Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.
As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses. Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.
So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions.
Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today.
After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These are activities people still alive today will recall.
With that, online is still in part a wild-west and new playfield, open, less restrictions compared to real life and with that, perhaps the logical outlet for teenage freedom.
But even that is slowly being eroded away with the same mentalities that drove children into 1984 style parenting.
With that, todays children may very well in their 50's look at the children of the time and feel how restricted and curtailed they are compared to the freedoms they enjoyed in their time. That would not surprise me, but equally, when do laws, rules, restrictions reach a zenith when no more need be added or changed! Until then, the lamentations of life march on.
Yes, more and more super-suburban living, combined with increasingly restrictive teen driving regulations, curfews, and fear-based media stories about abductions have ratcheted down the ability of teens to hang out together. So when technology came along to enable improved interpersonal contact, it was embraced far more rapidly than it would have been if teen freedom were as high as it was in the 70s.
The graphs they show don't perfectly correlate to the trends in hanging out in person. While smartphones have definitely contributed to changes in the culture (for everyone, not just teens), it's false to pretend that they are entirely responsible for changes in loneliness. It just as well may correlate to being bombarded by reactionary hatred from adults over things teens have grown up thinking about more openly, like more open ideas about gender and sexuality. Or perhaps from finding themselves in a culture of fear about mass shootings while again faced with an adult political establishment who does nothing about it. Or maybe just facing the reality that the grown-ups are making things worse, day by day, and that they're going to have to clean this all up after us.
Before 9/11, kids could get away with more. Not so these days (so I'm told)
Anecdote: my dad was stopped in an early 70s Mazda that was barely running and had a rusty floorboard hole so big you could stick your foot in it and flintstone down the road if you were a moron. He and a buddy loaded up 3-6 rifles and threw them in the back seat to go on down the road to shoot some skeets and/or whatever poor Cardinals were handy. No internet in those days, what are some bored teens to do?
Long story short, they were pulled over, told to get their erm unique vehicle and weapons outta the LEOs county before he changed his mind.
Today? Anyone getting pulled over like that would be jailed on charges of terrorism/conspiracy/something but that behavior would be considered highly irregular and put a stop to immediately. Punks like my dad would not be given a stern warning and marching orders, what police officer in their right mind would be caught on camera letting punks with several rifles go off wherever? Our societal walls of range of behavior have shrunk a lot thanks to ever-present electronic recording and unbounded fear of violent crimes.
But the internet? You can have a lotta fun on the internet, whether its HN, iwastesomuchtime.com, liliputing, Netflix, etc.
There also ought be more public spaces in general. When everything is all zoned up to be residential or commercial, there's nowhere to go without a credit card.
I can tell you that as a parent of an 18 yr old, I've always encouraged him to go out and be with his friends. Since he was 12, he's much preferred to meet online in games. Whole groups of them. Whooping and hollering until the wee hours of the morning, when they can.
But, I generally agree with your statement.
Oh, I have a son, some it might be vastly different for daughters.
>As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present.
This is byproduct of the "stranger danger", everything is trying to harm you/kill you mentality.
>Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses.
Curfews are always the double-edged reasoning sword used: It's to prevent crime and/or keep kids safe. This is, more or less, the byproduct of adults acquiescing to the government's mandates, yeah?
>Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.
Well, this is only partially true. For one, you're not considering that malls, in the classical sense as we remember them, have been pretty much replaced by strip malls (unless you're in Europe). For two, this entirely negates swathes of teens who live "in the sticks", as it were, where the nearest town (much less, city) is 10km or more away.
I'd like to see a breakdown of these stats in an urban versus rural environment context and by social classes context.
I'd suspect that those whom are far more disadvantaged are quite more likely to meet-up in person than their more affluent counterparts. I'd also suspect that there's correlation between the urban and rural teenagers, as well, in terms of classes, which might lend directly back to whether or not they're more or less likely to meet-up in person (given the disadvantaged, who are more apt to live in rural areas, will probably have far few incidences of access to mobile phones).
