IMO one of the root causes of the issues kids have these days is the fear culture where it's no longer acceptable for parents to let younger kids do things on their own.
When I was in grade school in the early 1990's, all of the grade-school-aged neighborhood kids walked to school, and roamed the streets freely after school and on the weekends. I used to walk to the library, the book store, the hobby shop, the park, the pool, etc.
Now, I can't let my grade-school aged kids out to play or to go into a store without supervision. People literally call the police when they see a 9-year-old alone, and the police say it is unsafe. There are many stories of child protective services getting involved, and even threatening to remove children from homes, just because the parents allowed them go outside unsupervised. It's insane.
There is no way that that doesn't have a big effect on people.
If you read any discourse about teenage suicide over at least the past 2 decades (since I started reading the news), it was always focused on the disproportionately high number of boys who died of suicide vs girls. In fact, the disproportionately number of high attempts by girls was rarely even mentioned in most discussions, unless it was in the context of gun regulation because it has been quite clear for a while that more boys died because they tried to commit suicide by guns.
The reason the media is focusing on girls in the context of suicide right now is simply because the recently released CDC numbers show a huge increase in girls attempting suicide in the past, an effect which hasn’t been as large in boys.
For decades the focus has indeed been on the disproportionate number of boys who died of suicide. But the huge jump in girls feeling depressed and having suicidal thoughts is new. Hence, it’s being covered more in the news right now.
The ability of some people to turn everything into us vs them grievances is mind boggling to me.
> The conflation of suicide rates with forced sex here seems at best highly misleading. The sexual frequency number is rather obviously a reflection of two years where people were doing rather a lot of social distancing. With the end of that, essentially anything social is going to go up in frequency, whether it is good, bad or horrifying – only a 27 percent increase seems well within the range one would expect from that. Given all the other trends in the world, it would be very surprising to me if the rates of girls being subjected to forced sex (for any plausible fixed definition of that) were not continuing to decline.
If you look at the data from the cdc [0] there's no dip during quarantine like that paragraph would suggest leading to this sudden surge in comparison. Theres just an increase
My understanding is that males tend to choose methods of suicide with higher rates of success and therefore actually die in their suicide attempts more often.
I was born in the late 90's and so I grew up with social media existing: first MSN Messenger, then [pre-FB social network popular where I lived], later Facebook, and that's just the networks my classmates used. I had a smartphone in the last three years I was in highschool.
The bit where the author reacts incredulously to cyberbullying not increasing with smartphones is… weird, to me. I am not convinced smartphones made social media more of a thing, they just shifted the mode of consumption. Social media was a thing at least five years before smartphones were.
I think the moral panic about smartphones ruining kids' lives is looking in the wrong places. The internet gave me a safe place to discover myself and escape real-life bullying. If I hadn't had internet access I don't think I'd have been happier.
Smartphones increased usage of social media because you can use it everywhere, all the time. When it was tied to a PC at home, there was a natural limit.
> Young people in liberal peer group social circles – which is most young people, especially given the internet – were increasingly socially punished for not expressing the view that a lot of extremely depressing things were happening.
Blaming the awareness instead of the actual depressing thing.
The short-form video algorithms like TikTok, IG Stories, YouTube stories etc., seem to be masterfully tuned to figure out what you're insecure about and then harass you with content that reinforces that message.
It would have been poisonous to my adolescent brain.
Yale university has a free course on coursera called "The Science of Well-being"
The aim is to help teenagers feel better and build healthier habits. It's a very popular course, and you should share it with any teen you know.
I do not understand the introduction to this post. "Could the kids be depressed because we keep telling them (rightfully) that humanity is fucked and has no future and that they'll experience societal collapse in their lifetime due to entirely preventable causes? Heck no! It's the phones."
I'll need something more convincing than a "heck no" and a South Park meme.
No, it is the phones. Every generation all through the 20th century has had its existential crises and they've all been alright. Until now, where it's the phones.
> I'll need something more convincing than a "heck no" and a South Park meme.
Well, good for you, the post is real long! (I did find some good observations towards the middle, and appreciated the look at various other theories and statistics)
I notice in this article a pattern where the author makes some really detailed statistical analysis of a trend, including rebuttal to some theories that aren't backed up by the statistics in a useful, well-presented way --
And then immediately launches on a tangent based on a self proclaimed theory with no backup...
But one of the major points he makes is that the economy isn't actually that notably worse, because we all have a roof or something? This point strikes me as very out of touch. There are a significant number of people who are in significantly more precarious economic situations. The gap is widening due to rising housing, healthcare, education, etc costs. He does mention this but somehow manages to also dismiss it...
