I find it odd that this is has became such a pandamoniom now.
As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Regardless, I feel that it the debate needs to be about what children are doing. Probably like many here I spent a lot of my childhood devouring technical content on the internet, which I would say has given me the chance to work on incredibly interesting projects (and make friends with people across the world). If I had been time restricted on my computer (and a lot of my friends were) it would have significantly altered my career trajectory.
If you are scrolling endless garbage tiktok or YouTube videos for hours a day, yes the utility is pretty low (though again, watching hours of trashy cable TV back in the day doesn't feel that different to me).
That doesn't mean that many won't learn and find out about their passions in a way that was unthinkable a few decades ago.
MSN wasn't social media, there were no likes and as I remember, most chats were 1on1. You didn't post publicly, there was no algorithmic feed etc. It was just chatting, basically texting. And actually yeah, texting was already a thing on dumb phones, remember all the abbreviations, emoticons, etc. Teens were glued to that too, especially girls, as well as guys texting with girls. But that's absolutely different from the fomo and "keeping up" and public likes and algorithms thing today. I think as millennial we don't really appreciate how deeply ingrained it is, compared to back then.
> As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.
A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.
On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)
We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
My point was more despite all the limitations people were spending 8+ hours a day on MSN messenger after school.
I'd agree that (younger) children should have limits on social media - that's obvious for many reasons. But why smartphones in general? If they're reading a book or similar on it, what's the harm in that? My main point is it's not really the medium, it's the content.
It’s fascinating to track which cultures will be absolutely annihilated by the introduction of endless entertainment in a rectangle. (Annihilated in the demographic sense).
Isn’t it basically all of them? I mean is there a culture as you say, which I interpret to mean a civilization or country, where iPhones* are affordable and isn’t facing this issue?
I've seen similar issues in villages in developing countries like India and Vietnam as well. Parenting is hard, and smartphones reduce the amount of effort it takes anyone to get a dopamine rush, disincentivizing creativity.
Smartphones are extremely powerful, but I strongly feel they shouldn't be in the hands of children at least until their adolescence - that way some amount of creativity is forced.
Ironically, Steve Jobs was himself a major proponent of how boredom begets curiosity and creativity.
I’m reminded of the intentional usage of whisky, rum, and other alcoholic spirits as an intentional policy of genocide against Native Americans. Also interesting is that during this same period of history, payment of taxes in whisky was common in some states in the western US, and these were federal taxes for debts left over from the Revolutionary War. These adjacent topics are reminiscent of modern national cryptocurrency stockpiles and stablecoin interest.
It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.
So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
I would push back that there are healthy options in comparison to McDonald’s.Tthe only healthy option I have been able to find that offers quick drive thru food is oddly Starbucks. And when I say McDonald’s, I mean fast drive-through food options that yourself and a child would enjoy .
> It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke.
Do you know how advertising works? McDonald's have spent an unimaginable amount of money to sway people's choices and absolutely need to share in the blame for the result of those actions.
The point of the article is to say that this is a bad thing, but to someone who was bullied as a child, the idea of being “sedentary, scrolling and alone” sounds like the ideal childhood. I remember adults saying socialization was a good thing when I was a child, and to me, that effectively claimed that my daily beating from 5 to 6 of my classmates was a good thing. It does not matter how much time passes; nothing will convince me that was a good thing.
Whenever I complained that recess was unnecessary, I was told that it was good for me, sent outside and promptly beaten. Being sent outside and beaten happened regardless of whether I complained it was unnecessary. What I learned from that was that being beaten was considered good for me, since that is what happened when I was forced to “socialize”.
Thanks. 8 years of being bullied (with the first 3 years consisting of beatings and the latter 5 years consisting of psychological bullying) certainly did leave scars. The most obvious were regular nightmares. The less obvious was a coping mechanism where I would pretend that anything bad did not actually happen to avoid facing it. I do not think I ever fully grew out of that one. There are probably others, but I am not fully cognizant of them.
Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is leisure time, and it was just as possible to spend that sedentary and alone 30 years ago.
Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
I was beaten during “leisure time” (it was called recess). As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life. That social life was one where I was a punching bag, but none of the school employees cared. They blindly thought leaving children to their own devices was good for them and while there was supposedly oversight, the teachers had no idea what a student being beaten by his peers on a day to day basis looked like and apparently thought there was nothing wrong while I was being stuck by several others. They only recognized it the few times I fought back, and then disciplined me for having the audacity to defend myself, while my bullies were exempt from discipline through the intervention of their parents. Having leisure time in school be spent with zero interactions with other students would have prevented the beatings.
As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?
as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing but i never made any friends at school and at home my parents were not very emotionally supportive (not their fault, they had it worse growing up). i was unconsciously searching for that emotional support all my life, but it took me decades before i finally understood what i was missing and how it affected me. i also don't remember much from my childhood because i repressed memories from that time.
The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me:
* One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful.
* The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue.
* Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil.
That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.
Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
The public school system is absurd and the biggest culprit in the vast majority of our modern problems. The idea that we would take children and put them in an environment that is essentially the same as a prison for 18 years, is ABSURD.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
The Aztecs had mandatory boarding schools which were basically military academies. Plenty of nonwestern societies had mandatory training for children who lived apart from the rest of the community.
Well obviously schools have existed in any part of society. But schools have always had a purpose - whether it's training future scholars at madrasas, training sons of nobility for war, etc.
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
> Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
I don't know why all this focus on "public schools".
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I think you misunderstand my comment. When I say "public" school I don't mean in distinction from private.
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
Okay, but that's not what "public school" standardly means in English.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
Ban on "no ball games" signs is addressing the problem from the easiest and worst possible angle.
More than 400 playgrounds closed in England from 2012 to 2022 and annual park budgets have fallen
Why are they bouncing balls near/against a house? Probably because there aren't enough affordable, easy to access sports centres/playgrounds etc nearby. Plus helicopter parents afraid of letting kids out of their sight
Bouncing balls are low frequency noises and can drive someone insane and completely ruin the quiet enjoyment of their home. Those signs are perfectly valid to prevent anti-social noise pollution and prevent damage to property
Let's undo the austerity cuts instead of forcing people's property exteriors into make-do ball courts
Yup ... it seems we can't afford anything except healthcare, defence, welfare and social care.
That still doesn't make it ok to drive people crazy in their homes. We do still have plenty of playing fields etc where they can take their balls - it's on the parents
There is a big gap in outdoor activities for children between the ages of 12 and 18.
That's when kids start to do things without their parents, but don't have the means to engage in most activities. There are plenty of parks and public spaces in the UK, but there is only so much football one can do before getting bored. Most of them can't afford activities, and they are unable to partake in the British national sport (going to the pub). The only thing left is to roam around and be up to no good. In the end, staying indoors and exploring the digital world is the only way for them to experience the world on an equal footing.
I think we are romanticising what teens used to do (much more at least) to pass their boredom. Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.
I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.
> Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.
I would argue that that "antisocial behavior" is actually important for most people to be able to form and navigate authentic social relationships.
I don't think all the kids in my generation (X) were involved in tons of "sport, drama or other artistic or social endeavors", but at the very least they were "hanging out at the mall". Sure, some of that was getting into trouble, but I'm astounded by how much adolescence has changed since I was a kid. Like I see a lot of kids that very rarely "hang out", and I'd argue that social media/text communication is a very poor substitute for in-person hanging out.
It's like the Simpsons episode from season 2 in which Marge crusades against violence in itchy and scratchy. And then, to Beethoven's ninth symphony, all the children start exploring nature and engaging in wholesome idyllic play.