I was kind of wild in high school. I graduated in 2008.
We had a lot of parties. drinking, smoking, etc.
My parents were really upset with me later in life. I have always brought up to them The fact that they were allowed to drink at 18. There were bars that would accept them. They had places to go.
In 2008, me and my peers had nowhere to go. The choice is to either find a place to secretly meet, or don't congregate at all in your teens. The choice there is obvious.
> Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.
Part of this is the ever increasing liability (real or perceived) of being in any proximity to somebody else's kids as a business owner or member of the general public.
This doesn't just apply to teens: we as a society suck at creating social spaces outside of the home and work for anyone. Churches failed catastrophically to adapt to changing social values, civil-society type organizations have done nothing but decline for decades, and people in general have less free time to devote to building communities outside of work.
> Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.
This should be easy to check. If this is true, then it would be different in countries with different laws and customs. My impression (from what I read about it online) is that American parents and society tend to be much restrictive about freedom for their kids than parents elsewhere.
I certainly encourage my son (9) to go out more, but he just doesn't want to. He meets his friends online. I would love to give him a 4 day train ticket when he is 12 to travel the country on his own like I did at that age, but I doubt he'll be interested.
And the abundance of mobile phones just makes that sort of freedom easier, not harder. I think it's really just the addictive nature of computers and online interaction that makes meeting people in person less relevant.
I have to laugh at this. If one more teen tells me they don't want to leave the house or learn to drive, because they "don't need to"... I guess it's not their choice. They're infantilized by their parents so that they no longer want to leave and be independent. They just want to send pictures by phone. It's their parents fault, not society, or technology, and certainly not the choice of the children, because remember they've been infantilized! Poor things... the creek, a stick, and some friends, just aren't as interesting as they used to be. Sigh... if only we hadn't made him go camping or learn to ride a bike.
Idk if this is specific to my generation, but us young people suck at hanging out. People never confirm whether or not they're going to an event. They flake all the time, often without warning. If they're not flaking, they're perpetually late, often absurdly (nothing like getting to a place and getting a text about just leaving). It drives me nuts. But it's so ubiquitous, it's hard to take a stand against it. It's like people forgot how to hang out with friends.
When I was a kid we had relatives who were always late by half an hour or more. I remember my parents planning event with sometimes hours of buffer to account for people being late with no mean to check if they'll even be there in the end.
I think we are more sensitive to these issues because there's less excuses (even 'traffic was bad' is less and less an excuse as we get ETAs, it needs to be something really bad happening to get sympathy).
We are more used to things being in sync (pre-checking shop opening hours or having average wait times for instance) and moving generally fast.
When I was a kid, which is getting to be a long time ago, we never really scheduled anything. People in our peer group tended to hang out in maybe 6-10 different locations - one being a particular bar, one being a particular corner, one being a particular house, etc. Sometimes a location would disappear, sometimes you'd hear about a new location.
On your downtime, you would go to one of those locations and join the group already there, or loiter a little while until someone you knew showed up. If nobody showed up, you'd drift to one of the other locations and do the same thing. One out of 20 times you'd go home without seeing anybody that you were interested in hanging out with.
That's how a commons works, I think. The problem is a lack of a commons, and a suspicion of people in public who aren't currently in the process of shopping. The idea that in this alienated time I'd go to a particular restaurant where people go, drink coffee and just wait for somebody to show up that wanted to hang out almost sounds utopian or suspiciously foreign, but it was my life from probably age 12 to 24.
I don't know if it's teenagers today, but that's always been the case for me and I'm in my mid 30s. Going outside close knit circle of people you know real well for a while, when you create an event people are perpetually going to leave their answer to the last minute or say maybe.
> It's like people forgot how to hang out with friends.
This isn't unique, I grew up on the cusp of cellphone ubiquity, and I think it's that in the first few years after people have real latitude in managing their own time, there's a steep learning curve. In In my experience though, this started to change around 18/19 when people started to realize that being flakey isn't cool. Does it seem like that's happening/happened with your peer group?
