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Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

• atonse 3y ago
  We have really made it a point to have our kid play freely as much as possible and minimize scheduled activities (piano lessons etc.) the problem is that most of his friends are in a million classes so even if he’s free, they often aren’t. That’s been the big challenge. So then there are these magical days where they all don’t have any activities and those invariably happen to be the days ALL kids look forward to. Cuz at the end of the day, they just want to play with their friends. But that has taken planning in the past where we coordinate with parents for those free play days. But those days are the exception. I wish they were the rule. We’ve actually noticed how amazing his mood is after a day full of unorganized play hanging out with friends.
  • fnimick 3y ago
    Sure, but are you maximizing his college admissions chances via skills in carefully selected activities in order to stand out? (mostly joking, but this is how a lot of people approach scheduling these days)
    • gloryjulio 3y ago
      I agree. You get to be really careful where you want to put ur skill points. Play time is part of the skill tree too ;) Full scheduling of random stuff doesn't mean it would always help the children. It's the children's version of appearing busy.
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        A full schedule is bad for a kid. They need to learn how to keep themselves entertained, or plan their own activities, or manage their own time, and they can't do that if they get a day plan from sun up to sun down.
        • shard 3y ago
          Kids can keep themselves entertained very easily nowadays, YouTube/Tiktok/games can suck hours away in the blink of an eye. It's not like when I was young where going outside and hanging out with friends was the most fun choice.
          • atonse 3y ago
            As a tech person I long for the days of limited choices. In this age of extreme abundance, we have lost the ability to just daydream, people watch, etc. I’m not glamorizing being bored. I used to hate waiting for 30 mins for the bus. Sorry this is something I lecture my kids about a lot! :-)
    • atonse 3y ago
      haha I have been maximizing the annoyance level of my parents and others by telling my kids these things: - don’t focus on GPA, focus on actually gaining knowledge and understanding how the world works. good grades are a measure of how you understand things. they should never be the goal. I was a C student and I am more curious about things than many of my peers with fancy degrees. - forge your own path, there is always a thousand different paths out there. College is just one. - no replacement for hard work. don’t expect anything in life. anything worth getting, you’ll have to compete with many others to get it so learn to be a good competitor. - college should be approached with all the tradeoffs and as any other investment. We’ve told them we will not pay for their college. so they will have to make choices about getting the best bang for your buck. We’re the only parents in our whole social circle that aren’t saving for their college. it feels weird and isolating when that topic comes up. - first think about the kind of life you want and then make choices to get you that life. they’re already sick if my lectures. and they’re 10 and 5. :-)
      • jzawodn 3y ago
        I wish I could upvote more than once.
      • m-ee 3y ago
        Assuming you’re American you are really screwing then over by not paying for college. The FAFSA assumes a parental contribution. It’s not just other parents, but the federal government and all the colleges themselves that have the expectation that you will contribute. There’s no exemption for “I want to teach my kids financial responsibility”. If you’re high income your children will be ineligible for any financial aid and have few options for funding their own education.
        • AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
          There's always the Post-9/11 GI Bill. 36 months of tuition at the most expensive in-state rate in whatever state you attend school in plus Basic Allowance for Housing equal to an E5 with dependents is quite good.
        • 3y ago
    • kelseyfrog 3y ago
      When does little Johnny learn intrapersonal skills, conflict resolution skills, active listening skills, how to build and maintain friendship skills, or self-determination skills?
  • evrimoztamur 3y ago
    This makes it sound like the adult pains of holding friendships alive as you grow older. Everybody is busy with their lives and coordinating even with your closest friends leads to 'agenda conflicts' that push your time together weeks or months ahead. It's sad to see that this is happening to kids (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too.
    • awesomeMilou 3y ago
      > (who are often pushed into scheduled extracurriculars for better academic opportunities) too. Gotta say though, this seems to be purely a thing in the english speaking cultures. Apart from sport and maybe an instrument, extracurriculars aren't a thing in most european countries. Extracurriculars are so peculiar that our ministry of education deems it necessary to make it a mandatory point for teachers to discuss when talking about american childrens typical day in school.
      • grey413 3y ago
        Things like this are actually some of the main reasons I'm moving my family to Europe. In Europe, my kid can be her own person with her own schedule and her own environment to explore on her own terms. In america, she'd be isolated and dependent.
        • mantas 3y ago
          Unfortunately it’s getting worse here. In my youth few kids had scheduled activities. 20 years later, many kids are on a rather tight schedule.
          • taeric 3y ago
            Not really discounting your experiencs, but 20 years ago plenty of folks had scheduled activities. Music lessons didn't get invented in the past two decades. Nor did school/college prep. Indeed, the numbers typically show that those that did this, had a better chance of success at whatever they were scheduled to do. (This fits expectations, too. People succeed at that that they are prepared to do...) Would love to see updated numbers on it.
  • bowsamic 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • lgleason 3y ago
      Yup, I've seen the effects of this first hand.
      • bowsamic 3y ago
        I am one of the unmanaged kids and I am very much competing with all the managed ones. I’m 28 and still feeling the effect quite heavily. My wife was managed and she just has such a stronger work ethic and honestly better mental health than I. It’s a miracle I got to where I am frankly
    • mantas 3y ago
      Disadvantaged in what sense? It’s likely those kids won’t even go for the same grind as „managed“ kids.
      • bowsamic 3y ago
        Less ability to compete in the job market with others who were managed in basically all skilled jobs
        • jjk166 3y ago
          When was the last time a job interviewer asked what extracurriculars you did when you were 14? There is an extremely small sliver of society where that one additional extracurricular makes the difference between getting into an excellent school vs a merely great school. For everyone else, the long term value is quite dubious.