There are plenty of things I did outside when growing up that kids could still do: invent sports (we had one involving a hockey net and a koosh ball), bike around the neighborhood, have a water fight, go to the pool, play capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, jump on a trampoline, go to the ride scooters, play basketball, play with sidewalk chalk, etc
All of This! And shout outs to the Ghost in the Graveyard! We also had "Survival Masters." A whole neighborhood (or multiple adjacent, if you can organize that many youths) affair with everyone in two teams, a single safe area, but it is still, at its core, "Tag After Dark." Strats, tactics and patterns emerged, soft skills, team building, athleticism, they were all on show here. As was the neighbor 's tolerances for youth running through and hiding in their properties.
this is a cultural problem. in germany and austria we had/have lots of affordable extracurricular outdoor activities. scouting, sailing, soccer clubs. all just charging a nominal fee to participate. we were on welfare and we could still afford it. i don't know about other countries, but at least scouting is available and affordable in many places.
I remember hanging out and loitering in malls and food courts because none of us wanted to be at home and there weren't other free options. Back then we just shuffled off to another location, like nomads. I'm not surprises teens now just hang out online instead.
It's all well and good telling parents to do better, but this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
I think it's because parenting is hard (always has been, some aspects like having to be a helicopter parent to not have CPS called on you in the US maybe make it harder).
> this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
My parents and grandparents grew up in communism and they had to work full time jobs (and help bring in the harvest in the fall) with a side of hours standing in queues to buy meat.
Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
> Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
That's not an improvement at a societal scale, that's the thing. Without those in working age actually working and generating economic activity, the system becomes nothing more than a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Capitalism, especially modern rabid capitalism, depends on the illusion of infinite growth - an illusion that can only fail, given modern demographic trends and resource scarcity. And it is completely unsuited for the coming era when a lot of work will be done outright by machines.
In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill.
Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.
People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great."
Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
That's a lie. But one of the pressures is that suburban parents overschedule their kids with extracurriculars instead of letting them waste more time on their bikes, in the parks, etc.
When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
That's a chicken / egg problem, because if their peers are in scheduled activities there won't be any kids hanging around to play with.
There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years.
(A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.)
To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
One thing to add I find missing in many such articles: the rise of helicopter parenting, correlating with the rise of families that can only afford to have one child.
Basically, up until a few decades ago, it was the norm to have a lot of children - there was a lack of contraceptive options, access to abortions was highly questionable (and deadly on top of it, given the circumstances of back-alley "angel makers"), and most importantly it was the norm that quite a lot of these children would die from some sort of accident, pest or war.
Nowadays, financial and housing insecurity plus the demands of modern capitalism (aka, have a full school education plus an academic degree, so you enter the workforce at 25, not 15, any more) drive people to start later and later with finding partners, much less having children, so the "room for errors" is much less than it used to be.
And on top of that you got the horror stories of "child snatchers", pedophile gangs and knife-wielding immigrants that now make national headlines out of very individual crimes. It's hard to attempt to raise your child in the open when every newspaper shouts at you that THEY are out there to GET YOUR CHILD. The rabid fearmongering has gone completely out of control.
How pointless, biased and inflammatory. Generally, citizens commit crimes at rates higher than immigrants. Please keep that in mind while you read the Daily Mail or whatever tabloid you get your information from.
It's not really valid English parsing to read it that way - if the poster meant it that way then they've accidentally formed the sentence in a way that's unambiguously not ironic. Putting the word refugees in quotes makes it biased and inflammatory, accusing people seeking asylum of being rapists and murders.
If the whole phrase following the word probably was in quotes, only then could it be read ironically.
I find it odd that this is has became such a pandamoniom now.
As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Regardless, I feel that it the debate needs to be about what children are doing. Probably like many here I spent a lot of my childhood devouring technical content on the internet, which I would say has given me the chance to work on incredibly interesting projects (and make friends with people across the world). If I had been time restricted on my computer (and a lot of my friends were) it would have significantly altered my career trajectory.
If you are scrolling endless garbage tiktok or YouTube videos for hours a day, yes the utility is pretty low (though again, watching hours of trashy cable TV back in the day doesn't feel that different to me).
That doesn't mean that many won't learn and find out about their passions in a way that was unthinkable a few decades ago.