I volunteer at STEM after school program at a Northern California suburban public school in a very affluent county. Engineers from the local companies work on projects with hacker kids.
It's a pretty dreamy albeit "canned" town, I never lived in a place that nice. Lots of cul de sacs and "mini malls" and "canned fun" places that are very walkable (unlike the poorer suburbs where kids have to cross 8 lanes of traffic to meet at a Shari's).
I noticed that before I show up at 5PM (I get to leave work early two fridays a month, yay!, the kids are sitting around on their phones. And when I leave at 7pm, kids just go home with their parents. First: few of them drive. WTF?! Then the weird part: there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch of restaurants and TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and they just ... go home. WTF.
Maybe they are lying to the adults in the room, but the parents claim they go home and text or play computer games all night.
There's also the fact that when you're in the suburbs, you need a chauffeur until you can drive. American adults are working more and more, and thus less available to take children to outside activities, which these days are also further and further apart.
> It turns out that today’s teens are socializing with friends in fundamentally different ways – and also happen to be the loneliest generation on record.
This is a very sad observation.
(as I sit at a computer, not looking at anyone, and type these words)
All the sillhouettes of kids in the banner have undercuts and it makes me shivver. Hate that style. I guess I'm an old man now.
Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default. In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or unavailable, like when I haven't had a new game to play in a while, or my sister was hogging the internet.
The separation has only increased as at-home activities have gotten less boring and more available, and as physical presence became less neccessary for social activities like games.
AIM was great, we could chat without having to be physically together.
Battle.net was great, we could play games without having to be physically together.
Xbox Live was great, we could play games AND chat at the same time without having to be physically together. (many fond memories of high school nights quizzing each other on history while blowing each other up in Halo 3)
Facebook was great, we could share stories and media without having to be physically together, and asynchronously as a bonus.
I am not convinced that face-to-face interaction is an inherent good. The last several decades of technological development have been the story of people striving to spend less time with each other physically. Especially given the article's proposed explanation that "friend groups meet on instragram now, and kids without instagram are lonely", the barriers to telecommunication are lower than ever before.
Or maybe we should cut this thread short and save the discussion for Linuxfest Northwest.
For the less socials teens, it's much easier for them to play an online game with each other than to actually meetup in person. I would know, because I used to be one of them.
Meeting together in person used to give me tremendous anxiety and as a result I would always vouch for taking the easy way out. In hindsight, I wish I had actually made more of an effort to hangout during my high school years because deep down I did enjoy those personal interactions. Nowadays I'm a lot more social than I was in the past and a lot more happier as a result too.
"Tech" corporations have successfully conned a large portion of the population into believing that clicking a thumbs up icon under a photo of someone's breakfast or mindlessly scrolling through useless reposted memes qualifies as "staying in touch".
Even when people do venture out, it often seems to be for the sole purpose of collecting carefully planned and staged selfies that they feel will gain them more thumbs up clicks.
It's a sad situation, and I feel bad for the kids who are growing up in a world where this shit has a death grip on all of their peers.
I wonder if one of the biggest drivers of loneliness isn't necessarily that kids are spending more time on their phones or even that they have less face time with their friends, but that their social media can tell them more about what their friends are doing when they aren't together. First, everyone knows people curate their social media presence so that they look cool and that they are doing fun things. Second, if two of my friends in my group of friends hung out, I wouldn't necessarily know about it until after the fact. I wouldn't be able to see fun images of my friends or even people who were like the "cool kids" hanging out. Essentially, that limited the amount of FOMO you could experience because you just didn't have that ability.
I definitely think some of it also has to do with the level of control and protection we try to place on kids as well. It's just probably discouraging to kids or, worse, they sense their parent's fear that something will happen to them so they become afraid and ultimately pull themselves back from social interactions.
I wonder if kids also tend to feel more lonely because parents have also increased their smartphone usage. When I go out to restaurants, I feel like I am more likely to see entire families on their phones sitting around the table instead of talking with one another. That can't help either.
Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?
You can download the data for the chart. It's actually 2007 if you don't eyeball it. I think we're probably seeing Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. The great recession made loneliness less important to them or less apparent to them. Pretty cool actually. This kind of thing is probably unaccounted for in many similar studies.
Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety and thus 'loneliness'.
There may be a fear element that also affects adults -- some time ago, I was at a work party at a bar in a major city. (Nice bar, ritzy area) Everybody else either came in groups by car or had a hotel within walking distance; mine's quite a way out. Shortly past midnight I'm tired of watching people act stupid and tell folks I'm walking back (alone). Most of them were surprised I was willing to do that!
But in my youth, also in a major city, I'd walk back from the movies or wherever with other kids around 1-2am all the time. You had to know which areas were lit and not stare strangers straight in the eye, but that's kinda normal, and certainly no one then felt walking was inherently dangerous. What world do we live in that a bunch of semi drunk adults can't handle the night for 2 miles?
No wonder their kids are spending their lives' quietest hours in front of a screen if that's the risk tolerance calibration of the parents.
Showing two graphs with opposite directions and claiming one is the cause of the other is not how one should present their claims.
It could be just the case that because of some other reason(s) teens spend less face-to-face time with their friends, and they spend more time on social media.
Beside, the second graph already shows high loneliness rates in 80s, too. Is this also because of social media which did not exist in 80s?
There can be so many other reasons for teens to feel depressed: economy, global warming, the increasing gap between rich and poor, mortgage crisis, and now student debt crisis, so on and on.
Please do not divert our attention to wrong reasons, or please make sure that you are really on top of your game.
No, sense of community is actually stronger than ever I think. But those communities are less geographic and much more ideological. The communal bond these days happens more in ideas and beliefs than in physical proximity. Social media made it so, and this shifted sense of community has given rise to increasingly radical and extreme ideologies — but also much stronger bonds in my opinion.
I think it’s just an indication of how much more addicting technology is than people care to admit. To say that there was nothing fun to do back in the olden days would be false. These days there are way more options that are much more addicting and gratifying. Why play in the park when you can blast people online. Games are designed to build addiction and sure enough it works - kids would rather fame than do anything outside.
I don’t know if there is any easy way around this. I personally struggled with gaming addiction for the longest time and kept lying to myself that I was in total control. Looking back I feel sorry for all the kids who are sucked into the world of gaming now, especially when adults who grew up gaming themselves are nothing wrong with it. I tuned into a random twitch stream one time with this grown ass guy playing some mmo and his little kid came in the room and asked daddy to play with him. He just dismissed the kiddo and told him to go find mommy. Really fucking sad.
>To say that there was nothing fun to do back in the olden days would be false.
I think people are saying the opposite. When I think back at all the most fun things I did as a kid, a large chunk of them are totally unavailable to most kids now.
What is there for a kid to do outside now? Most of them could go outside and walk for hours in any direction and not find anything but rows of houses and roads. Likely all of their friends live so far away that walking there isn't an option.
Why play in the park when there may be no park you can get to without your parents driving you there and when you get there you find no one your age or that you know.
According to some experts, spending more time on social media and less time face to face, might result in emotional under development as the conditions for the formation of the brain circuitry in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are not adequately met. [1]
The OFC is not well understood, but it has been implicated in mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, etc.
From my experience, the feeling of loneliness has little to do with face time with friends. You can feel "lonely" even if you're constantly surrounded by friends/family.
The competitive nature of the world, as felt by youth in particular, might have something to do with it. Spending time "just hanging out" might seem like a waste of time when you see people your age making millions of dollars online. I guess this is another side of the "comparing your life to other people's" problem.
[+] [-] Zak|7 years ago|reply
As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses. Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.
[+] [-] Zenst|7 years ago|reply
Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today.
After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife. Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention. These are activities people still alive today will recall.
With that, online is still in part a wild-west and new playfield, open, less restrictions compared to real life and with that, perhaps the logical outlet for teenage freedom.