          • bowsamic 3y ago
            As much as you might want it to be, your life right now is not a blank human plus qualifications. Who you are as a person is shaped by your life before this point. A person who has invested in those extra curricular skills will simply be more skilled now, from precise ways (the specific skills learnt) to more general ways (the required concentration and perseverance etc)
  • ccleve 3y ago
    I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only way we can get him out is to call other parents and schedule something. There is something deeply wrong here. I blame other parents who overschedule their kids.
    • afavour 3y ago
      > I blame other parents Ah, the mantra of our parental lives! These classes kids go to aren’t always some kind of arduous, academic overachiever factory. My kid goes to a Spanish immersion after school program once a week and she loves it. She’s made a ton of friends there. We’re not shoving her through the door. Don’t get me wrong, some parents do go over the top with it, no doubt. But a lot of these activities are genuinely enriching.
      • omnicognate 3y ago
        It's not about your kid going to a Spanish class once a week, and the objection isn't that doing that isn't enriching for your kid. The problem is over the holidays when all your kid's friends have been sent to camps and summer schools (mostly as a form of holiday childcare for working parents presumably) or taken away on holiday, leaving your kid with nobody to play with. It presumably varies a lot but it's a real thing in our and our childrens' lives. The summer holidays should be filled with friends and play, not spent at home with your parents because nobody's available.
        • watwut 3y ago
          I still prefer my kid I'm camp or summer school over the kid on Netflix or Steam or whatsapp whole day. Or over me forcing them away from the above after which they still don't go play outside with friends, because friends watch anime or play video game.
    • 3y ago
  • azemetre 3y ago
    Might be an issue with your social class? I know plenty of poorer parents whose children aren't filled with a myriad of activities because the family simply can afford to pay them, the kids simply act like kids.
  • afavour 3y ago
    I’d hesitate to make any broad point with stuff like this. My daughter sounds like your son, she loves unstructured play. My son on the other hand is much happier with structured activities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either.
  • giantg2 3y ago
    Same thing as adults. Everyone is too busy to get together, especially after having kids.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    Structured lessons and organized sports are not the problem, kids have been taking piano lessons and swim lessons and playing Little League baseball since forever. But it can't be exclusively that. They need unstructured free play as well.
  • alex_lav 3y ago
    My sister and I have separate mothers. My mother, who I lived with, was pretty absent throughout my childhood. I never really had any monitoring on how I spent my time, for better or worse, but that reality allowed me to kind of chase interests (or ignore interests) and cultivate a lot of passion and curiosity. My sister's mother was the exact opposite. She prioritized "getting to be a mom" over my sister's time and enjoyment, so she became a Scout Leader, Soccer Coach, Ballet Coordinator, Cheer Coach etc. and had my sister join all of those activities. Every day was school from 7-whenever, straight to dance, straight to homework, straight to bed. I don't think my sister ever had more than an hour or two free for her entire childhood. The outcome is kind of wild. She's an anxiety mess, overly controlling, but also unable to really think for herself or prioritize her interests (maybe because she doesn't have a ton?), and usually just takes the path of least resistance or that she's been told to take. I feel sad for her, but I obviously was powerless to stop it.
  • kulahan 3y ago
    That sucks. I used to ride the bus home after school, throw my backpack at my house, and run off to play with my buds until the sun started to go down. It was the most amazing part of my day, just being free to be a kid and DO WHATEVER. Sometimes we'd walk to the stream and pick up rocks to look for bugs and crawfish. Sometimes we'd play card games. Sometimes we'd go to the park and play "wall ball", which obviously included a painful peg to the back with a tennis ball if you failed whatever the goal of that game even was! Anyways, point is, this fostered my interest in nature (looking for bugs), my sociability and strategy (card games), and my agility and teamwork (wall ball). This was stuff I worked hard at too, because they were my interests.
• fnimick 3y ago
  Meanwhile I know people who look at analytics and numbers to decide what sports and activities their child (who is still in elementary school!) should be doing in order to maximize college admissions chances. It's madness. Don't play violin (even if you like it) because there are too many people doing that, you have to do something unique. Don't play basketball, it's too common and therefore too hard to stand out, you have to do something exotic. It's better to be average at something rare and expensive than pretty good at something ordinary. We ramp up the pressure younger than ever, tell people that their entire future hinges on their success and getting ahead of their peers right now, then we're surprised that people crack under the stress? (FWIW, the sports that seem to come up on top are rich, exclusive sports like fencing and polo, because they serve well as class signifiers in admissions)
  • atonse 3y ago
    Yeah again the same social aspect is the challenge. We’ve resolved to tell our kids to forge their own path but they hear differently from friends, teachers, and other parents.
  • doubled112 3y ago
    As a dad of two, this timeline sucks. Even children need to be optimized for maximum success (so profit) now? Must have missed that memo.
    • fnimick 3y ago
      The "optimization" really is around signifying class. How much can you afford the exotic activities, how good is your network to get that unpaid internship or that volunteer opportunity, and of course you can't be in a financial situation where your child has to do menial work like retail. There was a discussion here a while back with a college admissions person where they confirmed that volunteer work is a bonus where actual work is not. It's not explicitly stated, but anyone who comes from a family where they _have_ to work is at a disadvantage.