MSN wasn't social media, there were no likes and as I remember, most chats were 1on1. You didn't post publicly, there was no algorithmic feed etc. It was just chatting, basically texting. And actually yeah, texting was already a thing on dumb phones, remember all the abbreviations, emoticons, etc. Teens were glued to that too, especially girls, as well as guys texting with girls. But that's absolutely different from the fomo and "keeping up" and public likes and algorithms thing today. I think as millennial we don't really appreciate how deeply ingrained it is, compared to back then.
number of myspace/facebook friends was an important metric for us early teens
> As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!
Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.
A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.
On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)
We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.
My point was more despite all the limitations people were spending 8+ hours a day on MSN messenger after school.
I'd agree that (younger) children should have limits on social media - that's obvious for many reasons. But why smartphones in general? If they're reading a book or similar on it, what's the harm in that? My main point is it's not really the medium, it's the content.
I think you can also get addicted to constantly refreshing the news, the live coverage of the current big thing (it's the Iran thing right now).
I think it's the constantly available Internet in your pocket.
If you have a smartphone without internet and put 10 ebooks on it, that won't cause this kind of thing.
Though there are also much more addictive mobile games now, compared to grays ale snake we grew up with. The visual flashes and dings...
It’s fascinating to track which cultures will be absolutely annihilated by the introduction of endless entertainment in a rectangle. (Annihilated in the demographic sense).
Isn’t it basically all of them? I mean is there a culture as you say, which I interpret to mean a civilization or country, where iPhones* are affordable and isn’t facing this issue?
The US has many sub cultures, it’s too early to tell which survive since smartphones are so new…
They've been around for almost 20 years now, and 2.5 generations (later millenials, Z, Alpha) have all spent formative years using smartphones.
The subcultures have already formed, died out, and formed into new subcultures multiple times already.
I've seen similar issues in villages in developing countries like India and Vietnam as well. Parenting is hard, and smartphones reduce the amount of effort it takes anyone to get a dopamine rush, disincentivizing creativity.
Smartphones are extremely powerful, but I strongly feel they shouldn't be in the hands of children at least until their adolescence - that way some amount of creativity is forced.
Ironically, Steve Jobs was himself a major proponent of how boredom begets curiosity and creativity.
All of them?
Some maybe less.. [0]
[0] https://washingtonmorning.com/2025/06/19/how-differently-tik...
TikTok/Douyin isn't alone in impacting a mindset (though it does play a role).
I see plenty of parents (even amongst Chinese families) handing a smartphone to their kids to essentially sedate them instead of engaging with them.
Honor of Kings, Arena of Valor, and MLBB have similar dopamine rush cycles.
Heck, even a bland, aggravating, obnoxious, and stick-up-their-butt social media site like HN can induce similar cycles.
I’m reminded of the intentional usage of whisky, rum, and other alcoholic spirits as an intentional policy of genocide against Native Americans. Also interesting is that during this same period of history, payment of taxes in whisky was common in some states in the western US, and these were federal taxes for debts left over from the Revolutionary War. These adjacent topics are reminiscent of modern national cryptocurrency stockpiles and stablecoin interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Forty-Three_G...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
Entertainment is an effect, not the main cause.
It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.
So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
I would push back that there are healthy options in comparison to McDonald’s.Tthe only healthy option I have been able to find that offers quick drive thru food is oddly Starbucks. And when I say McDonald’s, I mean fast drive-through food options that yourself and a child would enjoy .
Well, isn’t this just the old paradox of free will.
You are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires.
>But you are not free to choose your desires.
Couldn't be more false.
> It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke.
Do you know how advertising works? McDonald's have spent an unimaginable amount of money to sway people's choices and absolutely need to share in the blame for the result of those actions.
Then it’s equally valid to ask “but what if McDonald’s didn’t exist?”
If McDs wouldn't exist then KFC and Wendys would exist to fulfill that market demand. What a stupid question. Prohibition proved that.
s/McDonald’s/companies like McDonald’s/
dopamine
Is dopamine a new thing in th human body?