But even that is slowly being eroded away with the same mentalities that drove children into 1984 style parenting.
With that, todays children may very well in their 50's look at the children of the time and feel how restricted and curtailed they are compared to the freedoms they enjoyed in their time. That would not surprise me, but equally, when do laws, rules, restrictions reach a zenith when no more need be added or changed! Until then, the lamentations of life march on.
[+] [-] skywhopper|7 years ago|reply
The graphs they show don't perfectly correlate to the trends in hanging out in person. While smartphones have definitely contributed to changes in the culture (for everyone, not just teens), it's false to pretend that they are entirely responsible for changes in loneliness. It just as well may correlate to being bombarded by reactionary hatred from adults over things teens have grown up thinking about more openly, like more open ideas about gender and sexuality. Or perhaps from finding themselves in a culture of fear about mass shootings while again faced with an adult political establishment who does nothing about it. Or maybe just facing the reality that the grown-ups are making things worse, day by day, and that they're going to have to clean this all up after us.
Smartphones have nothing to do with that.
[+] [-] Multicomp|7 years ago|reply
Anecdote: my dad was stopped in an early 70s Mazda that was barely running and had a rusty floorboard hole so big you could stick your foot in it and flintstone down the road if you were a moron. He and a buddy loaded up 3-6 rifles and threw them in the back seat to go on down the road to shoot some skeets and/or whatever poor Cardinals were handy. No internet in those days, what are some bored teens to do?
Long story short, they were pulled over, told to get their erm unique vehicle and weapons outta the LEOs county before he changed his mind.
Today? Anyone getting pulled over like that would be jailed on charges of terrorism/conspiracy/something but that behavior would be considered highly irregular and put a stop to immediately. Punks like my dad would not be given a stern warning and marching orders, what police officer in their right mind would be caught on camera letting punks with several rifles go off wherever? Our societal walls of range of behavior have shrunk a lot thanks to ever-present electronic recording and unbounded fear of violent crimes.
But the internet? You can have a lotta fun on the internet, whether its HN, iwastesomuchtime.com, liliputing, Netflix, etc.
[+] [-] threatofrain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|7 years ago|reply
But, I generally agree with your statement.
Oh, I have a son, some it might be vastly different for daughters.
[+] [-] renholder|7 years ago|reply
This is byproduct of the "stranger danger", everything is trying to harm you/kill you mentality.
>Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses.
Curfews are always the double-edged reasoning sword used: It's to prevent crime and/or keep kids safe. This is, more or less, the byproduct of adults acquiescing to the government's mandates, yeah?
>Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.
Well, this is only partially true. For one, you're not considering that malls, in the classical sense as we remember them, have been pretty much replaced by strip malls (unless you're in Europe). For two, this entirely negates swathes of teens who live "in the sticks", as it were, where the nearest town (much less, city) is 10km or more away.
I'd like to see a breakdown of these stats in an urban versus rural environment context and by social classes context.
I'd suspect that those whom are far more disadvantaged are quite more likely to meet-up in person than their more affluent counterparts. I'd also suspect that there's correlation between the urban and rural teenagers, as well, in terms of classes, which might lend directly back to whether or not they're more or less likely to meet-up in person (given the disadvantaged, who are more apt to live in rural areas, will probably have far few incidences of access to mobile phones).
[+] [-] honkycat|7 years ago|reply
We had a lot of parties. drinking, smoking, etc.
My parents were really upset with me later in life. I have always brought up to them The fact that they were allowed to drink at 18. There were bars that would accept them. They had places to go.
In 2008, me and my peers had nowhere to go. The choice is to either find a place to secretly meet, or don't congregate at all in your teens. The choice there is obvious.
[+] [-] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
Part of this is the ever increasing liability (real or perceived) of being in any proximity to somebody else's kids as a business owner or member of the general public.
[+] [-] cirgue|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|7 years ago|reply
This should be easy to check. If this is true, then it would be different in countries with different laws and customs. My impression (from what I read about it online) is that American parents and society tend to be much restrictive about freedom for their kids than parents elsewhere.
