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I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly peo

by kbos87 3y ago

I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way.

dimgl 3y ago
This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  It's also worth noting that 'restrictiveness' is subjective. Your parents could be too restrictive for _you_, but in an alternative universe your hypothetical sibling could complain that his parents didn't care enough, let him do whatever and didn't prevent him from doing some things that he later he regretted, for instance starting drinking too early, getting himself involved in some sketchy people etc.
chasd00 3y ago
i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in. My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our career entries, and lasted for years with its consequences. In parallel, in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out, leading to years of wars and refugees. Then in 2014, the Russians made their first move into Ukraine, and the migration crisis began that then fully escalated in 2015. Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. As the migration crisis died down to manageable levels in 2019, we only had a few months of rest, as at the end of 2019 COVID hit the entire world - and before that was over, the Russians went into the rest of Ukraine. That in turn led to cost of living exploding, now also across the world instead of "just" in the urban agglomeration eras. And the entire time, the far-right and authoritarians have been on the rise worldwide, politicians are doing nothing to meaningfully combat climate change or the demographic crisis or ever rising cost-of-living cost and income/wealth disparities. And then people, particularly the Boomer generation, have the audacity of calling us snowflakes, weak, "depression is just a trend" or whatever? They created all this mess, they're all set in cheap homes they paid off decades ago, when wages were still worth something, while we've been fighting for survival? And our younger brothers and sisters have it even worse than we have, they saw us and our parents struggle all these years.
- starik36 3y ago
  All the political crises, you listed starting with 2008, could have easily be relisted from a decade or two earlier. There have always been crises. I am not sure that is any different than it has been for any generation.
- tomp 3y ago
  > Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 7 years (through Trump, Brexit and Covid) it’s that propaganda works. See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”. But if you actually think about his presidency, and ignore the fear mongering and propaganda, nothing bad actually happened! (Covid is, of course, another example, but whereas the virus itself wasn’t that bad, the governments’ reactions to it, was.)
jhoechtl 3y ago
Agreed that this topic requires more investigation but convenient answers. Occam's razor still applies though. There are cultures where > control, structure, and surveillance have not been neglected the way they have been neglected in the western culture. So it would be interesting to check if youth mental issues did rise in such cultures too. Put bluntly: Do taliban kids have the same mental issues as kids which were risen in an environment without > control, structure, and surveillance
DiscourseFan 3y ago
I think social media is definitely a part of that.
throwup238 3y ago
I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  It metastasized. It didn’t decrease. Now kids are barely allowed to go outside on their own
- resoluteteeth 3y ago
  > I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s. It stopped being a meme because the expected level of parental supervision of children got much higher and it went from being perceived as a thing that only weird people to what is required of parents in most places. Calling social services on unattended kids isn't something that makes the news as much simply because almost all parents agree that children should never be left unattended until they are old enough to have a driver's license now and there aren't any unattended children to have social services called on them
  - beaeglebeached 3y ago
    Yet if you attend to a child as anything but a stereotypical mom look you'll have the police called and men with guns roll up and scare your child and detain them because it's "suspicious" as happened to me as a racially mixed dad-family at the park with my kid. Accused of kidnapping and held for a good hour. You literally cannot win.
- clipsy 3y ago
  Parents weren't GPS tracking their children in the 1990s.
  - jader201 3y ago
    To be fair, GPS tracking may actually make parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to free roam.
echelon 3y ago
Kids need more time away from other kids. They're spending too much time in the insane asylum with the other inmates. This leads to bullying, gossiping, comparing themselves against one another. Social media made it worse. Kids at home on the farm, reading books, exploring nature - that was healthy. Now they're addicted to algorithmic peer pressure before their brains can even adjust to filtering it out.
- noelherrick 3y ago
  Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the sake of others - what if that was channeled to real world aid).
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    Don't overgeneralize. People are different and have different needs. You can speak your truth without having to say it is true for everyone.
  - bentley 3y ago
    > Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures That may be generally true, but it doesn’t imply that time alone is always bad, nor that all time “being social” is good. It’s certainly plausible that the explosion of access to social media has been a net negative and that spending some of that time alone would be better. Thinking back, the time I spent having sneaked to the school library during lunch break definitely felt healthier than the times I got caught by a teacher and sent back to “socially commune” with my tormentors, er, classmates.
    - banannaise 3y ago
      I think you're describing a different problem - a societal culture that enables and encourages bullying at all ages. If your peers aren't cruel to you, then spending time around them is extremely healthy.
CognitiveLens 3y ago
The causal link to social media is presented very simply in the article, but I suspect that's mainly because the article is not about diagnosis, but about the prevalence of the pattern. There is a lot of data to support the social media effect specifically (some referenced in the linked articles from Twenge), and I suspect the next few posts from Rausch will dive in more deeply, so it's not right to claim that they're jumping to convenient answers - these aren't casual bloggers sharing their reckons. edit: actually there's a heap of related writing on that site, e.g. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...
- throwup238 3y ago
  Not only is there a lot more content on the blog about the topic but Haidt and Rausch have several public Google docs where they keep an ongoing list of evidence for and against their hypotheses. Every time one of their articles gets discussed on HN (which happens at least once a month at this point) the discussion goes in circles about evidence and causality without engaging the meat of the content. HN just doesn’t have any mechanism to promote long term discussions about this topic.
  - B56b 3y ago
    It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.
ekianjo 3y ago
> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Not good enough thats mostly the US doing that
freddie_mercury 3y ago
> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame. > That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way. It gets discussed on the linked substack constantly.
- swsieber 3y ago
  > > what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time > None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame. I disagree. Cell phones come to mind as a major enabler here.
lolinder 3y ago
Jonathan Haidt, the man behind this article and most of this discussion, cofounded LetGrow.org [0] with the explicit intention of helping to free kids from the control that their helicopter parents increasingly smother them with. That organization is behind several laws in various states intended to protect parents who give their kids more freedom. He very much sees social media and helicopter parenting as two sides of the same coin, two tightly related forces that conspire to ruin childhood and thereby ruin children's mental health. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a trend among parents to latch on to Haidt's anti-social-media advocacy while ignoring his recommendations for what we fill the time with instead (hint: free roaming independence!), but it's not because he hasn't been vocal about both aspects. [0] https://letgrow.org/about-us/ https://letgrow.org/about-us/
huytersd 3y ago
Kids have always been very controlled in places like Asia way before the last decade or two. That’s not it.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Do we have research on how teen mental health in Asia compares to teen mental health elsewhere?