A constant source of it that requires no effort is, yes
It's been going on forever. "Stop looking at the cave art and take the garbage out."
The point of the article is to say that this is a bad thing, but to someone who was bullied as a child, the idea of being “sedentary, scrolling and alone” sounds like the ideal childhood. I remember adults saying socialization was a good thing when I was a child, and to me, that effectively claimed that my daily beating from 5 to 6 of my classmates was a good thing. It does not matter how much time passes; nothing will convince me that was a good thing.
I don't follow. How does claiming socializing is good effectively claiming bullying is good?
Whenever I complained that recess was unnecessary, I was told that it was good for me, sent outside and promptly beaten. Being sent outside and beaten happened regardless of whether I complained it was unnecessary. What I learned from that was that being beaten was considered good for me, since that is what happened when I was forced to “socialize”.
Getting beaten by a gang of classmates daily is genuinely awful & would leave some deep scars, I'm very sorry to hear that and wish you the best.
Thanks. 8 years of being bullied (with the first 3 years consisting of beatings and the latter 5 years consisting of psychological bullying) certainly did leave scars. The most obvious were regular nightmares. The less obvious was a coping mechanism where I would pretend that anything bad did not actually happen to avoid facing it. I do not think I ever fully grew out of that one. There are probably others, but I am not fully cognizant of them.
Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is leisure time, and it was just as possible to spend that sedentary and alone 30 years ago.
Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
I was beaten during “leisure time” (it was called recess). As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life. That social life was one where I was a punching bag, but none of the school employees cared. They blindly thought leaving children to their own devices was good for them and while there was supposedly oversight, the teachers had no idea what a student being beaten by his peers on a day to day basis looked like and apparently thought there was nothing wrong while I was being stuck by several others. They only recognized it the few times I fought back, and then disciplined me for having the audacity to defend myself, while my bullies were exempt from discipline through the intervention of their parents. Having leisure time in school be spent with zero interactions with other students would have prevented the beatings.
As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?
as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing but i never made any friends at school and at home my parents were not very emotionally supportive (not their fault, they had it worse growing up). i was unconsciously searching for that emotional support all my life, but it took me decades before i finally understood what i was missing and how it affected me. i also don't remember much from my childhood because i repressed memories from that time.
The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me:
* One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful.
* The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue.
* Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil.
That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.
Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
The public school system is absurd and the biggest culprit in the vast majority of our modern problems. The idea that we would take children and put them in an environment that is essentially the same as a prison for 18 years, is ABSURD.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
The Aztecs had mandatory boarding schools which were basically military academies. Plenty of nonwestern societies had mandatory training for children who lived apart from the rest of the community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#By_countr...
Well obviously schools have existed in any part of society. But schools have always had a purpose - whether it's training future scholars at madrasas, training sons of nobility for war, etc.
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
> Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
That's incorrect.
Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants - the idea of state-wide mandated education was to ensure the Bible was taught and spread.
Education and public schooling are different things.
I don't know why all this focus on "public schools".
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
Sources:
- Public education rates worldwide: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.PRIV.ZS?most_rec... (okay, that's percent private, but subtract from 100 to get percent public)
- Australia historical religious affiliation statistics: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I think you misunderstand my comment. When I say "public" school I don't mean in distinction from private.
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
Okay, but that's not what "public school" standardly means in English.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.
I didn't say they invented it. I said it's normalizing was due to them. Big difference.
[dead]
Ban on "no ball games" signs is addressing the problem from the easiest and worst possible angle.
More than 400 playgrounds closed in England from 2012 to 2022 and annual park budgets have fallen
Why are they bouncing balls near/against a house? Probably because there aren't enough affordable, easy to access sports centres/playgrounds etc nearby. Plus helicopter parents afraid of letting kids out of their sight
Bouncing balls are low frequency noises and can drive someone insane and completely ruin the quiet enjoyment of their home. Those signs are perfectly valid to prevent anti-social noise pollution and prevent damage to property
Let's undo the austerity cuts instead of forcing people's property exteriors into make-do ball courts
> Let's undo the austerity cuts
Is that so easy to do? The economy that fed the investment governments isn't there anymore.
