CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/31/student-mental-health-decline-cdc/

by walterbell • 4 years ago

254 491 4 years ago

eganist• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible.

Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access to social media essentially from birth (access that probably should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified negative perspectives.

The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected back at people on just about every social media platform rather than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by preventing people from spending time with each other in person, but kids are glued to their phones anyway.

$1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-α and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these learnings.

version_five2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible

I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the conditions were there, and inevitably something would come along to set it off.

briHass• 4 years ago

I'd add 'collective overreaction', at least from a fear perspective. I know plenty of adults that lost their rational minds during the pandemic: believing all the media-driven fear porn that never once honestly explained the true risk to the < 70 year-old crowd. Older children/teens watched those same news programs and also picked up on their parents' fear, and they had even less wisdom and ability to think clearly than the parents.

quickthrowman• 4 years ago

I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause

I keep seeing the argument that the pandemic and the response to it are distinctly separate phenomenon. They are not.

The pandemic response is explicitly part and parcel of the pandemic, you don’t have a pandemic without a response, and there’s no response without a pandemic.

This is not hard to grasp.

throw93232• 4 years ago

Most kids I know, think social media are lame. They use it complement for their hobbies and activities. It was pandemic that glued them to their phones, not the other way around.

But must protect meh narrative!!

easrng• 4 years ago

Here, have an anecdote: I always spent a lot of my time online (I got Discord at 12 or 13 I think, I never got Twitter or any FB/Meta apps, but now I'm on the fediverse which is nice) and the pandemic didn't really change much other than me not having to leave the house to go to school.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

The undergrads I work with don't seem to ever mention Facebook, but Discord seems pretty popular. Social media is like everything else: There's the "bad" product which has been ruined by old people and the "good" product that the hip young crowd likes. This treadmill will continue as people join networks, settle in to their preferences, and then age.

csallen• 4 years ago

Kids have been exposed to multiple consecutive years of social isolation due to the pandemic. They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in person. That's kind of the obvious hypothesis. To just completely write that off, you really have to have axe to grind against social media.

As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones.

Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was over the top.

vkou3• 4 years ago

They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in person.

I'm not sure there's a single family in the continental United States that has spent the entirety of the past two years keeping their children locked up in their basement.

Even when school is closed, nobody has been stopping children from seeing their peers in person outside of school.

And if our society can't figure out a way to make that a priority, then that may be the problem with it, not the school closures.

germinalphrase2• 4 years ago

I’m a high school English teacher. What you’re saying seems mostly right - but, anecdotally of course, the trend has been made more severe. Their ability to engage with in-person socialization is very obviously impaired, and their pre-existing tendency to snack on social media is compulsive for a whole bunch of them.

At a much higher level than I’ve ever seen, kids will choose swiping over talking with their friends who are sitting right next to them.

It’s getting better, but - man - it was bad when we first returned from distance learning.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

Kids have less freedom today than they eve did - my parents roamed the city freely, i only walked to school by myself, kids today hardly leave the house alone

a9h74j• 4 years ago

I can't find a contour plot to reference, but I saw one once to this effect:

Every few decades in the US, the roaming range for kids decreasing by a factor of three or more IIRC -- over generations.

My father as a kid was setting animal traps all over the county, and for him a rifle, technologically speaking, was his PC.

akira2501• 4 years ago

I'm always entertained by the idea that 4chan did something to people as opposed to it revealing what was always there. We're social animals, we're more defined by our environment than we'd like to believe; but similarly, we have the capability to generate and manipulate that environment ourselves.

I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was always going to lead to this.

MisterBastahrd• 4 years ago

It gave them a positive feedback loop and gave them a safe space to become more extreme and weaponize their own stupidity.

You can easily see this to a lesser extend by going to any sports team subreddit and then going to the subreddit of the league that team plays in. The voices will be much more uniform and arguments more minor in the team subreddit for the most part... and views that are freely expressed and thought to be factual in the team subreddit may not be at all popular in the league subreddit.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

kids are glued to their phones anyway.

In many places this was actively encouraged during the last two years. Virtually every other activity was banished. Playgrounds, schools, extracurricular activities, pools, museums, you name it... closed. In many places you literally couldn't go outside without some kind of government issued hall-pass.