    • anon291 3y ago
      > Even children need to be optimized for maximum success (so profit) now? Must have missed that memo. Well ... no they don't and this is the problem. 'Regular' people for some reason feel the need to replicate what 'they' do. Why do you see 'them' do this and then think 'my children need what they are doing with theirs'. Look.. the data are unequivocal. Most people are unhappy. If you are not unhappy with your life, you are the outlier and the exception. Thus... don't try to do what others are doing, since most likely they're unhappy. Just enjoy yourself.
• j-bos 3y ago
  Looking back I've never been more active on internet stuff, social media, mindless youtube, the hn loop, than when unable to hang out IRL and do stuff with friends. Given screens are correlated with mental health issues, the article premise seems plausible.
  • meter 3y ago
    I can empathize with the “friends” part. When I was in college, I was either studying or running around with friends. The only time I mindlessly scrolled on my phone was when I ate alone in the cafeteria. Hanging out with close friends, I hardly felt any urge to use my phone. I really miss that.
• mseepgood 3y ago
  Playing video games does not count as play, I assume?
  • j-bos 3y ago
    Games alone or online feel very different from games played together in the same room. Even if they're the game.
    • wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      Man do I ever lament the decline of 'couch co-op' games. Even to this day it's so nice to be able to go over to a friends house, crack open a beer and play together.
      • jstarfish 3y ago
        I've had a hell of a time finding good co-op games over the years too. Streets of Rogue was really fun for couch co-op, especially given the comical consequences of accidental explosions or poisoning air ducts with the wrong chemical. There's a character for every playstyle too.
        • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
          Sequel is coming out "soon". Definitely my most anticipated upcoming release.
      • mrguyorama 3y ago
        Yeah but then how do you get the other kid to pay for a new console and $80 video game when they can just play at their neighbors house? Who could have ever foreseen the rampant hollowing out of the holistic life in the service of making a few people richer....
  • nathanfig 3y ago
    (speculating) Multiplayer games with friends still provide a lot of the same healthy cooperation/conflict that play creates. But yeah I doubt it can be considered a whole substitute.
• Waterluvian 3y ago
  This may be obvious or well-discussed but I had an epiphany some years back when my dad, regarding my kids, said (paraphrasing), "they're not playing. 'Play' is a misleading term. They're testing the world. They're learning how things work. How gravity works. How friction holds lego together. How actions cause reactions. How friends and strangers behave when you do things. How to use language with make believe. How to comfortably and safely explore new ideas out loud with their action figures. How to discover what feels good and what doesn't. They're not playing. They're growing." My kids are young. But I'm confident this is generally true for teenagers, too. One quick example: I played WoW and looking back... I learned a ton about how to work in a team. How to be social. What social behaviours work and don't work. How to deal with people you don't like. How to delay gratification. How to plan. And it was all in a low-stakes environment.
  • pomian 3y ago
    Brilliant comment. We had a principal in our little community school who had exactly that attitude. He encouraged 'playing", and was often criticized for his efforts, by parents who didn't understand. Overall, however, the kids from that school were all eager learners, curious as to the world around them, socially very well integrated, and easily adapted to the rigors in high school and later. Play, is under valued.
    • OO000oo 3y ago
      The parents have every reason for concern, not because there's something wrong with the principal but because there's something wrong with the society their children are entering. The parents realize that their children will be screwed if they don't get into a good college, and the poorer parents need scholarships too! The principal's philosophical musings won't pay the bills.
      • nyanpasu64 3y ago
        My parents drove me to burnout, dropping out of college, and becoming an anxious traumatized wreck, by only providing support in response to achievements, and destroying my self-worth whenever I strayed from their chosen path of maximizing academic accomplishments to get into the most prestigious and stressful college possible. I don't plan to have kids, because I'm not doing well enough to provide an environment of psychological safety where they learn that they have worth as individuals and not just for their achievements, and I cannot give them a world where they will be safe from homelessness and starvation even if they do not find a high-paying college degree.
• caesil 3y ago
  I wonder if this doesn't have a lot to do with cars. In surrendering utterly to the preeminence of streets, we have essentially taken our open, free world and overlain it with an immense grid of electric fences -- thick lines all over the map that, if children wander across them, might easily lead to their deaths. So "hold hands everywhere" and "don't let your children run free outside" become the norms. The only safe place is locked inside or behind fences; the wider world is a death trap for children. Play inherently requires a degree of freedom, but children have none. We are just prison guards eternally transferring them from one captivity to another.
  • fallingknife 3y ago
    No. It's paranoia. Cars have been around for a long time.
    • pj_mukh 3y ago
      Is it paranoia? If it wasn’t for guns, cars would be the number killer of kids under 16. Note: This includes kids IN cars being ferried around from activity to activity. Granted the numbers are lower now than before but that’s because of various safety and traffic calming efforts. Seems like we should push harder on that front, so parents can feel safe encouraging their kids to just pop over to their friends place on their own.
      • jstarfish 3y ago
        It's paranoia. The pedophile panic of the last few decades led to nobody letting kids out of their sight. Things like the sex offender registry "help" but don't at the same time. It's not something I ever concerned myself with ("I know the stats, it's usually a relative!") until someone encouraged me to do it while closing on a house. I'm now acutely aware of the fact that there are dozens of child predators within a 1-mile radius of my home.
      • Tade0 3y ago
        According to this poll: https://reason.com/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-national-survey/ https://reason.com/2014/08/19/august-2014-reason-rupe-nation... Americans are split regarding whether there should be a law requiring 12-year-olds be supervised when playing in a park - no cars there. As an European, to me this is absurd. At twelve I had a bus card and the privilege to go wherever, as long as I respected curfew.
