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Kids These Days
- _trampeltier 2mo agoKids in europe walk from early to school and can drive by bisycle pretty far alone, without the police almost shoot parents for leaving children 1 hour alone outside.
- 1234letshaveatw 2mo ago[flagged]
- tboneatx 2mo agoHow is that a downside?
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoThere's no Lake Europe or Gulf of Europe. Or Flock cameras to keep you safe.
- marginalia_nu 2mo agoWe've laid claim to one of Jupiter's moons though.
- bluGill 2mo agoSame happens in the USA all the time. Don't let media impressions fill you.
- DangitBobby 2mo agoWalking or riding my bike to school was certainly not an option. I know very few people (no one?) for which those were options. It was difficult to visit my friends as well so I spent a lot of time alone.
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo agoIt is viable in pre-war developments where cars weren't assumed, such that housing and services needed to be denser.
- bluGill 2mo agoIt happens all the time in newer suburbs. Schools, particularly elementary schools, are almost always built inside of neighborhoods where all the local kids will be walking to school. Now, there are still buses, probably somewhere between a third and a fourth of the kids live close enough to walk to school. However, those who do are generally expected to walk to school in every city I've lived in.
- grebc 2mo agoWhy wasn’t it an option? I regularly walked/rode to & from primary & high school in Australia.
- saghm 2mo agoI'm in my early 30s, and I walked to and from school fairly often growing up in a suburb. My wife is the same age and living in one of the largest cities in the country used to ride the subway to and from school, but basically had the same experience of being able to do it unsupervised for at least some portion of her school years. It's hard for me to imagine what circumstances would lead you to not know anybody who had that option at all.
- jsisto 2mo ago> They have access to cheap travel, better food What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.
- goolz 2mo agoI specifically do not want kids because it feels like I would be shortchanging them. I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. But you are right. Owning a car is absurdly expensive, public transit is pretty grim in the US and definitely not cheap, plus our food supply is literal slop. Even the cheap stuff is expensive now. It is truly depressing. I can’t imagine being a kid who has to navigate all that on top of social media and constant agitprop.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo ago> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.
- matchbok3 2mo agoHave you ever heard of leaded gas?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoDid you see the "these days" part in my comment? Edit: nevermind that even, leaded gas was banned in Europe in 2000, and while I was a child in the 90s, it did not affect me or anyone I know negatively (that we know of), so not sure how to interpret your reply at all.
- matchbok3 2mo agoShortchanging? Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s? (Not the romanticized one). Do you think they were eating organic avocados? Life and technology and healthcare and many other things are objectively better in many, many ways.
- bwhiting2356 2mo ago> but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out. The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.
- jimbokun 2mo agoAs the author also points out.
- bwhiting2356 2mo agomy bad
- hyperhello 2mo ago[flagged]
- EA-3167 2mo agoMad stuff, especially when he reached the “top problems in school” graphic. Does the author really think that kids weren’t doing terrible things back then? It just wasn’t dealt with, victims were blamed, problems ignored. It’s like racism around the world, the countries that least acknowledge it as a problem are the biggest offenders.
- SpecialistK 2mo agoI'm pretty sure the point of the graphic was literally "look, people said the same thing a generation ago about the generation before!" In fact, the sentences around the graphic reinforce this reading: > in the 80s, people were complaining that things had gone to hell. Here’s a popular list (the facts are totally fabricated, by the way) distributed at the time > None of this means that the worriers are mistaken or that we are in the grip of a moral panic (though I might make this argument in another post). But it does suggest that the popularity of despair can’t be taken as good evidence that this despair is warranted.
- fasterik 2mo agoThat's a strange characterization of an article that spends the bulk of the text referencing studies and talking about research practices in psychology. Apart from the No Country for Old Men reference, the images are mostly mental health statistics or polling data. The list of "top problems in U.S. public schools" is quoted from an anthology Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification.
- proee 2mo agoThat was a great article, or maybe it was just a lot of gibberish that failed to say much of anything.
- jimbokun 2mo agoThe article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.
- moffkalast 2mo agoI think that in and of itself shows the broader problem: nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore. Things are changing too quickly, technologically at an unprecedented speed and as a consequence socially in unpredictable ways. We've gone from only having the TV and newspapers, to computers, smartphones, social networks, now actual machines you can talk to like they were humans, in like 30 years total. Quantifying the psychological and sociological effect of it all is nigh impossible. Everyone just does whatever seems like a good idea and hopes for the best, and of course there's no shortage of those talking out of their ass because there is no data yet to prove or disprove any real guidelines to anything. A meteoric rise on anxiety is a completely rational response to that imo, with climate change looming above as a cherry on top.