We absolutely, shamefully fucked over kids the last two years. And so many people cheered it on despite kids being the lowest risk group out there.

BlargMcLarg2• 4 years ago

The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials.

4chan did not incubate redpill. Reddit was the primary spot for redpill to congregate, until Reddit started cracking down on TRP and related subs. Cherry on top, Reddit has not acted against the highly similar FDS and many other subs.

Incel culture is also skeptical at best. Yes, 4chan did have the famous Elliot case, and several boards were famous among them. However, Reddit also banned several subreddits related to them which made them flock towards 4chan.

This doesn't change the issue (rampant media exposure is bad for the human psyche). It just puts into perspective things have been going downhill since the masses got access to social media and unlike 4chan, the darker corners of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and whatever else aren't nearly as taboo and may even sneak onto the homepage feed randomly. 4chan was mostly the place where the extremists would congregate, but extreme cases don't explain why the number of moderate or higher cases would increase.

To put things further in perspective: 4chan started in 2005. Twitter founded in 2006. Reddit, 2007. Smartphones took off somewhere late 2000s/early 2010s. The "average" kid did not have access to these platforms 24/7 before 2010. Those that would likely didn't spend the little PC time just browsing the darkest corners of the net on a single monitor.

regpertom• 4 years ago

I’ve been wondering about “mid phase” internet a bit recently. The time where it opened up to “nerdy” people, after tech professionals, and before general masses. There was a pushback against the internet being serious business. All someone has to do was turn off the computer and it all went away. Could it be that even back then it was somehow known what would happen with the influencer marketing engagement stuff that is a known problem now? Unwarranted self importance? Superman vs Goku and Star Trek vs Star Wars as training in not only how to leverage conflict for engagement (or your personal internet points) but also in how to see through it as being bait? That if you let the general masses make the internet real life then you open pandora bawks? Not sure that’s why it’s all questions. My awareness of TRP MRA ETC was only after internet feminists started complaining about it loudly, for whatever that’s worth. As a tangent: how often do we rediscover what the ancients already knew? Can anything survive touching the general masses?

erdos4d4• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible.

The article is literally reporting a major change in mental health metrics in teens as of a year into the pandemic. You honestly think social media/4-chan/reddit is the culprit? I think I'm starting to see why a million Americans are in a box today. There is a disconnect here.

BlargMcLarg2• 4 years ago

Concerns about adolescent mental health were rising before the pandemic: Teens had been reporting poor mental health at higher rates. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. In 2021, the figure rose to 44 percent.

I assume this is the line you're talking about. So in the span of a pandemic, it increased by 7% as opposed to the 11% between 2009 and 2019. While the premise "the pandemic didn't matter" might not be valid, it is a good question to ask which things that are now returning to normal had an effect, and whether the trend is still continuing up otherwise. It has been between 2009 and 2019. It's not difficult to find sources showing correlations between some mental health issues (in this case depression[0]) and internet usage. Several other aspects have not gotten any better either, and do not seem to be getting better anytime soon. Things these teens will inevitably have to deal with in the next 5 years unless things change drastically.

So the pandemic did matter, but I'd also be skeptical of what long term effects the pandemic caused which would not have happened otherwise, and which effects are caused by other trends which quietly continued or were amplified by the pandemic and will plateau or continue growing after.

[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/six-facts-about-screens-and-teen-...

tomrod5• 4 years ago

I am seeing that kids are less and less interested in online-only bubbles. They use social media, whatever the current popular platform, as ways to enhance connections if they use it at all.

There are many who are addicted to their devices. But there are many that are not. Why?

hammyhavoc• 4 years ago

Not like the adults are doing much better.

sebow• 4 years ago

"We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to discern good from bad, whereas a child until the age of 14-18 (depending on the topic at hand) does not have the sense of responsibility, especially about the crucial aspect which is his/her own health. Therefore you could expect an adult to be able to take care of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood, whereas a children is very rarely expected to do so, because most of the times they're not even fully aware of it (consciously speaking, not talking about almost instinctive reactions).

manuelabeledo16• 4 years ago

"We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to discern good from bad

Do we?

