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These cases are complicated. The pandemic was a difficult time: a scary disease that ripped through the population and led to widespread lockdowns in most Weste

These cases are complicated. The pandemic was a difficult time: a scary disease that ripped through the population and led to widespread lockdowns in most Western nations. It isn't any wonder kids would turn to videogames to comfort. But the problem is wider than gaming. In the UK there's a recognised problem of "missing students" - kids who switched to homeschooling during 2020 but never switched back. Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school. As someone without children it's hard for me to opine. I don't think games are entirely blameless - they're designed to hook you in, that's their business model, they probably have some habit-forming effects. But the kind of psychological dependence described here, sounds like the gaming is a proxy for something else. That article starts with a child called Cody, and he's clearly going through something. Socially withdrawn, screaming when he isn't allowed to play, breaking down a door so he can return to his games console. But also: diagnosed with ADHD, no longer succeeding at school sports, going through the pandemic. The article is vague about exactly what treatment he receives but it's serious enough to include medication. It all adds up to what sounds like a more serious underlying condition, with gaming as symptom rather than cause.

jstarfish 3y ago
> Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school. I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company. Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support. That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design." The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high. If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.
- secabeen 3y ago
  We should do many more things to stop school shootings, including getting guns out of the hands of children. It's also important to understand how rare school shootings remain in the US. The shooting rate is pretty swingy, with some years fewer than 5 school experiencing at least one death, and other years as many as 40. Assuming 20 schools a year have a shooting death and 128,000 schools, that's a 0.01% chance each year that your child will attend a school where a shooting happens, or a 0.2% chance (260 deaths) across a 13-year primary and secondary education. That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. [...] ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. > If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? All valid points. I know the stats are what they are--by rights they should be terrified of being on the road--but this is about optics. The lack of any response to what they [incorrectly] perceive as a threat sends the message that nobody cares about them. If enough people feel unsafe at work, security patrols will increase to project the appearance of safety. In this case, we're dealing with scared children...it wouldn't take banning all guns to change that. Shitshows like Uvalde do the opposite-- where even the cops are seen quivering in fear. Unlike their usual nonsense ("I can't get a job, my Munchausen's is flaring up!" or "You're abusive for not buying me a car!"), the kids have no demands on this one. They're begging for help. Ignoring that is only going to foster resentment, antisocial and sociopathic behavior; we give money to the poor to keep their knives away from our throats (and alas, food stamp programs are being defunded as we speak). These kids are the same demographic we expect will take up arms (irony) to defend the country when/if we have any kind of foreign conflict; meanwhile our two adversaries have been working very hard over the last decade to groom them for defection by selling them the idea that they can have everything for free under Communism. My point was mostly that I wouldn't blame them for welcoming a change in management. We do nothing to win anybody's hearts or minds. Even the case in TFA, in Canada-- we treat kids like a pool of idiots to exploit with blinky lights, loot crates and smartphones, and signal that we'll just leave them for dead if they feel threatened. The psychologists they go cry to have peers helping companies engineer these very outcomes.

jstarfish 3y ago

> Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school. I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company. Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support. That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design." The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high. If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.

secabeen 3y ago
We should do many more things to stop school shootings, including getting guns out of the hands of children. It's also important to understand how rare school shootings remain in the US. The shooting rate is pretty swingy, with some years fewer than 5 school experiencing at least one death, and other years as many as 40. Assuming 20 schools a year have a shooting death and 128,000 schools, that's a 0.01% chance each year that your child will attend a school where a shooting happens, or a 0.2% chance (260 deaths) across a 13-year primary and secondary education. That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. [...] ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. > If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? All valid points. I know the stats are what they are--by rights they should be terrified of being on the road--but this is about optics. The lack of any response to what they [incorrectly] perceive as a threat sends the message that nobody cares about them. If enough people feel unsafe at work, security patrols will increase to project the appearance of safety. In this case, we're dealing with scared children...it wouldn't take banning all guns to change that. Shitshows like Uvalde do the opposite-- where even the cops are seen quivering in fear. Unlike their usual nonsense ("I can't get a job, my Munchausen's is flaring up!" or "You're abusive for not buying me a car!"), the kids have no demands on this one. They're begging for help. Ignoring that is only going to foster resentment, antisocial and sociopathic behavior; we give money to the poor to keep their knives away from our throats (and alas, food stamp programs are being defunded as we speak). These kids are the same demographic we expect will take up arms (irony) to defend the country when/if we have any kind of foreign conflict; meanwhile our two adversaries have been working very hard over the last decade to groom them for defection by selling them the idea that they can have everything for free under Communism. My point was mostly that I wouldn't blame them for welcoming a change in management. We do nothing to win anybody's hearts or minds. Even the case in TFA, in Canada-- we treat kids like a pool of idiots to exploit with blinky lights, loot crates and smartphones, and signal that we'll just leave them for dead if they feel threatened. The psychologists they go cry to have peers helping companies engineer these very outcomes.