> I notice that this graph is suggesting something happened around 2011 that impacted everyone, and disproportionally impacted only liberal girls.
The author uses this point to (IMO) bash liberal views as forcing kids to act depressed. A lot of the article was subtly tainted with the authors personal politics, and I think this is one of the times they distracted themselves with their own views.
> Another aspect of liberal politics is the focus on various forms of identity, including demands for how kids must react to things and then potentially severe punishment if caught reacting the ‘wrong’ way...
I was a high schooler in 2011. Thats basically when phones started to get common (in my rich, liberal, suburb at least). I do think it's more likely that the introduction of 24/7 social media that is in-person during the school day would have a worse and immediate affect for girls. This assumes that liberal girl is actually upper middle class and suburban or urban (who would have a family that provided them a phone in high school).
I think the author made a lot of good recognitions elsewhere, but this line of logic just read like political bias.
There's more to be gleaned from the actual full M&M tables, these are just the web tables available re: suicide.
NOTE WELL!! In AU, UK, USofA etc reporting customs have changed with respect to cause of death and suicide over the years, some dips and peaks may be more related to the culture of reporting rather than rates of actual suicide.
Anecdotally, Switzerland's kids are doing ok, but I haven't checked the public health stats.
One thing that helps is having a stable future ready for them to inherit. They can see the investments our generation is making for them (windmills, car chargers, trains), they have guaranteed education and apprenticeship to bring them into adulthood and independence, and they have a social safety net ready to catch them (I suspect they don't really understand the value of that though).
My point is, it is easy to say "you've got a bright future" and get them to believe it when the entire society is actually organized around making it actually true.
Strong and stable culture makes people happier. You can predict and trust what others are likely to do in a crisis. You can get along with your parents or your kids better. You can take comfort in doing the right thing even if things are not going well. It's not all rosy, lack of flexibility can also lead one to follow dictators, regard dissenters as less than human and forego opportunities. But there is got to be a balance and flat rejection that anything from the past is good and worth preserving is not it.
What is the point of this article? I made it two thirds of the way through before I realized it was all references and no content. Does this person just blog about tweets? I've never been so confused when reading an article this long. How are there so many words and no actual statements?
Except daily disaster news has existed for decades. At least since the first gulf war, and probably hit its peak post 9/11. This was a time where most news broadcasts led with a freaking color coded terror alert, as if it was the weather.
And yet the 2000s, which saw 9/11 as well as the biggest financial crisis since WW2, didn’t see the rapid increase in suicidal thoughts in teens, especially girls, that we saw in the past decade.
Make it hide auto-delete or at least hide from everyone else by default after a while, viewable only by friends, illegal to consider in any school disciplinary action or admissions process or job interview.
I guess he's talking specifically about children's posts here, but I definitely want to know if a kid is threatening to shoot up a school or engaging in online bullying.
I also want to know if a potential hire is a Neo-Nazi or a Qtard.
I'll give my opinion though. It's not that social media apps are the ones hurting us, they are merely exposing us to the nasty nature of humans. Closing your eyes and not using social media doesn't mean the flow of likes and comments will stop. And likewise shutting down social media doesn't mean we will forget what we had before. The cat is out of the bag, humans will now chase to be the top 1% at everything, money, attractiveness, power, etc. Even without their phones they still have permanently changed their worldview.
I don't see a solution other than perhaps shut down the internet completely. And invest in better mental health coping strategies
The post does touch on that. The big counterpoint is that while yes the world is terrible in many ways, your objective lived quality of life depends on what you observe and how you think about it. If you’re more constantly exposed to negativity (and it’s hard to get away from it), you’ll feel more negatively as well.
So your quality of life and happiness can objectively be improved even while the world itself potentially gets worse.
An interesting thing about this post is that it's not obvious which political faction (either in Syria or in the US) this hectoring is even pointed at, let alone what relationship the two problems have.
It's sad to read about "liberal children" and "conservative children". It's like Reformation era Catholics vs Huguenots lol? With either beliefs usually being irrational and imprinted in childhood, even electional politics is increasingly not about convincing liberals to the conservative side or vice versa, but about bringing in more "right" and pushing out more "wrong" voters, redistricting to skew results in "your" favour, or even bringing about conditions that are likely to increase birth rate of "right" electorate or death rate of "wrong" ones (a lot of Covid vaccination messaging done by Biden administration seemed to be tailored to stimulate liberals to vaccinate and conservatives, to avoid vaccination, apparently in hope that they will die and thus not vote in the midterms).
Is this really the world we are heading to? SAD, as Trump would say.
