rabbit hole for an angry or angst mind of any age. But your approach to block it, safest and smartest way, like keys to the house - you need to have trust built before you let them loose and until then, block. Worse case they will educate themselves in how to get around the block.
tuyiown 5y ago
> Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. Except from the very privileged, I'm pretty sure they are at least exposed to adults discussing those subjects, or at least from medias. If the volume of concerning subject is large, they will internalize it and build up some anxiety, and that will impact mental health.
Tenoke 5y ago
>What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel. >I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat.. If exclusion is what you believe is causing them to be unhappy then forcing them to be excluded seems like an almost sadistic (though likely just misguided) response. I definitely hated when my parents did things like that.
- bambax 5y ago
  Sorry, my language is unclear. What I meant by "excluded" was "fired": to be a member of a Whatsapp group and they be fired from the group. As they have zero access to FB, Instagram and Snapchat they can't be fired from those.
antisinguIarity 5y ago
Of course they didn't suffer during the Covid lockdowns. Only those who obsessively consumed news and social media suffered.

by bambax 5y ago

jackblemming 5y ago

With all due respect, please don’t trivialize how the pandemic impacted youth because your family was fine. Especially because many of their parents (if they’re fortunate enough to have both) probably lost their jobs.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them. And than we trivialize how dangerous it is for their well being being bombarded by stories of personal success over nothing (being a popular tik toker is 99.99% luck) and let them do it anyway, because having to actually talk to them, have a meaningful relation with them or simply entertain them is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. so we let the screen rise them.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  > Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them. I would argue that Youngsters are also more vulnerable, raw and new to the cruelties and realities of the world as they slowly get older. The only difference I see is that they become a mental bomb of mental health issues on a wide range of a spectrum. I do not believe a kid who sees their family lose everything during a recession comes out 100% okay. Especially when you factor in how the recession affects the metal health of parents and in turn children if the parents do no deal with it in a Healthy way.

mandmandam 5y ago

> they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means. Those things are heavily affecting teenagers mental health even if they don't give a flying about them. Poverty, uncertainty, and anxiety in the family home have serious and lasting, even generational consequences. The "I'm alright Jack"-ness of that statement is making me actually angry. You think forbidding the social media of 20yo's from your teenagers is making a difference? You put "suffered" in quotes? Gross.

mmarq 5y ago

What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? Those whose parents lost their jobs? Those that have been evicted because their parents could not pay ever increasing rents? Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? > Those whose parents lost their jobs? If you acknowledge that, you should also acknowledge that heir only window to the outside World was a screen where some a*hole from Dubai whose only purpose was selling themselves and the things they were dressing to their "followers" for money, was saying all day that "we're gonna be fine" and then we didn't, "we are gonna come out better" and then we didn't and they interiorized the idea that they will never make it, because they missed the train, they are only teenagers but social networks taught them that you go big or go home at the age of 13. No matter how much support they get from families, their validation nowadays comes from social networks, their peers and who their peers follow or what trend is popular ATM. Compare that to my father born in 1941, in fascist Italy, his father lost in the Russian campaign, his house occupied by nazi, met his father at the age of 6 and lost him soon after for an undiagnosed infection, lived through 3 World pandemics, in 1957 during the Asian flu lost his sister aged 18, started working at the age of 6, lived through political turmoil of the 60s (my father was a socialist), terrorism of the 70s, oil crisis in 1973, heroin epidemic of the 80s, AIDS pandemic (he worked in an hospital), war on former Yugoslavia in the 90s, two Gulf wars etc. etc. What saved him? He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before. Imagine putting him in front of IG and what could have happened.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  'Compare that to my father born in 1941' I am sorry but the idea that 'bad old days had great mental health is a meme. Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't? What about other mental issues and traumas? They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago

"The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe" That's just not true, though. I'm over 40: My first formal 'current events' portion of a social studies class happened when I was 12, IIRC. The first gulf war was the current topic. Middle schoolers would be told now that they need to think about going to college, how doing well in high school is their only hope of a scholarship, and so on. They know about political extremism: They just might not use those words. They might know someone that is queer and see the hate they get. Heck, they might be spewing the same hate as their parents. They likely know about inflation even if they don't know what it is. Poverty - or even a tight budget - affects you as a child especially in the pre-teen and younger teen years. Parents stress over money, after all, and some of their peers might have struggled with homelessness, depending on where you live. At 15, I had started to care about politics. I mean, I knew they were a thing since elementary (and the mock elections they held), but I saw how it affected me. And of course they know about the fun things. You probably didn't successfully forbit FB and Instagram if their friends don't use it: This is more common with younger folks than their parents. Plus, if they are out playing in the yard (Which I quit doing during middle school and there was no internet) they might be too young to care right now.