• deanmoriarty 3y ago
  Wow, this is so sad. I grew up in Europe in the 90s with parents who pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I was a well-behaved child/teenager and getting reasonable school grades. At 6 years old I was literally biking by the river or wandering in the woods with my friends after school for hours on end. Every day was an exciting adventure without any adult supervision, just random groups of 2-10 kids who would gather in the afternoon to play together. The rule was "home by dinner or there won't be any dinner for you". I never did any extracurricular activity, ever. This did not prevent me from going to a great university in my country, get my master in Computer Engineering, graduating in the top 5% of my class, have a curriculum good enough to legally immigrate to the US, and working at several tech companies including FAANG, making high 6 figures now. I would never give away those wonderful memories and early life experiences for some random extracurricular activity just to "stand out" later on, I do believe such freedom helped form my character to a much greater extent than any scripted activity would have.
  • MattGaiser 3y ago
    > This did not prevent me from going to a great university in my country, get my master in Computer Engineering, have a curriculum good enough to immigrate to the US, and working at several tech companies including FAANG, making high 6 figures now. The key question is more, could you do that today and would you sacrifice that to give your kids that childhood? Would your grades and lack of extracurriculars have earned you admission in this year's cohort? Is that path still really available? I am 9 years out from the university admissions game, so still pretty young, but some time has passed. I would not be a competitive applicant today for many of the same programs I was admitted to back then. High school was by far the most stressful time of my life and the fun part is, it would have had to have had more pressure to be where I am today.
    • medvezhenok 3y ago
      This is a really good point that people miss. Sure, the (insert birth year here) childhood seems really nice in retrospect, but many of the realities of life have changed, and someone growing up with that kind of childhood today will not necessarily have the same outcomes as back then.
• outlace 3y ago
  I haven’t looked into the data carefully but this strikes me as implausible at first impression for a few reasons. One is that cultures with highly structured time for kids like China do not have the same dramatic rises in mental illness, that I’m aware of. Two is that this seems to only apply to middle class or rich western kids (unsurprising for academic studies). You really think poor kids are spending too much time at piano lessons and not playing? No they have the opposite problem of too much lack of structure. Overall this seems quite narrow minded to me. The only part of this that rings true is the cultural phenomenon of wanting to make feel everyone safe all the time, even from mere ideas and speech.
  • MattGaiser 3y ago
    > China do not have the same dramatic rises in mental illness Or does their culture just tend to view higher levels of distress as normal given how competitive it is there? https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/china-gen-z-mental-health-crisis-suicide-academic-depression-education/ https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/china-gen-z-mental-health-cri... That being said, they are open that there are issues there as well.
    • outlace 3y ago
      Yeah but there’s big a difference between mental health issues in China being driven by intense academic competition and pressure and, as the Haidt article claims, lack of enough unstructured playtime.
      • tinycombinator 3y ago
        Intense academic competition and lack of unstructured playtime would seem to go hand-in-hand, no?
  • ddq 3y ago
    The epidemic of youth suicide in Japan and South Korea related to the stress of their rigid, demanding education systems is fairly common knowledge.
• giantg2 3y ago
  It's the legal structure. We live in a society where a small mistake can ruin the rest of your life; where parents can be jailed for allowing previously common freedoms to children; where children are increasingly subject to age restrictions; where parents are under increasing threat of legal actions; surveillance is everywhere; and more. Many of these things were done with the best intentions of protecting children. How much joy does one get out of keeping a toy sealed in a box, preserving it's "value"? How much more valuable would that toy be if one enjoyed it during their childhood? We're keeping our kids in the packaging to protect them, but we're losing the real value.
• adamredwoods 3y ago
  Before everyone begins chastising parents: >> He notes that this is a correlation, not proof of causation, although experiments with animals support the claim that play deprivation causes anxiety and poor social development. I also wonder if "playing" in Minecraft, or Roblox supports this definition of play. Or even RPGs like DnD. It's interactive, and allows children to experiment. It's not a physical world, but I don't know if these parameters were explored.
  • jstarfish 3y ago
    > I also wonder if "playing" in Minecraft, or Roblox supports this definition of play. Or even RPGs like DnD. It's interactive, and allows children to experiment. It's not a physical world, but I don't know if these parameters were explored. I don't think so, but that's my opinion. These virtual worlds have entirely different sets of rules that do not reflect those of reality or social norms. Kids do go through the same motions of testing boundaries, but they're testing boundaries that would get you punched in the face or jailed IRL-- but they get away with it without consequence because it's all virtual. There's no consequence to scamming other kids in Roblox or destroying people's artwork in Minecraft. It's completely normal behavior to them. Tabletop D&D doesn't count; it's in-person, so if you're tossing around slurs or being conspicuously offensive, someone will correct your behavior. That's the extent of their socialization, and then they're unleashed into the real world expecting things to work the same way there.
    • adamredwoods 3y ago
      >> but they get away with it without consequence because it's all virtual. I'm not sure. From my limited observations of my N=1, and even from observing some Minecraft Youtube channels, there are definitely rules and consequences. But these are tested, changed, negotiated when new members (usually classmates) are brought in.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • em-bee 3y ago
      Kids do go through the same motions of testing boundaries, but they're testing boundaries that would get you punched in the face or jailed IRL-- but they get away with it without consequence because it's all virtual. There's no consequence to scamming other kids in Roblox or destroying people's artwork in Minecraft i'd like to disagree. first of all these actions don't have serious consequences because it's a game. destroying someones work in minecraft is no worse than destroying your lego house. that would not get you punched in the face either, nor would cheating your classmate out of their lunch money. there are also less consequences because of lack of supervision. i don't know about roblox, but the minetest servers my kids play on absolutely have rules against breaking others work and punish players by putting them in an in-world jail or blocking them from the server. in both cases the consequence is that the kids can't play. they have to learn how to interact with other players just as much.
