One 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.
I 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.
I 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 idea of 'clean air'..."
True, 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.
When 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.
Sounds 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?
I 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.
There 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.
This 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.
I think that this is true to some extent, but that people often underestimate how much Discord and group chats get used compared to "traditional" (feels weird calling it that, in this context) social media.
The 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
I 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.
When was the last time you met somebody who only walked all thier life? Never rode a horse because only the rich could afford such things.
When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.
Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.
I think it's fairly well accepted that the high obesity rates are caused by the shifting American diet. Yes it's more available than the 1950s (although I suspect not terribly so), but the effect it has on public health has been a nightmare.
You can just as readily find correlation with behavioral changes linked to a sedentary lifestyle driven by a firehouse of entertainment that first became available with cable television. That doesn't satisfy the orthorexic cause, so isn't discussed much.
Fundamentally, obesity is caused by an excess of calories. The foods we eat today are more calorie-dense. Even an apple is sweeter and larger than it was in the 1950s. But bottom line people are obese because calories are cheaper and more readily available than they used to be.
It seems uncontroversial to say that young people now, and for the last 25 years, have access to cheaper travel than previous generations. The network of budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and MENA is extensive; I can often find a WizzAir flight for as little as 10€ if I'm willing to fly with just a smaller carry-on. As for long-distance bus travel, FlixBus in Europe sucks in so many ways and has a monopoly over whole countries, but its tickets (if you purchase well in advance) are often cheaper than the local operators that one had to use before.
I 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.
I guess this is just what selection pressure looks like. It’s possible that adults who struggle to navigate social media and agitprop to the extent that they can’t imagine being able to raise kids in the 21st century might actually be right that their offspring would also struggle.
Shortchanging? 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.
The projectors are not worth the extra cost (not even close!). When I think of all the classes I took in over a decade at universities, very few benefited from projectors. They existed mostly for lazy professors who wanted to write a slide deck once and keep using it, without doing interactive work on the whiteboard.
Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.
WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.
Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.
Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"
Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.
The 1960s was well after agriculture as a percentage of the population in the US had declined to a small figure, and relatively few suburban or urban dwellers were growing things for their own consumption.
I 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.
One 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.
Those 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.
a 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?
The 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?
Kids 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.
Walking 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.
I'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.
It 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.
> 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.
The 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.
Don'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.
Drinking 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.
One 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.
Children are easily led on, and if we’re being honest most adults are too.
It 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?
I 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.
I 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 idea of 'clean air'..."
If 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.
True, 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.
One of the effects of heavy social media and phone use is parents (and other carers) paying less attention to kids.
When 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.
Sounds 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?
I 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.
I 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.
There 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.
This 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.
I think that this is true to some extent, but that people often underestimate how much Discord and group chats get used compared to "traditional" (feels weird calling it that, in this context) social media.
The 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
I 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.
4chan is still thriving
> They have access to cheap travel, better food
What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.
When was the last time you met somebody who only walked all thier life? Never rode a horse because only the rich could afford such things.
When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.
Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.
> You talk about poison, but that is pure lie
I think it's fairly well accepted that the high obesity rates are caused by the shifting American diet. Yes it's more available than the 1950s (although I suspect not terribly so), but the effect it has on public health has been a nightmare.
You can just as readily find correlation with behavioral changes linked to a sedentary lifestyle driven by a firehouse of entertainment that first became available with cable television. That doesn't satisfy the orthorexic cause, so isn't discussed much.
Fundamentally, obesity is caused by an excess of calories. The foods we eat today are more calorie-dense. Even an apple is sweeter and larger than it was in the 1950s. But bottom line people are obese because calories are cheaper and more readily available than they used to be.
Shifting diet, but poison is the wrong term.
He seems to focused on what happened in the last few decades. Your points seem to apply to a much longer time-scale.
The last few decades are much harder to quantify. I wouldn't want to go back to my youth.
So better off today compared to 200 years ago.
It seems uncontroversial to say that young people now, and for the last 25 years, have access to cheaper travel than previous generations. The network of budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and MENA is extensive; I can often find a WizzAir flight for as little as 10€ if I'm willing to fly with just a smaller carry-on. As for long-distance bus travel, FlixBus in Europe sucks in so many ways and has a monopoly over whole countries, but its tickets (if you purchase well in advance) are often cheaper than the local operators that one had to use before.
Regarding travel, you can decide for yourself:
https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...
I 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.
I guess this is just what selection pressure looks like. It’s possible that adults who struggle to navigate social media and agitprop to the extent that they can’t imagine being able to raise kids in the 21st century might actually be right that their offspring would also struggle.
> I imagine all generations think it was better in their day.
This might be objectively true these days, considering climate change.
Have you ever heard of leaded gas?
Shortchanging? 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.
> Do you have any idea what a "typical" middle class lifestyle was like in the 1960s?
You mean the one where they could have 3 kids, send them to college, and graduate with no debt?
One of my professors went to UC Berkeley in the 60's. Inflation adjusted, his cost was $700 (I forget if this was per semester or per year).
And those classrooms had no AC (probably), no WiFi, no projectors, no access to (almost unlimited) online resources, no fancy gym, etc etc.
The projectors are not worth the extra cost (not even close!). When I think of all the classes I took in over a decade at universities, very few benefited from projectors. They existed mostly for lazy professors who wanted to write a slide deck once and keep using it, without doing interactive work on the whiteboard.
Wherever I studied (admittedly in the north), we did not need ACs. Heating was important, and many of the buildings were old and used the same heating they had in the 60's.
WiFi: Mostly not in my time either. I certainly don't see it as important in education. I personally didn't even own a WiFi capable device until 2012.
Online resources: I'll grant you that, but I'll point out where I went in the early 00's, our low ranked university had excellent Internet access (ranked amongst the top in the country), and the annual cost was $2600. Never found a journal, etc that I didn't have access to.
Gym? Seriously? For the extra cost in education, you can go to any good gym! Are you going to tell kids these days "Sorry you can't afford a degree that will help you get a job - we wanted a fancy gym!"
Other than the Internet, none of the other items is valuable for most degrees. Personally, in a hotter climate, I'd really want the AC - but I wouldn't pay that much just for an AC.
Maybe not organic avocados but more likely to be eating produce from your own backyard garden.
That was done for cost reasons back then but today local and seasonal produce is a staple of high end restaurants.
The 1960s was well after agriculture as a percentage of the population in the US had declined to a small figure, and relatively few suburban or urban dwellers were growing things for their own consumption.
Well we still were in small town America in the 1970s. :)
That was a great article, or maybe it was just a lot of gibberish that failed to say much of anything.
The article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.
I 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.
One 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.
Those 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.
> 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.
As the author also points out.
my bad
a 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?
Compared to world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, widespread racism, etc.? No.
The 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?
Kids 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.
Same happens in the USA all the time. Don't let media impressions fill you.
Walking 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.
I'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.
Why wasn’t it an option? I regularly walked/rode to & from primary & high school in Australia.
It is viable in pre-war developments where cars weren't assumed, such that housing and services needed to be denser.
It 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.
Saying that teenage pregnancy, rape, suicide and alcohol abuse were not serious problems in 1940 is some serious head-in-sand thinking.
> 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.
> 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?
I 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.
The 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.
Don'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.
Drinking 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.