Why are American teenagers so sad and anxious?
theringer.com
theringer.com
He confirmed that many of his friends do have access to social media... but I think we have to define that term. He is constantly interacting with a huge friend group - via chat on his phone. While I know there are risks and concerns, it's a big friend group that also play video games together. So sure, it is different than when we were kids on our bikes roaming the neighborhood, but there's still a tremendous amount of social interaction happening there.
My kids are a bit different... two of them were discussing American foreign policy on a sunny afternoon a few days ago. But, I sincerely think that kids are stressed out for reasons beyond just "social media." We have a number of undocumented persons in our community, and during the last administration, they were legitimately stressed out about whether they would get sent to a camp or sent back to a country they were too young to remember. I meet a lot of young kids questioning their sexuality, etc, who are legitimately very concerned about our national politics and what it means for them. Sure, our unemployment rate is very low, but kids are concerned about the cost of education and whether there will be good jobs available to them in the future. So - frankly, I think kids are stressed out by a lot of the same things as adults, but many may not have the adult support to guide them.
This is the crux of the issue. Behavior – including emotional responses – is learned. And what American youth are being taught is that there is danger around every corner and everything is doomed.
The irony, of course, is that the deliberate indoctrination into anxiety only makes danger more prevalent. Sheltered young people never learn to cope with challenges they may face.
I think breathless doomsaying about climate change is a brilliant example. The overwhelming zeitgeist is one of learned helplessness. But the more people feel that global disaster is both imminent and inevitable, the fewer people will be motivated to work on the problem.
I'm not living in the US, but this one buggers me a lot. In my country school they are "educating" children about climate change and pollution. My child, who is worrying about everything, is freaking out about the planet future and animals. This summer at the beach, he freaked out about microplastics in the sea and made sure I put the rubbish in the bin.
The trouble is that all these pollution speech are always about disasters, they give no hope for future generations. This is the main issue in my opinion, there is no dream to look forward at the moment. Where are the dreams about flying cars and great cities? Robots serving us while we spend our lives at the beach?
Good dreams don't sell, but bad dreams do. I just finished watching a series with slum people living in slums where the air and the water is toxic. It was a huge Netflix success among a young cohort. I admired all the innovation and art that went into the visuals, but the story was cookie-cutter-forced-tragedy.
I just hope we don't end up in the dystopia we are painting in so many colors at each step.
I'm surprised you're more upset about your kids knowing they have no future than that somebody sold your kids future.
We have no idea how it will turn out in the future, what global events are going to happen or whatnot. The only thing I'm sure: we are going to die someday and Earth will survive us. If humanity manages to kill itself by destroying the environment, so be it and we deserve to die.
As for that somebody who sold my kids future, it always happened. Remember endless wars? The current 80 years without wars in Europe is an anomaly in history.
That seems like a strawman, unless you own some oil derricks or personally moved some factory jobs to China.
So maybe that gives you a little glimpse. Perhaps rather than taking cheap shots behind an anonymous account, you could actually add something to the discussion?
You seem lovely in general.
I was voted "friendliest guy" in my high school class. I give generously of my time and (paltry) finances to child and animal welfare causes because I believe firmly in the idea that a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.
So thank you, I hope you follow the same practices in your community.
If you knew anything about my story or my kid's stories, you'd be ashamed of yourself.
Two different people called it out as a red flag for the exact same reason. Because it was a mean thing to say about someone who relies on you and under your care. Deal with it.
You probably are a fine person, but maybe you should be a bit more introspective and acknowledge that saying your daughter is a "scared, timid, immature, socially awkward" person, just like your ex-wife, is comically transparent in its resentment towards both of them.
Also funny how their personality is everyone else's fault (society, your ex-wife's, the boogyman) but has left out one key player who participated in raising them.
Your comment above continues this pattern, extending your argument that I either harbor resentment or that I'm a poor parent and that is the cause of either my ex-wife's or my daughter's many issues. All without knowing me or them, or anything about the situation. Do you see where that is an ungrounded personal attack that has no relation to the discussion?
Now, let's perhaps get back to why I made the original observation that I did - it's because when we read an article on teen emotional / mental well-being, we have to assess a lot of factors. In my own family I've witnessed both genetic and environmental factors that have yielded different outcomes. That was the purpose of my original sharing.
You can't 'cope' with chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
I'm all for team sports and free-range kids but not at the expense of my kid's neurological function. Let them choose literally any other sport.
-- Playing sports or other group participative activities is so good for them on every level. As the article points out, declining participation is a concern.
-- Every activity has risk. Helping kids learn to assess that risk and not be afraid of the world is important in their emotional and mental growth, IE: learning to overcome fears and take calculated risks.
Classic "well city folk just don't get it. Here in the country..." People from the country have this bizarre narcissistic need to prove the superiority of the town vs the city, and nothing you tell them about the city can be positive. This for example! City people hate football?? News to me! Better tell the Bears and the Giants to pack it in, the liberal city slickers aren't interested.
And I spent the first 20 years of my life in a town of less than 2k people, 5 hours away from the nearest large city, so I say this from experience.
Which is worse: a risk of anxiety and depression among ~20% of the subset of young people who choose to play football, or fully realized anxiety and depression among ~44% of all young people?
Safetyism is a cure that is literally worse than the disease.
To be clear: they are talking about american football, not world football.
It's literally in the first paragraph of the OP.
It is a fact that anxiety and depression are increasing, not decreasing, as adults become more overprotective about things like letting kids play football.
Clearly we should ban emoji.
There is nothing to "work on" here- we can solve climate change by simply voting to solve climate change. We just need everyone to agree that it's a problem and we should prioritize solving it.
The problem is that tons of people either don't believe in climate change or don't care. There are still people who vote for conservatives in 2022, as ridiculous as that is. Until that changes, we need to talk MORE, not less, about climate change until the problem is solved.
As for football - endangering one's health by playing American football is idiotic. It's a crappy game anyway, nothing is lost by spending that time riding a bicycle or playing videogames instead.
All of those are greatly exaggerated, but for some minority of jobs, apartments, and street corners, yes.
If there was a real problem, they'd never tell you about it, to prevent a moral panic. Thus, this is just another fear-porn piece.
Going from many TV series set in American high school environments, bullying seems to be a major problem, and that bullying seems to be usually rooted in physical appearance.
To tackle bullying, the ability for a bully to become a bully must be addressed. Anything else is accreting social debt (to draw a parallel to technical debt). If you wish to address social or technical debt, you have to actually address it, not try to patch the effects.
1. Appearance certainly among other things. Children can be bullied for race, culture, class, &c.
More importantly, bullying generally affects only a fairly small number of children, and has been around forever; it's not like bullying was invented in the last 15 years. Not that I want to trivialise the effects of bulling in any way, but I'm skeptical it can be the cause of a fairly wide shift in the general population (we're talking about 44% of kids here).
That’s a common misconception. Bullying affects everybody, most of all the bystanders and the societal attitudes as the result. If bystanders don’t interfere to prevent bullying they accept it and only wish it doesn’t happen to them. That perpetuates the notion that the strongest, most violent and cruel rule, deeply rooting it in the minds of the growing adolescents and dictating the prevalent mentality of the society 10-20-30 years forward.
Children, in general, are kind of terrible human beings. Their brains are still developing and they don't quite have the same sense of empathy and compassion that adults do. People's brains continue developing until around the age of 25 or so.
I figured out that both were true once I became an adult.
Kids are gonna jerks. But it’s nice not having to decide what to wear