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Ahhhh. So it's not social media? That said, social media aside, I wouldn't want to be a teen today. Too much fear. Too much gloom & doom. Too much adults preaching "Don't do Y and/or Z (and not offering "do this instead" alternatives). And parents are looked down upon for not overseeing their kid's every move. So yeah, the parents live in fear as well. This level of fear is not healthy. We've removed agency and replaced it with a void. Is it any wonder teens are struggling?
  • nathanfig 3y ago
    One major cause would not subtract another
    • chiefalchemist 3y ago
      The point is, the mainstream media narrative has been 95% focused on the social media devil. That's leading to stagnation elsewhere. It's not only unstructured play, it's physical activity that's needed. But how do you tell a society raised on taking pride in fat & stupid that the bridge they brought is - in the context of history - one of the biggest scams of all time? You don't. You go all in on blaming something secondary like social media (which - fyi - parents could exert more control over).
• legitster 3y ago
  As a parent of a young kid, I am rarely worried about him. He knows how to watch for traffic. He knows how to find his way home from a friends'. He knows enough about what is dangerous to do. It's the police and CPS that I am afraid of. The ubiquity of smartphones has made tattling and "calling someone" so easy. And it's almost never from other parents! The parents are more worried about "what people will think" than they are their own kids actually being hurt! Also, there are so many fewer kids in a neighborhood than when I was a kid (both from a declining birthrate - and also the monopoly older/kidless people have in suburban housing right now is very underreported) that there is less safety in numbers. There are only 2 other kids on our block.
  • alexpetralia 3y ago
    (deleted - posted under the wrong comment)
    • afavour 3y ago
      Agreed. Also in NYC and while I do trust my kid with road safety I’ve witnessed so many drivers blowing through a red light, speeding, parking in the middle of a crosswalk and pulling all kinds of dangerous manoeuvers that the streets don’t actually feel particularly safe. There’s just zero enforcement out there.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • doubled112 3y ago
        I was in an intersection one morning after walking the kids to school, and almost hit by a man running the all way stop. It wasn't even the standard for the neighbourhood rolling stop, but full on blowing through it. I threw up an arm in disapproval, and he flipped me off in return, like I was the problem. Sometimes the entitlement is unreal, and I'm not sure how much enforcement it would take before people did the right thing. There was a YouTube video of a man standing on the sidewalk next to a puddle with an umbrella, then a brick. Perhaps staged, but I'll let you guess which one kept him drier.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Moreover, the 2019 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey revealed that during the previous year 18.8% of US high school students seriously considered attempting suicide, 15.7% made a suicide plan, 8.9% attempted suicide one or more times, and 2.5% made a suicide attempt requiring medical treatment. Wait a minute, what? Nearly 1 in 10 attempted suicide? So in a middle school of say 400 kids a kid would know almost 40 peers that tried to kill themselves? I wasnt in middle school in 2019 but this just doesnt seem right. Maybe im misunderstanding. Edit: it says high school not middle school, but point stands
  • dwaltrip 3y ago
    Yeah that sounds way off.
  • MattGaiser 3y ago
    I would be curious at how far you have to go for “attempted”, especially when most supposed attempts did not require medical intervention (so it might consist of getting the materials and not having the final nerve to go through with it). But having graduated high school in 2014, my anecdotal reaction based on that experience would be that it seems on the high side but is plausible. My reaction certainly isn’t “no way.”
    • nonethewiser 3y ago
      Yeah there is a lot of gray area. Its also self reported, so they could also feel motivated to over report for some reason or another
  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    Maybe there's something like a "mental health crisis" that could be why it's so high.... /s
    • nonethewiser 3y ago
      Im not denying that. Im saying those numbers are shockingly high
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Old guy perspective: When I was a kid(tm), I played with a neighbor almost every weekend be it skateboarding, building a fort, playing Nintendo, or riding bikes around the neighbor. That was back when toy guns didn't have orange tips and parks didn't have ultra-safe, ultra-boring equipment. Perhaps the real losses of community and public commons (other countries call it "commonwealth") create a desert of human interaction. Maybe this is partly why the US has an absurd number of depressed and maladjusted young people.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  adults are human too, this applies to adults to a same, lessor or more degree
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Does anyone know of somewhere in America where it is common for children to play semi-unsupervised with lots of other children of different ages? I grew up in a super-block like setting and you could look out and see your kids play but most of the time you didn't and they'd form groups with kids of ages above and below theirs and work out some relatively fair way to play a game and have fun. Usually sports, but sometimes something else. I actually really enjoyed this sort of setting. Kids would get hurt accidentally, there were some harmless fights, and that sort of thing. I'm just concerned that, independent of my own viewpoint on the subject, I will be unable to find sufficient other parents with this approach, or, should I find them they'll be clustered with other beliefs that I think are suboptimal for success. Ultimately, if there is a place with this culture then I will try to make it so I can reasonably live there.
• lgleason 3y ago
  The kid that does really well in school, makes it big is going to have an opportunity for a lot more play later in life. The kid who does nothing but play will probably end up having very little opportunity and have to work long hours later in life to barely make ends meet with lots of stress and little opportunity for play. So its a trade off. Obviously if the kid comes from a rich family that is willing to support and leave all of their money to the kid that changes the equation, but I have seen examples where those kids still ended up as drug addicts etc..