- njarboe 2mo agoThose things and also everyone always having a video recorder in their pocket and a culture of posting them online where they can go viral, is likely a huge factor.
- jimbokun 2mo agoOne of the difficulties pointed out in the article is the difficulty of finding a control group when the entire culture has been transformed by these technologies.
- reciprocity 2mo agoMood.
- TFNA 2mo agoThis bit strikes me as rather stuck in the past and oblivious to 2026: "the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade." That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community. It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.
- yathern 2mo agoThe article intentionally is giving an overly optimistic view of the modern day, when giving the argument that "kids these days" are better off, and it's quickly contrasted with a pessimistic view: > children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure.... Our children are living in a time of crisis Yes it's stated less technically proficient than your version, but the point remains that you can look at the current internet as a blessing or a curse, and is mostly just an intro to the rest of the article
- TFNA 2mo agoI think this is the first time on HN when I've been one of those people who didn't adequately look at the linked article before commenting, and boy is my face red.
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- ks2048 2mo ago> Teenagers drink less, smoke less, and are less likely to die in car accidents. Why would he put "drink less" is reasons why teens should be happier?
- recursive 2mo agoDon't know about the research, but I've always assumed that drinking has some correlation with psychological pathology. I drink myself, and would self-diagnose myself as being happy. However, drinking, particularly heavy drinking seems correlated to problems.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoDrinking is often (not always) an escape. So if a kid is drinking more than experimentally or e.g. occasional weekend gatherings with friends, it's a good sign they are having trouble coping with something. Same would go for smoking weed, etc. A normal well-adjusted person is not driven to get intoxicated frequently.
- jimbokun 2mo agoThe author discusses at length how the conclusions we reach about social media are strongly tied to our personal values and what we consider “good” or “bad” outcomes.
- donatj 2mo agoI think it's kind of cuts both ways. Some of my happiest memories growing up in the late 90's early 2000's involved drinking with a bunch of friends in their basements. My wife on the other hand drank because she was unhappy. These things are not the same.
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- AnodicElegy 2mo agoWhy call out "drink less" but not "smoke less"? Both are recreational drugs, both are socially stimulative, but only the former has the propensity to lead to serious harm in the short term.
- cjs_ac 2mo agoOne observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different problem.
- grebc 2mo agoChildren are easily led on, and if we’re being honest most adults are too.
- Arodex 2mo agoIt is a well established fact now that suicide is contagious. Just the mention of it is enough to cause a spike in suicide attempts. Then how do you tell people that they can be helped about it without triggering the very thing?
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI would say you mention it when the subject has already come up. Probably do not however devote an entire class period or a special school assembly to it.
- citadel_melon 2mo agoReminds me of the task “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The first thing you do is think of a pink elephant. The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.” Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.
- antonymoose 2mo agoI once heard a lecture from an attorney, one of his tenets was as to completely avoid topics you don’t want opposing council to clue in on and attack. Don’t they to preempt it, just ignore it entirely unless you’re forced to confront it. The analogy was “don’t tell your kid not to stick crayons in their nose” - otherwise, well, they most certainly will latch on to the topic and do so.
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- xg15 2mo agoI feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking. "Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."
- EA-3167 2mo agoIf the respiratory symptom you’re talking about is lung cancer then the rate of that has dropped by hundreds of thousands. Not smoking works, but maybe people need more freedom to hurt themselves. I’d support that if society didn’t have to pay their bills later on.
- xg15 2mo agoTrue, but I imagine in an environment in which the vast majority of people smoke, the ones who don't will probably still passively inhale a lot more toxins than if no one smoked at all - making the effect size in direct comparison with smokers seem weaker than we know today it really is. I believe social media and phone use could have a similar dynamic - like the kids said themselves, it's more a "collective action" than an individual problem. That was what I was trying to get at with that analogy.
- graemep 2mo agoOne of the effects of heavy social media and phone use is parents (and other carers) paying less attention to kids.
- pibaker 2mo agohttps://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-now-spend-twice-as-much-time-with-their-children-as-50-years-ago https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-... > Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago
- undeveloper 2mo agoa lot of attention given to phones, somewhat rightly so, but little to the rest of society. class -- can we think of any current events might lead to children being despondent about their future? anything at all going on in the world?
- graemep 2mo agoCompared to world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, widespread racism, etc.? No.
- alphawhisky 2mo agoThe dissolution of many of the financial/social cornerstones of our society such as: class mobility, third places, education, trust in your neighbor, privacy, meritocracy, free thinking (and the right to dissent), etc. My question to the reader is this: Who benefits from this?