by kbos87 3y ago

dimgl 3y ago

This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
It's also worth noting that 'restrictiveness' is subjective. Your parents could be too restrictive for _you_, but in an alternative universe your hypothetical sibling could complain that his parents didn't care enough, let him do whatever and didn't prevent him from doing some things that he later he regretted, for instance starting drinking too early, getting himself involved in some sketchy people etc.

chasd00 3y ago

i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in. My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our career entries, and lasted for years with its consequences. In parallel, in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out, leading to years of wars and refugees. Then in 2014, the Russians made their first move into Ukraine, and the migration crisis began that then fully escalated in 2015. Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. As the migration crisis died down to manageable levels in 2019, we only had a few months of rest, as at the end of 2019 COVID hit the entire world - and before that was over, the Russians went into the rest of Ukraine. That in turn led to cost of living exploding, now also across the world instead of "just" in the urban agglomeration eras. And the entire time, the far-right and authoritarians have been on the rise worldwide, politicians are doing nothing to meaningfully combat climate change or the demographic crisis or ever rising cost-of-living cost and income/wealth disparities. And then people, particularly the Boomer generation, have the audacity of calling us snowflakes, weak, "depression is just a trend" or whatever? They created all this mess, they're all set in cheap homes they paid off decades ago, when wages were still worth something, while we've been fighting for survival? And our younger brothers and sisters have it even worse than we have, they saw us and our parents struggle all these years.

starik36 3y ago
All the political crises, you listed starting with 2008, could have easily be relisted from a decade or two earlier. There have always been crises. I am not sure that is any different than it has been for any generation.
tomp 3y ago
> Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 7 years (through Trump, Brexit and Covid) it’s that propaganda works. See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”. But if you actually think about his presidency, and ignore the fear mongering and propaganda, nothing bad actually happened! (Covid is, of course, another example, but whereas the virus itself wasn’t that bad, the governments’ reactions to it, was.)

jhoechtl 3y ago

Agreed that this topic requires more investigation but convenient answers. Occam's razor still applies though. There are cultures where > control, structure, and surveillance have not been neglected the way they have been neglected in the western culture. So it would be interesting to check if youth mental issues did rise in such cultures too. Put bluntly: Do taliban kids have the same mental issues as kids which were risen in an environment without > control, structure, and surveillance