  • tegmark 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    > The kid that does really well in school, makes it big is going to have an opportunity for a lot more play later in life. Really? There's a constant push to "grind" more, even for well-paid professionals. This is a cultural problem, not one of attainment. Consider how Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world, claims to work ~16 hours a day. Someone with a steady job in construction probably has a lot more free time than him.
  • tinycombinator 3y ago
    I don't think it's as simple as having 100% play vs 100% work. There's got to be some optimum balance here that we're clearly not satisfying, with our flawed notion that 100% work is the best route. It's possible for people to have a satisfying social life while also doing very well in school, and it's also possible for a loner to have a depressing life while failing at school.
    • Shocka1 3y ago
      Agreed. It's not black and white and the realistic answer is something in between. It's entirely possible to work hard and still play hard, especially in your 20s/30s/40s when your body is still in its prime.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  yes, and i'd love to put this through the frame of generational differences, which play a significant part, but we've honestly made a work/school/eat/fuck off culture that just doesn't help anyone raise kids i mean, its even gotten to the point where no one is having them. other countries around the world apply all the golden rules of economics to become wealthy and successful, but it fails in 2 main areas: education/upbringing, and maintaining a stable birthrate/population we're eating ourselves alive through a more insidious version of the soviet-era snitching system while proclaiming that cannibalism is immoral
• nazgulnarsil 3y ago
  I think most video games are too structured to really qualify as play. This would be why more freeform games have been such surprise smash hits.
• rossdavidh 3y ago
  I am especially interested to hear from non-USA readers of HN, as to how much of this sounds like what is happening in their countries vs. how much is a unique American issue.
  • DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    Outside looking in: - In the rest of the world University applications are (mostly) decided on academic scores. This adds academic pressure but it means outside school work the time is yours (probably not so true in Asia though). In the US I get the impression that kids (and parents) need to create some sort of 110% intensity overachiever halo in all their out of school activities (as early as possible) to be able to pad their applications in order to impress an Admissions Officer. - Your infrastructure is (beyond insanity) car hostage and the SUV arms race adds to even more pedestrian lack of safety. That pretty much makes a lot of kids confined to a few blocks around the house until they are 16. If you were to say to anyway in Europe that a town with more than 50k people has multilane streets but with no sidewalks they would probably protest. - Having said that I still feel that at least for teenagers smartphone/social media usage is a major cause of mental health decline across the globe (so not US exclusive). It's the whole problem of comparing other people's filtered best with your internal self-perceived worst.
• clsec 3y ago
  Seeing lots of comments about over scheduling children's free time. I took music lessons, did Cub Scouts Weeblos & Boy Scouts, played little league, played Pop Warner & high school football and ran track. All after school activities. As for freedom.. I took SF MUNI, BART, Ferries and Golden Gate Transit starting at 7 year old. Any free time I had was spent playing with friends. And I had to be home by the time the street lights came on. So it is possible to have a lot of after school activities and plenty of time to play with friends and explore the world.
  • ddq 3y ago
    Scouting is an interesting example because my experience included both ends of the scheduling vs. freedom spectrum. My first troop was all about the weekly meetings, merit badge classes, memorization, structured activities, and the like. Camping trips almost always had a specific goal, like hiking a certain trail or getting certain merit badges. My second troop was about going camping and making our own fun. Once the necessary duties were out of the way, we were pretty much left to our own devices and it was infinitely more rewarding, both as a kid and in my retrospective analysis. I learned so much more just figuring things out with the other boys, especially on the social development side.
    • em-bee 3y ago
      i was going to mention scouting somewhere in this thread for exactly that reason. we didn't have merit badges in the country where i grew up, and scouting was a lot more of less structured exploring of the outdoors or activities planned and organized by the kids themselves. and most importantly, parents were not involved.
• Animats 3y ago
  Go watch Sesame Street, S01EO1.[1] Early Sesame Street is all about unsupervised kids in a big city. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NUiHCr9Cs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NUiHCr9Cs
  • twiddling 3y ago
    Another thing that's jarring is how slow paced the early episodes were.
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Were the early episodes slow, or are newer ones faster because they know kids have reduced attention spans?
• dukeofdoom 3y ago
  "About 1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to estimates from CDC's Autism." When I was growing up, basically no one had it. The rates were 1 per 1,000 or lower. So one or two kids in the entire high school. Now you can expect one in your class. Many of these kids are supper naive and vulnerable, just trying to fit in. One reason why the right is skeptical of what is being taught to them.
  • medvezhenok 3y ago
    Sorry to burst your bubble, the rates of Autism likely haven't changed (or changed in a minor way), what has changed is the rate of diagnosis. A lot of the kids currently being diagnosed also have parents that are autistic but undiagnosed. Same thing with ADHD. The paths available in society have gotten less friendly to those with ADHD/Austism (by default), so more people are seeking diagnosis today than in the past. Also, if you go far enough back, the U.S. used to institutionalize people with mental conditions, which is a pretty strong case against seeking any sort of diagnosis. The decrease in child mortality might have also increased the occurrence of certain conditions in the population, but I'm not aware of specific studies to that effect.