- moffkalast 2mo ago> My friend Frank Keil has a terrific new book out (buy it here), in which, among many other things, he mourns the loss of tinkering. Children and teenagers used to take things apart and put them back together again—toasters, bicycles, and especially cars. Keil argues that the decline of tinkering has had profound consequences for children and adolescents’ understanding of the world. It is somewhat sad that things have gradually become more un-tinkerable. What used to be a bunch of large components over a large circuit board, or maybe even a mechanical system is now a tiny chip with literally no way to tell anything about it when you disassemble it. On the other hand, there's far, far more resources for dedicated tinkering these days. $5 microcontrollers and electronics kits 20 years ago? Not a thing. Internet guides you can follow to master it all? Good luck with books that are too hard for you to start reading without a mentor or a school. Learning tinkering has never been easier, but people's motivation for it has never been lower either.
- II2II 2mo agoWhen people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.
- qball 2mo agoSounds like you had a pretty lame childhood to me, and in the 30 years since it's only become worse. Much like panda bears in captivity, it is unusually difficult to give a human being a life that resembles what it evolved for, which mostly involves convincing other humans to back off the safetyism a little. What dignity can be found in the life of the modern child?
- testing22321 2mo agoI felt the same way as an adult exploring Africa for three years. One guy even said I was a lion that grew up in captivity, so not completely wild. “People in developed countries don’t know how to really live, they just die slowly” Note that guy lived in the US for a decade, and his adult kids still do.
- Huarache1 2mo agoI've only ever felt alive when I left back to Peru. You're quite literally forced to always live in the moment, rather than plan for the future, or even ruminate in the past. Something about the environment, maybe the increased Microbiota due to food, higher freshness and Non-GMO food, being forced to talk with family. Its not as though as screens aren't present, but they don't feel so overwhelming back there. Despite Lima having pretty bad places (hence the joke of Perukistan), Peru overall has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, with underreporting being unlikely, since their neighbors with similar culture have less infrastructure yet report much more.
- II2II 2mo agoThere is a bit of a difference between making a explosives and planting a bomb in another student's locker. The former involves taking risks and may have some utility. The latter only results in others living in fear. Call that lame if you will. I'd rather think of it as being civil.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoSaying that teenage pregnancy, rape, suicide and alcohol abuse were not serious problems in 1940 is some serious head-in-sand thinking.
- usernametaken29 2mo agoI think one aspect that wasn’t discussed in this article sufficiently is: > given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out. Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media. I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake. In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years. Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.
- testing22321 2mo agoThere are a few towns around the world that ban phones and social media for kids. I really like this approach because it means nobody feels left out, and the parents are not the bad guys. Fingers crossed it comes to my mountain hippie town before my 2 year old wants it.
- ip26 2mo agoyou need to be able to experiment With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.
- usernametaken29 2mo agoAbsolute case in point, in Germany drinking age is 16, but if you’re drunk and goofy and on social media rest assured you’ll be an outcast for a long while
- ytoawwhra92 2mo ago> With what? With stuff that you're be free to do as an adult with minimal to no restrictions. Teens should have opportunities to experiment with these activities in safe spaces so that they have direct life experience to reflect on when they're in a less safe or unsafe environment.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoI can't stand this writing style. It's very boomer-ey and reeks of elitism and "well back in MUH day we just toughed it out and it was great and the kids these days are too WEAK!" This article is so unbelievably misguided. Kids nowadays deal with a lot of crap that none of us dealt with in the 80s/90s/2000s.
- Huarache1 2mo agoIt's written by someone who lived through the "End of History". That is, someone who lived through the best periods of America and Liberalism, and didn't know that it ended at 2014, the exact year China surpassed the US in PPP, and still lives with the "End of History" optimism and wealth the rest of us never got to experience.
- hefner1456 2mo agoIm a layman... but how do you measure social medias impacts, when everyones algorithm is different? If everyone is on it but having a different experience, how can that be measured? I imagine some are better at being resistant to it and can subconsciencly push it to more positive direction and ignore the depression-bait it starts feeding them when IT knows they are down... I was in a severly nacassistic relationship for years, and while I'm mostly over it, those few times a year I log into facebook, all it wants to do is remind me of it and feed me all this victim crap. It can't be healthy for a young mind to be staring at this all day, its absolutely manipulating. It's kind of messed up.
- cowpig 2mo agomeanwhile: https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-settlements-over-childrens-social-media-addiction-2026-08-26/ https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...