I certainly encourage my son (9) to go out more, but he just doesn't want to. He meets his friends online. I would love to give him a 4 day train ticket when he is 12 to travel the country on his own like I did at that age, but I doubt he'll be interested.
And the abundance of mobile phones just makes that sort of freedom easier, not harder. I think it's really just the addictive nature of computers and online interaction that makes meeting people in person less relevant.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|7 years ago|reply
i dont understand it personally
[+] [-] kurthr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|7 years ago|reply
Tell me a family that says " YOU BETTER BE HOME BY SUNDOWN "
Today.
Regardless of neighborhood...
I used to only come home for provisions and to prevent being grounded.
LET THE FUCKING KIDS PLAY. FORCE them to be outside and play. Period.
This is how you get nice things, like the internet.
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|7 years ago|reply
I think we are more sensitive to these issues because there's less excuses (even 'traffic was bad' is less and less an excuse as we get ETAs, it needs to be something really bad happening to get sympathy).
We are more used to things being in sync (pre-checking shop opening hours or having average wait times for instance) and moving generally fast.
[+] [-] pessimizer|7 years ago|reply
On your downtime, you would go to one of those locations and join the group already there, or loiter a little while until someone you knew showed up. If nobody showed up, you'd drift to one of the other locations and do the same thing. One out of 20 times you'd go home without seeing anybody that you were interested in hanging out with.
That's how a commons works, I think. The problem is a lack of a commons, and a suspicion of people in public who aren't currently in the process of shopping. The idea that in this alienated time I'd go to a particular restaurant where people go, drink coffee and just wait for somebody to show up that wanted to hang out almost sounds utopian or suspiciously foreign, but it was my life from probably age 12 to 24.
[+] [-] winningcontinue|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justwalt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cirgue|7 years ago|reply
This isn't unique, I grew up on the cusp of cellphone ubiquity, and I think it's that in the first few years after people have real latitude in managing their own time, there's a steep learning curve. In In my experience though, this started to change around 18/19 when people started to realize that being flakey isn't cool. Does it seem like that's happening/happened with your peer group?
[+] [-] iheartpotatoes|7 years ago|reply
It's a pretty dreamy albeit "canned" town, I never lived in a place that nice. Lots of cul de sacs and "mini malls" and "canned fun" places that are very walkable (unlike the poorer suburbs where kids have to cross 8 lanes of traffic to meet at a Shari's).
I noticed that before I show up at 5PM (I get to leave work early two fridays a month, yay!, the kids are sitting around on their phones. And when I leave at 7pm, kids just go home with their parents. First: few of them drive. WTF?! Then the weird part: there's a frigging movieplex down the street with a bunch of restaurants and TWO parks on opposite sides of the main E/W street... and they just ... go home. WTF.
Maybe they are lying to the adults in the room, but the parents claim they go home and text or play computer games all night.
[+] [-] bobthepanda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...
[+] [-] m463|7 years ago|reply
This is a very sad observation.
(as I sit at a computer, not looking at anyone, and type these words)
[+] [-] hannasanarion|7 years ago|reply
Anyway, I'm hardly surprised that kids aren't spending time with friends in person, because nobody likes spending time with people in person as default. In my childhood in the 90s, I did it only for events that require it, like board games or sports, or when the alternatives are boring or unavailable, like when I haven't had a new game to play in a while, or my sister was hogging the internet.
The separation has only increased as at-home activities have gotten less boring and more available, and as physical presence became less neccessary for social activities like games.
AIM was great, we could chat without having to be physically together.
Battle.net was great, we could play games without having to be physically together.
Xbox Live was great, we could play games AND chat at the same time without having to be physically together. (many fond memories of high school nights quizzing each other on history while blowing each other up in Halo 3)
Facebook was great, we could share stories and media without having to be physically together, and asynchronously as a bonus.