Because it couldn't possibly be more complex and attributable to other causes like, oh I don't know, kicking fathers out of their children's lives (with statistics from the US Census openly stating most all custodial parents are mothers and proportions are statistically unchanged over the years)?
"In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994 (Table A)." [1]
"Custodial parents have become more likely to be fathers over the past 24 years, increasing from 16.0 percent in 1994 to 20.1 percent in 2018...
The number of custodial parents has varied somewhat over the past 24 years, including the proportion of fathers who are custodial parents. In 1994, about 1 of every 6 custodial parents were fathers (16.0 percent). By 2018, that proportion reached 1 in 5 (20.1 percent) (Appendix Table 2)." [2]
[+] [-] D13Fd|3 years ago|reply
When I was in grade school in the early 1990's, all of the grade-school-aged neighborhood kids walked to school, and roamed the streets freely after school and on the weekends. I used to walk to the library, the book store, the hobby shop, the park, the pool, etc.
Now, I can't let my grade-school aged kids out to play or to go into a store without supervision. People literally call the police when they see a 9-year-old alone, and the police say it is unsafe. There are many stories of child protective services getting involved, and even threatening to remove children from homes, just because the parents allowed them go outside unsupervised. It's insane.
There is no way that that doesn't have a big effect on people.
[+] [-] rhaway84773|3 years ago|reply
If you read any discourse about teenage suicide over at least the past 2 decades (since I started reading the news), it was always focused on the disproportionately high number of boys who died of suicide vs girls. In fact, the disproportionately number of high attempts by girls was rarely even mentioned in most discussions, unless it was in the context of gun regulation because it has been quite clear for a while that more boys died because they tried to commit suicide by guns.
The reason the media is focusing on girls in the context of suicide right now is simply because the recently released CDC numbers show a huge increase in girls attempting suicide in the past, an effect which hasn’t been as large in boys.
For decades the focus has indeed been on the disproportionate number of boys who died of suicide. But the huge jump in girls feeling depressed and having suicidal thoughts is new. Hence, it’s being covered more in the news right now.
The ability of some people to turn everything into us vs them grievances is mind boggling to me.
[+] [-] jpopesculian|3 years ago|reply
> The conflation of suicide rates with forced sex here seems at best highly misleading. The sexual frequency number is rather obviously a reflection of two years where people were doing rather a lot of social distancing. With the end of that, essentially anything social is going to go up in frequency, whether it is good, bad or horrifying – only a 27 percent increase seems well within the range one would expect from that. Given all the other trends in the world, it would be very surprising to me if the rates of girls being subjected to forced sex (for any plausible fixed definition of that) were not continuing to decline.
If you look at the data from the cdc [0] there's no dip during quarantine like that paragraph would suggest leading to this sudden surge in comparison. Theres just an increase
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/healthy-you...
[+] [-] emodendroket|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|3 years ago|reply
The bit where the author reacts incredulously to cyberbullying not increasing with smartphones is… weird, to me. I am not convinced smartphones made social media more of a thing, they just shifted the mode of consumption. Social media was a thing at least five years before smartphones were.
I think the moral panic about smartphones ruining kids' lives is looking in the wrong places. The internet gave me a safe place to discover myself and escape real-life bullying. If I hadn't had internet access I don't think I'd have been happier.
[+] [-] worldsayshi|3 years ago|reply
Maybe the internet stopped being a safe place? Social media is increasingly feeling like a space designed for manipulation.
[+] [-] blowski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerpotgh|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] the_gipsy|3 years ago|reply
Blaming the awareness instead of the actual depressing thing.
[+] [-] lexandstuff|3 years ago|reply
It would have been poisonous to my adolescent brain.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deesep|3 years ago|reply
https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being-for...
[+] [-] mort96|3 years ago|reply
I'll need something more convincing than a "heck no" and a South Park meme.
[+] [-] tigerlily|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahtallen|3 years ago|reply
Well, good for you, the post is real long! (I did find some good observations towards the middle, and appreciated the look at various other theories and statistics)
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChatGTP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahrd|3 years ago|reply
And then immediately launches on a tangent based on a self proclaimed theory with no backup...
But one of the major points he makes is that the economy isn't actually that notably worse, because we all have a roof or something? This point strikes me as very out of touch. There are a significant number of people who are in significantly more precarious economic situations. The gap is widening due to rising housing, healthcare, education, etc costs. He does mention this but somehow manages to also dismiss it...
[+] [-] illiarian|3 years ago|reply
We've deprived kids of the future, and we've removed most places where kids can be kids.
Edit: the latter part is especially true in the US. I think Europe is a much better place for kids and teens.
Let's blame phones and social media.