Yup ... it seems we can't afford anything except healthcare, defence, welfare and social care.
That still doesn't make it ok to drive people crazy in their homes. We do still have plenty of playing fields etc where they can take their balls - it's on the parents
There is a big gap in outdoor activities for children between the ages of 12 and 18.
That's when kids start to do things without their parents, but don't have the means to engage in most activities. There are plenty of parks and public spaces in the UK, but there is only so much football one can do before getting bored. Most of them can't afford activities, and they are unable to partake in the British national sport (going to the pub). The only thing left is to roam around and be up to no good. In the end, staying indoors and exploring the digital world is the only way for them to experience the world on an equal footing.
It's a tough world for teens.
I think we are romanticising what teens used to do (much more at least) to pass their boredom. Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.
I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.
> Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.
I would argue that that "antisocial behavior" is actually important for most people to be able to form and navigate authentic social relationships.
I don't think all the kids in my generation (X) were involved in tons of "sport, drama or other artistic or social endeavors", but at the very least they were "hanging out at the mall". Sure, some of that was getting into trouble, but I'm astounded by how much adolescence has changed since I was a kid. Like I see a lot of kids that very rarely "hang out", and I'd argue that social media/text communication is a very poor substitute for in-person hanging out.
It's like the Simpsons episode from season 2 in which Marge crusades against violence in itchy and scratchy. And then, to Beethoven's ninth symphony, all the children start exploring nature and engaging in wholesome idyllic play.
There are plenty of things I did outside when growing up that kids could still do: invent sports (we had one involving a hockey net and a koosh ball), bike around the neighborhood, have a water fight, go to the pool, play capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, jump on a trampoline, go to the ride scooters, play basketball, play with sidewalk chalk, etc
All of This! And shout outs to the Ghost in the Graveyard! We also had "Survival Masters." A whole neighborhood (or multiple adjacent, if you can organize that many youths) affair with everyone in two teams, a single safe area, but it is still, at its core, "Tag After Dark." Strats, tactics and patterns emerged, soft skills, team building, athleticism, they were all on show here. As was the neighbor 's tolerances for youth running through and hiding in their properties.
this is a cultural problem. in germany and austria we had/have lots of affordable extracurricular outdoor activities. scouting, sailing, soccer clubs. all just charging a nominal fee to participate. we were on welfare and we could still afford it. i don't know about other countries, but at least scouting is available and affordable in many places.
I remember hanging out and loitering in malls and food courts because none of us wanted to be at home and there weren't other free options. Back then we just shuffled off to another location, like nomads. I'm not surprises teens now just hang out online instead.
It's all well and good telling parents to do better, but this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
I think it's because parenting is hard (always has been, some aspects like having to be a helicopter parent to not have CPS called on you in the US maybe make it harder).
And screens are easy.
It's the anxiety generation. Parents are now terrified of paedophiles and traumas. My generation needed TV commercials reminding our parents we exist.
Do you have any theories about those “systemic reasons”? Curious what they might be.
Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?
> this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
My parents and grandparents grew up in communism and they had to work full time jobs (and help bring in the harvest in the fall) with a side of hours standing in queues to buy meat.
Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
Huge improvement all in all
> Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
That's not an improvement at a societal scale, that's the thing. Without those in working age actually working and generating economic activity, the system becomes nothing more than a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Capitalism, especially modern rabid capitalism, depends on the illusion of infinite growth - an illusion that can only fail, given modern demographic trends and resource scarcity. And it is completely unsuited for the coming era when a lot of work will be done outright by machines.
What are urban kids supposed to do, play in traffic?
There is no outside.
In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill.
Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.
People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.
We have paths ("sidewalks") in the UK that children can walk/cycle on to get to parks etc, even in suburban and many rural areas.