Suicide rate among adults in all age ranges is way higher than in teens and pre-teens.

Anecdotally, there are plenty of day to day examples of adults not having their crap together. The historical state of the world is one of them.

bawolff• 4 years ago

Therefore you could expect an adult to be able to take care of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood

I used to believe that as a kid... then i became an adult and met other adults who do not remotely have their shit together.

CPLX2• 4 years ago

"We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to discern good from bad

You’re going to be shocked when you find out what Facebook did to the Boomer generation.

refurb2• 4 years ago

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop"

I couldn't think of a worse situation than being isolated from classmates and friends, cooped up at home, having extra time on my hands and unlimited access to social media.

wccrawford• 4 years ago

And parents that think it's someone else's job to raise their kids.

lookalike74• 4 years ago

The influence of this cannot be overstated. George Carlin said it best... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ryuJDTpEc

vkou3• 4 years ago

It's always been someone else's job, it's just that 'someone else' used to be called 'grandma'.

In the nuclear family of 2022, grandma no longer lives with you - or within half a mile of you - so she's no longer an option.

We've built our society such that it's impossible to go anywhere without a car, and then we wonder why children don't get enough socialization, or why the only caretakers they have access to are their direct parents, and their teachers.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

It takes more than somebody's parents to raise a kid. It takes a community to raise a kid.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

Surely this can be fixed by lowering the standards, like for speech development, right?

Thorentis• 4 years ago

Social media and pornography are the two biggest enemies of teenage mental health, and both of them have been available for almost the entire Gen-Z person's life, delivered straight to their bedroom via high speed internet, and follows them everywhere they go on their smartphones.

marginalia_nu2• 4 years ago

Both social media (in some form) and porn has been around for far longer than this has been a problem. I'm a card carrying "Starcraft and DeusEx defined my teenage years"-millennial, and these things have been around most of my formative years as well. I think I was like ten when a friend showed me you could type "boobs" into altavista and get whitehouse.com, which back then was a porn site alluding to Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I think the big difference now is smartphones, and being always online. It's much easier to have your entire world view informed by the Internet now than it was twenty years ago. It's a stark contrast. If you look on twitter and reddit, everything is always burning, the sky is falling every day for a hundred different reasons, the bees are dying, the Russians are about to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, there's indignant outrage and injustice everywhere.

If you look out the window, there's literally none of that going on. Like it's almost all speculation, or happening somewhere else. Twenty years ago, a lot of bad things were happening as well, but they weren't up in your face in nearly the same way. For some things, you had the dotcom bubble, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq. While they made a prominent impact on the news, the news was only on while you watched them. They didn't follow you around everywhere you went like they do today.

riedel2• 4 years ago

The problem is IMHO not that things change, but that parents and teachers have difficulty adapting to that change and prepare their offspring for life. We are trying to establish a protected physical world that does not really teach you much about that "other" life and helps kids to develop resilience.

CPLX2• 4 years ago

Arguable. I’m in my mid 40s and the internet as we know it didn’t really exist at all until I was a college graduate.

The speed with which things have changed is staggering on a cultural and generational timescale.

wedn3sday• 4 years ago

I strongly agree with you. Social media, if it was used through a computer, isnt the problem, its instant access to everything all the time via smartphones. I feel like Bo Burnams "Inside" struck a chord with me and has been living in the back of my head for a year and a half now as I slowly digest it.

See a man beheaded, Get offended, see a shrink, Show us pictures of your children, Tell us every thought you think, Start a rumor, buy a broom, Or send a death threat to a boomer, Or DM a girl and groom her, Do a Zoom or find a tumor, Here's a healthy breakfast option, You should kill your mom, Here's why women never fuck you, Here's how you can build a bomb, Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky quiz, Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids,

Could I interest you in everything? All of the time? A little bit of everything, All of the time, Apathy's a tragedy, And boredom is a crime, Anything and everything, All of the time

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

This is according to the teens themselves, but people still are hesitant to listen…

jeltz• 4 years ago

Social media has been around since the early 2000s, over 20 years, and easily accessible porn has been around slightly longer. So, no, I am not convinced this is it. Smartphones on the other hand is a possible culprit.

treis• 4 years ago

Social media wasn't ubiquitous and certainly not mobile. What was there was an extension of your meat space life. It wasn't until the late 00s early 10s that social media blew up and took on a life of it's own.