fullstop 5y ago
> The first gulf war was the current topic. Our view of that was from the news, as well. The events in Ukraine are much more real-time and on social media. They see stories of children separated from their parents, of parents murdered, or all of them being killed in bombings. These atrocities have always happened in war but now they are barely filtered and easily accessible. "If it can happen to those children, it can happen to me."
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  I didn't even consider that when I wrote the response. I mean, I remember seeing the bombs on television and being a bit worried about it, but I imagine it seems a bit more 'real' now and there is so much more available.

conradev 5y ago

I was 12 when I started using Twitter (shh, don’t tell them https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/29/twitter-is-locking-out-those-who-change-their-birth-dates-users-say/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/29/twitter-is-locking-out-th...) I was 14 when I had to loan my parents some money, and was acutely aware that I would not be able to afford college. I read the news every day and was smart enough to realize that things were not going so great (according to the news). To say that kids are blissfully unaware of the world they are born into is just wrong. Social media makes it even more apparent. This awareness helped me make the right decisions for myself (deciding to not go to college, for example), but I am fortunately mostly optimistic. The weight of the world crushed some of my peers.

derangedHorse 5y ago
I think it would be safe to say the majority of kids (at least in America) don’t share that same experience. Also, I’m not saying that to try and discredit your experience, I’m just acknowledging the counterpoint may not generalize well to the majority of teenagers in America.
- fullstop 5y ago
  I would disagree with this statement. My kids are 13 and 18 and are both acutely aware of what is going on in the world right now. They have friends who know that their parents are struggling and that they likely won't be able to afford to go to college, something that they had previously been told was absolutely necessary. When I was a kid, I barely knew what was going on in my friend's lives. Today they are all on Discord, etc, and they talk. A lot. They absolutely know what's going on in the world. It weighs on them.
- conradev 5y ago
  My story is certainly different than most, but Many kids in my high school had to make tough decisions around college – weighing the universities they could get into against the costs of said universities The classmates who decided to do pre-med in-state versus out of state to get better tuition because a full doctor’s education is expensive The few who got into Ivy leagues but ultimately decided against it because they got some financial aid, but not enough The ones who graduated college and decided to get into consulting not because it was their passion, but because it paid well. Even harder is when these kids’ parents are not well equipped to help make these tough decisions, because they never had to make them themselves. You can suspend it for quite a while, but at some point reality kinda sets in and you’re faced with tough decisions.

Zenst 5y ago

recessions - see parents with less disposable income so teenages get less things global pandemic - saw a couple of years of curfew at a time when teenages thrive outside and conditioned them towards a more online life and exposed and engaging more with the news of the day rising inflation - again multiple impacts, less pocketmoney is depressing at any age housing - quality of home, shareing bed space with siblings are never helpful for anybody education getting more expensive by the day - fear of the future as teens, exams and beyond start to become more and more in focus and the prospects of life are also taking hold, can be a bummer, more so with the cultural changes of 2 years pandemic. But many factors and to pin them upon a singular aspect is hard, also geographic and more so financial backgrounds play a factor that needs to be eliminated to see a more common root cause. But hey, social media since Elon brought twitter a seen a resurgance in news about it, so more and more social media focus aspects will pop up and been a lot of ongoing debate and concerns on rollover for a while now as is. As an anicdote how things have changed, a friend in his mid 40's was at some event and found some marbels so was playing a game with another friend for nostagia and some teens came up asking why you throwing stones about - as they had never seen marbles, let alone played it. Yet for decades and decades prior, everybody would instantly recognise marbles. Times change, not saying people who grow up playing marbles less prone to mental health. You find everybody has some aspect and there own coping ways. Perhaps it may well be a case that we are looking into things like mental health more in a more detailed way and then looking at patterns of our times. After all, earthquakes have increased but equally the sensors in play to measure them have also increased so you have to balance out the more you see and compare to seeing less with less in the past very varefully as easy to see patterns that may not be there and come to conclusions. After all, TikTok has been around less than any teenager era, let alone generatioins to get a clear picture. But then, isn't social media for many mental health issues across generations, with it's echo chamber avenues and bombardment of all you care or dislike, it can be a dangerous rabbit hole for an angry or angst mind of any age. But your approach to block it, safest and smartest way, like keys to the house - you need to have trust built before you let them loose and until then, block. Worse case they will educate themselves in how to get around the block.

tuyiown 5y ago

> Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. Except from the very privileged, I'm pretty sure they are at least exposed to adults discussing those subjects, or at least from medias. If the volume of concerning subject is large, they will internalize it and build up some anxiety, and that will impact mental health.

Tenoke 5y ago

>What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel. >I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat.. If exclusion is what you believe is causing them to be unhappy then forcing them to be excluded seems like an almost sadistic (though likely just misguided) response. I definitely hated when my parents did things like that.

bambax 5y ago
Sorry, my language is unclear. What I meant by "excluded" was "fired": to be a member of a Whatsapp group and they be fired from the group. As they have zero access to FB, Instagram and Snapchat they can't be fired from those.

antisinguIarity 5y ago

Of course they didn't suffer during the Covid lockdowns. Only those who obsessively consumed news and social media suffered.