Even if there is a motorway in the way there is often a bridge or some kind of underpass.
In urban areas there is usually a park/playing field 5-15 minutes away
I would be willing to bet that 80% of urban kids in the UK live within a 10-minute bike ride of a park.
That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great."
Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.
American comments on UK news. No such issue here, sure a lot of areas are more built up, but children under 10 walk to school, it's not America.
People used to do a whole lot of nothing. EDIT: But daily life provided enough social micronutrients to get by. Less so with the phones.
The "nothing" being wandering around outside, digging holes, and talking to people rather than sitting around watching paint dry.
Cars have existed for multiple generations. Kids are glued to their screens, which is why parks are empty.
> There is no outside.
And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.
It's not radically different from, say 20 years ago, when there weren't all these phones.
That's a lie. But one of the pressures is that suburban parents overschedule their kids with extracurriculars instead of letting them waste more time on their bikes, in the parks, etc.
When our parents were kids, everyone drove but all the kids played outside.
That's a chicken / egg problem, because if their peers are in scheduled activities there won't be any kids hanging around to play with.
There are also location-specific effects. The happiest few years of my childhood - I'm a generation older than the over-scheduling thing; we were latchkey kids, as they said then - were spent on a block with three other families whose kids were +/- three years of me and my sister. We were on our bikes, or building forts, or playing football in someone's yard every single day. Then, the course of a year or so, the other families all moved away, and... Well, I was sedentary, reading books, and lonely for the next few years.
(A lovely coda: a few years ago I happened to visit the city where my favorite friends from that period had settled, and looked them up. We literally had not seen each other in twenty-five years. I thought it might be awkward, and maybe for thirty seconds it was, but we immediately recaptured the tenor of our ancient friendship, and it was magical. I see them every couple of years, now, and am so happy they're back in my life.)
To pull those two points together, when there were enough young families (and higher population density) that there were kids on every block parents didn't need to schedule their kids social lives. Now that the fertility rate has dropped, and housing sprawled, that's often necessary - and even when strictly-speaking not, it's become a cultural default that's difficult to overcome.
ban cars
the correct yet wildly unpopular solution
Kids don’t play Red Ass anymore?
Wasn't that only in the schoolyard? Against the wall.
One thing to add I find missing in many such articles: the rise of helicopter parenting, correlating with the rise of families that can only afford to have one child.
Basically, up until a few decades ago, it was the norm to have a lot of children - there was a lack of contraceptive options, access to abortions was highly questionable (and deadly on top of it, given the circumstances of back-alley "angel makers"), and most importantly it was the norm that quite a lot of these children would die from some sort of accident, pest or war.
Nowadays, financial and housing insecurity plus the demands of modern capitalism (aka, have a full school education plus an academic degree, so you enter the workforce at 25, not 15, any more) drive people to start later and later with finding partners, much less having children, so the "room for errors" is much less than it used to be.
And on top of that you got the horror stories of "child snatchers", pedophile gangs and knife-wielding immigrants that now make national headlines out of very individual crimes. It's hard to attempt to raise your child in the open when every newspaper shouts at you that THEY are out there to GET YOUR CHILD. The rabid fearmongering has gone completely out of control.
[flagged]
How pointless, biased and inflammatory. Generally, citizens commit crimes at rates higher than immigrants. Please keep that in mind while you read the Daily Mail or whatever tabloid you get your information from.
Just to offer an alternate perspective: I read that comment ironically. I recognize that tone is ambiguous online.
It's not really valid English parsing to read it that way - if the poster meant it that way then they've accidentally formed the sentence in a way that's unambiguously not ironic. Putting the word refugees in quotes makes it biased and inflammatory, accusing people seeking asylum of being rapists and murders.
If the whole phrase following the word probably was in quotes, only then could it be read ironically.
It's PK. After a couple of generations everyone will get used to the new norm.
What is PK?
Also, obesity is apparently the new norm, and I guess we got used to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have huge negative impacts.
Was about to type “OK”.