    • tegmark 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • dukeofdoom 3y ago
      I have a friend with an autistic kid. The kid is 3 can't talk and doesn't respond to facial expressions, along with a long list of specific easily recognizable common behaviours. The idea that these common traits would have not been diagnosed by previous generation of educators is wishful thinking at best. Key signs of autism in children include: 1. Social communication difficulties: Lack of or limited eye contact Difficulty understanding and using nonverbal communication (e.g., gestures, facial expressions) Trouble with understanding and using gestures, body language, and facial expressions Difficulty developing and maintaining age-appropriate relationships with peers Challenges with sharing interests or enjoyment with others Repetitive behaviors and restricted interests: 2. Engaging in repetitive movements (e.g., hand-flapping, rocking, spinning objects) Insistence on sameness and routines; becoming distressed by changes in routines Intense focus on specific interests or topics, often to the exclusion of others Communication difficulties: 3. Delayed speech development or difficulty in acquiring language skills Unusual patterns of speech, such as echolalia (repeating words or phrases out of context) Difficulty initiating or sustaining conversations Challenges in understanding and using language pragmatically (e.g., taking turns, using appropriate tone of voice) Sensory sensitivities: 4. Heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli, such as noise, lights, textures, or smells Seeking or avoiding certain sensory experiences (e.g., seeking deep pressure, avoiding crowded places) 5.Unusual play and behavior: Engaging in repetitive and imaginative play that lacks social aspects Using toys in unusual ways or showing little interest in toys altogether Engaging in self-stimulatory behaviors (stimming) to self-regulate or express emotions"
• dunkmaster 3y ago
  I wonder if adults can also benefit from unstructured play
  • syntheweave 3y ago
    They can, but you have to shape it a little bit so that they're out of the comfort zone and playing in a different role than their usual. It's the role, not the formal structure, that is important. Improv acting, for example, centers simple "improv games". Playing the game imposes moments of vulnerability and creativity. But if you don't add enough context some proportion of the actors will fall into habit and "play like a winner", knocking over everyone else's boundaries by being an asshole.
• honkycat 3y ago
  we grew up in a less prosperous time than our parents and grandparents so our parents didn't have any time to raise us and were constantly economically terrorized. I will also ALWAYS point out that our parents could go to bars at 18 and actually had places they could gather socially without parental supervision before half-way through college. They put kinds in child jail, tell them to behave or else, make them sit through hours and hours of shitty classes in un air-conditioned rooms with checked out teachers. ( note: this is not how the children of the wealthy experience school ) Once again, you can point to economic factors like the erosion of the public spaces, the massive over-building of suburb and road infrastructure making outside objectively dangerous, and outsourcing public spaces to corporate owned malls that were NEVER profitable.
  • tegmark 3y ago
    [flagged]
• rafaelero 3y ago
  Why talk specifically about children when the uprising on mental health issues has been seen across the board, from kids to adults and elders? It doesn't seem like a smart stratification if you want to find the correct cause. Also, multiple twin studies show how parenting have negligible effects over life outcomes, so I am pretty skeptical of this theory.
• moffkalast 3y ago
  > There is also evidence that teens who have part-time jobs are happier than those who don’t, because of the sense of independence and confidence they gain from the job. Genuinely wondering where they got any data for that, given that child labour is generally illegal these days and all. What kind of part time jobs for children that pay actual money exist in the present? I suppose you've got the rare ones like acting, modelling, toy testing, but those come with a lot of other factors that are probably hard to control for and in most cases I doubt the kids are paid directly. Maybe they counted getting $5 from your parents for mowing the lawn.
  • twiddling 3y ago
    < given that child labour is generally illegal these days and all In the US that's changing...
  • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Teenagers can work almost anywhere in the US. There are special rules restricting how much they can work, and under what conditions, but there aren't any states that outright ban teenagers from any kind of paid work.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  The argument in TFA makes sense at a conceptual level. Kids that aren’t allowed to play will be a neurotic mess. But I hesitate to write off teen mental health as just a result of over parenting or social media. Those are probably contributing factors, how much is not clear to me. Another contributing factor is the economic knife hanging over everyone’s head. It’s not enough to just finish high school like it was in the 1950s. It’s not even enough to finish a bachelor’s degree now, even though only 40% of millennials have accomplished that. So just being above average isn’t enough. You need to be excellent. If you compare pretty much any other time in American history to the post-war economy, every metric is going to look worse. Does it mean we should be letting kids play tackle pom pom [1] during recess? So I’m not convinced by the hand-wavy look how great things were back in the day analysis. This analysis would be much stronger if it tried to account for confounding factors. For example analyzing countries where life expectancy is not decreasing. [1] https://www.yellowbullet.com/threads/school-yard-recess-games.1799282/ https://www.yellowbullet.com/threads/school-yard-recess-game...
  • itronitron 3y ago
    You could also make the argument that teens only seem to be having a mental health crisis because adults are spending more time listening to them.
• 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  i'd assume that play deprivation is also a major cause of mental problems in adults. me personally i just recently discovered the joy of games feasible with one or two standard decks of cards. current selection: - skat - gin rummy - german whist - spite and malice i found playing cards to be an amazing catalyst and temporary distraction while having a drink with a friend. it relieves the pressure of having to talk more or less nonstop. and shifting attention to the game away from conversation tends to engage the subconscious producing new interesting subjects to discuss. similar to that effect of ideas popping up during having a shower. any standard card game enthusiasts here? what's your game of choice?
• poorbutdebtfree 3y ago
  [flagged]
• jrochkind1 3y ago
  also possibly adults?
• sourcecodeplz 3y ago
  My knees and elbows were constantly hurt from all the activities.
  • twiddling 3y ago
    I remember my friends and I playing tag in a copse of trees which were close enough to swing to and from branches between them. Fell out once and laid there on the ground , breath knocked out of me, staring at the dappled light through the trees... In my 50s and I still smile when I think about that day.