[+] [-] vineyardmike|3 years ago|reply
The author uses this point to (IMO) bash liberal views as forcing kids to act depressed. A lot of the article was subtly tainted with the authors personal politics, and I think this is one of the times they distracted themselves with their own views.
> Another aspect of liberal politics is the focus on various forms of identity, including demands for how kids must react to things and then potentially severe punishment if caught reacting the ‘wrong’ way...
I was a high schooler in 2011. Thats basically when phones started to get common (in my rich, liberal, suburb at least). I do think it's more likely that the introduction of 24/7 social media that is in-person during the school day would have a worse and immediate affect for girls. This assumes that liberal girl is actually upper middle class and suburban or urban (who would have a family that provided them a phone in high school).
I think the author made a lot of good recognitions elsewhere, but this line of logic just read like political bias.
[+] [-] CalRobert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
I’m not saying the logical conclusion is phones and socials, but it isn’t a feeling of doom just by itself.
[+] [-] warrenmiller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defrost|3 years ago|reply
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/de...
Male rate consistantly ~ > 4x female rate (particularly so pre WWII) - save for WWII years.
Youth suicide in Australia: 2001 - present (ungendered)
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/po...
Ages 18-24 are peak ages for suicide, ~ 2x rate @15-17
Indigenous suicide in Australia: 2001 - present
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/po...
approx 1.5-2.5x non-indigenous.
There's more to be gleaned from the actual full M&M tables, these are just the web tables available re: suicide.
NOTE WELL!! In AU, UK, USofA etc reporting customs have changed with respect to cause of death and suicide over the years, some dips and peaks may be more related to the culture of reporting rather than rates of actual suicide.
[+] [-] jeffrallen|3 years ago|reply
One thing that helps is having a stable future ready for them to inherit. They can see the investments our generation is making for them (windmills, car chargers, trains), they have guaranteed education and apprenticeship to bring them into adulthood and independence, and they have a social safety net ready to catch them (I suspect they don't really understand the value of that though).
My point is, it is easy to say "you've got a bright future" and get them to believe it when the entire society is actually organized around making it actually true.
[+] [-] dragoncrab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbacaloa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|3 years ago|reply
The lyrics mostly fit too.
https://genius.com/The-offspring-the-kids-arent-alright-lyri...
[+] [-] hjkl0|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/afam2nIae4o
(The offspring song, as well as many others, references this)
[+] [-] codetrotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raincole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] favorited|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1632524972588695553
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonogo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaway84773|3 years ago|reply
And yet the 2000s, which saw 9/11 as well as the biggest financial crisis since WW2, didn’t see the rapid increase in suicidal thoughts in teens, especially girls, that we saw in the past decade.
[+] [-] snozolli|3 years ago|reply
I guess he's talking specifically about children's posts here, but I definitely want to know if a kid is threatening to shoot up a school or engaging in online bullying.
I also want to know if a potential hire is a Neo-Nazi or a Qtard.
[+] [-] Beaver117|3 years ago|reply
I'll give my opinion though. It's not that social media apps are the ones hurting us, they are merely exposing us to the nasty nature of humans. Closing your eyes and not using social media doesn't mean the flow of likes and comments will stop. And likewise shutting down social media doesn't mean we will forget what we had before. The cat is out of the bag, humans will now chase to be the top 1% at everything, money, attractiveness, power, etc. Even without their phones they still have permanently changed their worldview.
I don't see a solution other than perhaps shut down the internet completely. And invest in better mental health coping strategies
[+] [-] noahtallen|3 years ago|reply
So your quality of life and happiness can objectively be improved even while the world itself potentially gets worse.
[+] [-] pedrosorio|3 years ago|reply
Why? And what does this have to do with social media and “the nasty nature of humans”?
[+] [-] breezingfast|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] emodendroket|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] litiholofan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c_prompt|3 years ago|reply
"In the spring of 2002, an estimated 13.4 million parents had custody of 21.5 million children under 21 years of age whose other parent lived somewhere else. About 5 of every 6 custodial parents were mothers (84.4 percent) and 1 in 6 were fathers (15.6 percent), proportions statistically unchanged since 1994 (Table A)." [1]
"Custodial parents have become more likely to be fathers over the past 24 years, increasing from 16.0 percent in 1994 to 20.1 percent in 2018...
The number of custodial parents has varied somewhat over the past 24 years, including the proportion of fathers who are custodial parents. In 1994, about 1 of every 6 custodial parents were fathers (16.0 percent). By 2018, that proportion reached 1 in 5 (20.1 percent) (Appendix Table 2)." [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211212183149/https://www.censu...
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...