Aerroon2• 4 years ago

I don't see how you can blame this on porn.

The people who grew up with east to access online porn are now in their 30s. In the early 2000s it was harder to escape porn online, because you'd see it in ads and people would trick each other with (eg the content of downloads were swapped out).

Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent.

The starting figure from 2009 would consider teens who grew up with easy access to porn. But it fell from there.

trinovantes• 4 years ago

It makes me feel pretty lucky to be born in the last generation where those aren't part of my life till I'm almost out of my teenage years. I didn't even get a smartphone until I started university and that was considered early adopter for my group of friends.

sylens2• 4 years ago

I wish tech had frozen at like the 2005-2006 era; good enough for wireless routers in homes and some Web 2.0 capabilities but before everything was aggressively targeted towards an always connected phone in your pocket at all times

loceng• 4 years ago

Add very unhealthy inflammatory diets/low quality food (processed etc), pharmaceuticals, and multi-generational dis-ease progression to that list; your parents' health, society's health as a whole and how they interact with you, much more greatly affects a culture than is talked about - most of society has lost the ancient traditions and understanding of health, and the body-mind-spirit.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

Where did pornography come from?

I’d argue social media is far more damaging, especially Twitter and the advent of outrage culture. It breeds hatred and intolerance, two thought patterns that will send us back 30 years.

kar5pt• 4 years ago

Porn was around long before 2009 so this doesn't make sense.

yobbo2• 4 years ago

It's not smartphones or "straight to the bedroom". Online communities for teenagers have been around in some form since the 80s.

Now everyone is expected to be on social media and it is the main community for a teenager, not an escape for nerds. If you're not successful there, you're also an outcast in reality.

prepend7• 4 years ago

This exposure wasn’t mainstream until the early-mid 10s when every high schooler got a phone and social media. Before then, it was computer and game system based and that changes.

I don’t know real screen time data, but the use of phones probably added an extra 4-10 hours of screentime per day. And the type of activity is very different with notifications and pickups being top of mind.

sdoering5• 4 years ago

Do you have any scientific sources for those claims? Any qualitative good studies?

drno123• 4 years ago

CDC isolates teens for two years, CDC keeps them in fear for two years, and CDC is now surprised.

ImaCake2• 4 years ago

A lot of people would, and did, isolate even without being told too until they were vaccinated. They would have done so out of fear. All that governments really did by mandating lockdowns was enforce it on the part of the population that wouldn't do it with the hope that it would stop the spread of COVID. In some countries it worked, in others it didn't.

All this is to say there is no causal relationship between the government lockdowns (mandated at the state level in the USA, no?) and the CDC reporting on mental health. Both occured independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

In some countries it worked, in others it didn't.

You cannot say this for certain. It will take much calmer heads before anybody can say these restrictions were worth their incredible costs.

Both occured independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though.

Kids were not allowed to go to school for more than a year. You don't need any research to suggest that isn't good for kids. Seriously. Claiming these lockdowns and restrictions didn't have a significant impact on children is being willfully ignorant.

standardUser4• 4 years ago

The only teens who have been "isolated" for two years are maybe some of those at very high risk (or the unfortunate children of hyper-paranoid parents). No need to exaggerate.

Nemrod674• 4 years ago

so when the media told us that seeing Grandma at Christmas would kill her, it wasnt an exaggeration?

qiskit• 4 years ago

Makes me wonder what the CDC's recommendation will be. More medication? More pills? Isn't that their answer for everything. We are already the most medicated society on earth. I guess a little bit more won't hurt.

tomohawk2• 4 years ago

It's not like the CDC wasn't warned that their policies would be harmful. Oh, wait, they were!