DiscourseFan 3y ago

I think social media is definitely a part of that.

throwup238 3y ago

I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
It metastasized. It didn’t decrease. Now kids are barely allowed to go outside on their own
resoluteteeth 3y ago
> I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s. It stopped being a meme because the expected level of parental supervision of children got much higher and it went from being perceived as a thing that only weird people to what is required of parents in most places. Calling social services on unattended kids isn't something that makes the news as much simply because almost all parents agree that children should never be left unattended until they are old enough to have a driver's license now and there aren't any unattended children to have social services called on them
- beaeglebeached 3y ago
  Yet if you attend to a child as anything but a stereotypical mom look you'll have the police called and men with guns roll up and scare your child and detain them because it's "suspicious" as happened to me as a racially mixed dad-family at the park with my kid. Accused of kidnapping and held for a good hour. You literally cannot win.
clipsy 3y ago
Parents weren't GPS tracking their children in the 1990s.
- jader201 3y ago
  To be fair, GPS tracking may actually make parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to free roam.

echelon 3y ago

Kids need more time away from other kids. They're spending too much time in the insane asylum with the other inmates. This leads to bullying, gossiping, comparing themselves against one another. Social media made it worse. Kids at home on the farm, reading books, exploring nature - that was healthy. Now they're addicted to algorithmic peer pressure before their brains can even adjust to filtering it out.

noelherrick 3y ago
Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the sake of others - what if that was channeled to real world aid).
- shkkmo 3y ago
  Don't overgeneralize. People are different and have different needs. You can speak your truth without having to say it is true for everyone.
- bentley 3y ago
  > Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures That may be generally true, but it doesn’t imply that time alone is always bad, nor that all time “being social” is good. It’s certainly plausible that the explosion of access to social media has been a net negative and that spending some of that time alone would be better. Thinking back, the time I spent having sneaked to the school library during lunch break definitely felt healthier than the times I got caught by a teacher and sent back to “socially commune” with my tormentors, er, classmates.
  - banannaise 3y ago
    I think you're describing a different problem - a societal culture that enables and encourages bullying at all ages. If your peers aren't cruel to you, then spending time around them is extremely healthy.

CognitiveLens 3y ago

The causal link to social media is presented very simply in the article, but I suspect that's mainly because the article is not about diagnosis, but about the prevalence of the pattern. There is a lot of data to support the social media effect specifically (some referenced in the linked articles from Twenge), and I suspect the next few posts from Rausch will dive in more deeply, so it's not right to claim that they're jumping to convenient answers - these aren't casual bloggers sharing their reckons. edit: actually there's a heap of related writing on that site, e.g. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epi...

throwup238 3y ago
Not only is there a lot more content on the blog about the topic but Haidt and Rausch have several public Google docs where they keep an ongoing list of evidence for and against their hypotheses. Every time one of their articles gets discussed on HN (which happens at least once a month at this point) the discussion goes in circles about evidence and causality without engaging the meat of the content. HN just doesn’t have any mechanism to promote long term discussions about this topic.
- B56b 3y ago
  It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.

ekianjo 3y ago

> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? Not good enough thats mostly the US doing that

freddie_mercury 3y ago

> what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame. > That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way. It gets discussed on the linked substack constantly.

swsieber 3y ago
> > what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time > None of those things changed dramatically in the 2010-2020 time frame. I disagree. Cell phones come to mind as a major enabler here.

lolinder 3y ago

Jonathan Haidt, the man behind this article and most of this discussion, cofounded LetGrow.org [0] with the explicit intention of helping to free kids from the control that their helicopter parents increasingly smother them with. That organization is behind several laws in various states intended to protect parents who give their kids more freedom. He very much sees social media and helicopter parenting as two sides of the same coin, two tightly related forces that conspire to ruin childhood and thereby ruin children's mental health. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a trend among parents to latch on to Haidt's anti-social-media advocacy while ignoring his recommendations for what we fill the time with instead (hint: free roaming independence!), but it's not because he hasn't been vocal about both aspects. [0] https://letgrow.org/about-us/ https://letgrow.org/about-us/

huytersd 3y ago

Kids have always been very controlled in places like Asia way before the last decade or two. That’s not it.

lolinder 3y ago
Do we have research on how teen mental health in Asia compares to teen mental health elsewhere?