I am not convinced that face-to-face interaction is an inherent good. The last several decades of technological development have been the story of people striving to spend less time with each other physically. Especially given the article's proposed explanation that "friend groups meet on instragram now, and kids without instagram are lonely", the barriers to telecommunication are lower than ever before.
Or maybe we should cut this thread short and save the discussion for Linuxfest Northwest.
[+] [-] penciljencil|7 years ago|reply
Meeting together in person used to give me tremendous anxiety and as a result I would always vouch for taking the easy way out. In hindsight, I wish I had actually made more of an effort to hangout during my high school years because deep down I did enjoy those personal interactions. Nowadays I'm a lot more social than I was in the past and a lot more happier as a result too.
[+] [-] 908087|7 years ago|reply
Even when people do venture out, it often seems to be for the sole purpose of collecting carefully planned and staged selfies that they feel will gain them more thumbs up clicks.
It's a sad situation, and I feel bad for the kids who are growing up in a world where this shit has a death grip on all of their peers.
[+] [-] AmazingAtalanta|7 years ago|reply
I definitely think some of it also has to do with the level of control and protection we try to place on kids as well. It's just probably discouraging to kids or, worse, they sense their parent's fear that something will happen to them so they become afraid and ultimately pull themselves back from social interactions.
I wonder if kids also tend to feel more lonely because parents have also increased their smartphone usage. When I go out to restaurants, I feel like I am more likely to see entire families on their phones sitting around the table instead of talking with one another. That can't help either.
[+] [-] Vagantem|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_tterc_p|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lskopwol|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobush|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] arandr0x|7 years ago|reply
But in my youth, also in a major city, I'd walk back from the movies or wherever with other kids around 1-2am all the time. You had to know which areas were lit and not stare strangers straight in the eye, but that's kinda normal, and certainly no one then felt walking was inherently dangerous. What world do we live in that a bunch of semi drunk adults can't handle the night for 2 miles?
No wonder their kids are spending their lives' quietest hours in front of a screen if that's the risk tolerance calibration of the parents.
[+] [-] ctulek|7 years ago|reply
Showing two graphs with opposite directions and claiming one is the cause of the other is not how one should present their claims.
It could be just the case that because of some other reason(s) teens spend less face-to-face time with their friends, and they spend more time on social media.
Beside, the second graph already shows high loneliness rates in 80s, too. Is this also because of social media which did not exist in 80s?
There can be so many other reasons for teens to feel depressed: economy, global warming, the increasing gap between rich and poor, mortgage crisis, and now student debt crisis, so on and on.
Please do not divert our attention to wrong reasons, or please make sure that you are really on top of your game.
[+] [-] bitxbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbosch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Maybe the rate of violent crime is roughly constant for time spent with others.
[1] https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/
[+] [-] mrhappyunhappy|7 years ago|reply
I don’t know if there is any easy way around this. I personally struggled with gaming addiction for the longest time and kept lying to myself that I was in total control. Looking back I feel sorry for all the kids who are sucked into the world of gaming now, especially when adults who grew up gaming themselves are nothing wrong with it. I tuned into a random twitch stream one time with this grown ass guy playing some mmo and his little kid came in the room and asked daddy to play with him. He just dismissed the kiddo and told him to go find mommy. Really fucking sad.
[+] [-] baroffoos|7 years ago|reply
I think people are saying the opposite. When I think back at all the most fun things I did as a kid, a large chunk of them are totally unavailable to most kids now.
What is there for a kid to do outside now? Most of them could go outside and walk for hours in any direction and not find anything but rows of houses and roads. Likely all of their friends live so far away that walking there isn't an option.
Why play in the park when there may be no park you can get to without your parents driving you there and when you get there you find no one your age or that you know.
[+] [-] plainOldText|7 years ago|reply
The OFC is not well understood, but it has been implicated in mental disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, etc.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2YdpvnwtGc&feature=youtu.be...
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|7 years ago|reply
I am judging this author very harshly for making up their own label for something everybody else already has a name for.
[+] [-] nstj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danschumann|7 years ago|reply