    • sourcecodeplz 3y ago
      I once worked my courage up to go to the skate park with my roller blades. I fell on my ass when trying to go down the quarter-pipe. I felt like dying and couldn't breath. When I got home I threw them in the trash, without hesitation.
• carabiner 3y ago
  Kids should be inside coding and studying math. That's what 90% of successful YC founders did I bet.
• viburnum 3y ago
  I’m confused, play is something small children do, not teenagers. Do they just mean free time in general?
• anon291 3y ago
  We've normalized institutionalizing children in institutions that will never let them take any risks due to insurance concerns. So many colleagues and friends put their children in day care a few weeks after birth and then straight to school. These institutions are naturally conservative and don't let children engage in the kind of rough and tumble play that they need. Moreover, in order to appeal to parents, they focus on doing 'activities' with the child. My children are at home with my wife (not school age yet). This is apparently abnormal now. So many people have expressed concern that our daughter is not in preschool or daycare. My own mother is concerned she hasn't started academic work like my niece and nephew (they're all around four and five). A neighbor has commented that we're pursuing an 'alternative' lifestyle just by having our kids at home. It's crazy. Now back to play deprivation. Hot take: the play at preschool, etc is not the same as play with parents, family, and friends. At the end of the day, daycares, schools, etc are businesses (yes, even public schools) that need to protect themselves from liability, which means they are naturally going to promulgate the safety culture that we now know leads to all sorts of mental health issues for teenagers. To get around the issue of lack of play, they announce new activities for the kids. One preschool we were looking at bragged that they did a 'research project' with the children! Now, I'm sure research projects while sitting inside carry less liability concerns, but I'm not sure a preschooler needs that. But, this is the best business decision as they get the benefits (low insurance premiums and ability to get more revenue by enrolling more kids) while they outsource the problems (a teen's mental health issues are the parents problem). We are lucky to have an active community and my wife and other stay at home moms take the kids on play dates basically every day. On the days they're not with friends, they're at one of the grandparent's houses. Over the summer, they've done things like gone hiking, gone fruit picking, zoos, museums, playgrounds, pools, etc with other kids. The best part is that, since it's not a professional environment, the kids get to do things like jump off rocks, fight with each other, fall of playground equipment, run down hills, climb tall trees, etc. Now of course, not all parents are like this, and some probably think my wife is negligent (I've seen many of these parents at the playground and they seem dreadfully boring). However, some parents allow their kids to play. On the other hand, I've never met a teacher or daycare worker that would allow these things. My carers growing up certainly wouldn't. I don't even blame the teacher; they're often watching 10+ kids at a time, and it's simply impossible to pay attention to a kid doing anything fun at that scale. But, when you have a group of adult friends supervising children, what ends up happening is that the adults sit around having fun, while the children play, which is awesome. So many times I've seen one of the kids come up to the adults with a complaint about play, and the unvarying response from all the adults is "if you're not having fun playing, why don't you sit down and engage with the adults?" Sure enough, after you put it that way, every kid goes back to playing regardless of whatever slight initially sent them away. We need to normalize being a child again, and we need to have an honest conversation about how to make that possible.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Anecdotal, but still.. back when I was a kid, we had school until 13h (1pm), maybe an hour more or less, and after that we were 'free'. We did have some homework, but that was usually left for the evening, or copied in school the next day. We did a bunch of stupid stuff, went around, from 'adventurous' trips around the city to sitting on the same benches for 6 hours talking about stupid stuff and arguing about stuff, that we couldn't google right then, because google didn't exist yet. They (the parents) didn't even wait for us to come to dinner, since sometimes we were impossible to reach (if we weren't on the same benches next to the apartment buildings). "Kids these days" (at least the ones I know) have their whole days scheduled for 'stuff'... school, home, music lessons, sport practice, come back home at 8pm, homework, sleep. On weekends, they're packed in the cars and taken somewhere 'in nature/countryside', so they wouldn't spend their days at home or outside sitting on a bench for the whole day. I'm an adult now, for quite a few years, and the thing I miss the most about childhood is the "freedom",... after school, you were free to do whatever, and during the summer, you were free for 2.5 months... no responsibilities, no timetables, schedules, no nothing... just kids and stupid (then important) kid stuff.
• crtified 3y ago
  Free play is but one element of an ideal childhood. A kid can play free as much as they like, but that doesn't parlay into success if that kid routinely goes home to unhappiness and imbalance in other areas of life.
• rcurry 3y ago
  When I was like 12 my teacher was an army reservist and got the idea to teach us how to rappel off the top of the school, lmao. So we all got together with our families and rappelled off a four story building. It was bananas and we all had so much fun. Now days they’d probably charge that teacher with a felony.
• black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
• kbos87 3y ago
  There’s (rightly) a lot of focus on the impact of social media on teen mental health, and very little about how controlled, structured, and parent-dependent the average young persons’ life is today. Social media clearly plays a role, but you have to wonder if it’s a convenient scapegoat for parents who don’t want to face the impact their own anxieties and control are having over their kids lives.
• trizuz 3y ago
  [dead]
• thefz 3y ago
  Yet if you point out that the current state of teens is "not alright", you will drown in comments teaching you that this is something that every genration thinks of the one before, and kids are better and better, get called "boomer"... ... Oh, and the compulsory XKCD link https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  It's weird there is little discussion about having kids play more online to have them discover that space the same way they discover the rest of the world. We let kids look at cars, poison signs, stairs and elevators and make them understand hos it works and why it's dangerous. Online threats shouldn't be different.