Unfortunately, the CDC policies were captive to the teacher's unions, who are anti-child and anti-parent.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/teachers-union-collaborated-wi...

manuelabeledo16• 4 years ago

So a teacher’s union pushed to protect teachers during a pandemic. Shocking, especially after ~1000 teachers died from COVID-19.

tomohawk2• 4 years ago

Thanks for agreeing that the teacher's union pursued an agenda contrary to the needs of our children.

It won't be shocking given this activity to undermine our children's health that parents will work to re-orient the teacher's union to a mission that is actually useful to society.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

Somehow grocery stores managed to stay open. So did tire repair centers, auto shops, home depots, uber drivers, pot shop employees, pharmacy employees... what makes teachers so damn special?

Adults sacrifice for children. Asking children, none of whom are at risk, to sacrifice for more than a year for a bunch of frightened adults... it is so disgustingly immoral I can't even.

If teachers were scared, they should have quit and let somebody else teach the kids. Covid isn't and never was some modern black plague. The median age of death was higher than the average life expectancy of a human.

JaimeThompson6• 4 years ago

How are they "anti-parent"?

manuelabeledo16• 4 years ago

They are “anti-parent” only if they are viewed as babysitters.

I think that this idea has been pushed by right wing media as part of their “open for business” rhetoric. They claim to be concerned about children wellbeing, when the actual goal is to get kids out of their homes and parents back to the offices.

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

These trends have been happening for decades and it tracks quite well the gradual breakdown of stable family structures. Psychologically for example, kids experience their parent’s divorce as worse than a parent’s death.

VerminOctopus1• 4 years ago

Do you have a source for that claim? It sounds like nonsense. My parents divorced when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I’m pretty sure it would be unimaginably more traumatic if one of them had died instead.

replygirl• 4 years ago

Just anecdotally, my parents divorced and one of my parents took their own life, the divorce was harder

barry-cotter2• 4 years ago

If you compare children of divorce with children who have a parent die the children of divorce look worse on basically every measure, sure. That doesn’t mean divorce is worse for children than the death of a parent. Divorce is a choice. The king of person who gets divorced is different from the kind who doesn’t. By way of example Asian-Americanc college graduates who get married in their 30s have a divorce rate around ~2%. Most people who get divorced remarry. The kind of person who marries a divorcee is not the same king of person as those who don’t.

Correlation isn’t causation.

Cpoll• 4 years ago

I've read some takes that divorce can be positive for a child. The theory was: parents having time away from their child gave them a break, and also helped them value their time with the child more. There are also theories that living in a divorced family is better than living in an unhappily married one.

AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as grades, which don't necessarily correlate.

lapsis_beeftech• 4 years ago

Of course divorce can be positive! My parents divorced in my late teens and it was hugely beneficial for me since it meant I could live with my mother and entirely avoid the very stressful daily conflicts with my father.

barry-cotter2• 4 years ago

Regardless of any internet-level understanding or resentment, the millennial/zoomer understanding of mental health is completely destroying people's lives.
I work and have worked in mental health for my entire adult life (late 20s now). I have my own mental health diagnoses. I was diagnosed with severe OCD when I was 11. Since then I've gone through periods of generalized anxiety, agoraphobia, panic disorder, you name it. It has destroyed my life once every three or four years without fail. Losing jobs, friendships, my grades in college, everything. Just utter ineptitude and catatonic inability to take care of myself. I have been blessed with the most supportive family anyone could ask for. I do not fail to see the differences between myself and those who I now serve. But there is an intense illness that is permeating through our younger generations that is destroying the possibility of recovery for these people suffering through legitimate mental health issues.
I have met and helped and treated numerous individuals now who are my peers in age - anything from 18-early 30s. And so many have internalized a generational "understanding" of mental illness that is toxic and worthless beyond condemnation. Our youngest generations' understanding of mental health enables, encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-broken-model-of-broke...

gilrain• 4 years ago

Whoa, I was with that until the huge hit of bigotry at the end. Being queer or polysex is not at all a mental illness.

p10_user• 4 years ago

Not sure what OPs original meaning was, but I think a legitimate statement can be made stating that being queer/polysex (or any other non “standard” sexual identity) comes with a higher probability for mental illness due to discrimination.

germinalphrase2• 4 years ago

“I can not understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their identity.”

One of these is not like the others.

alexb_• 4 years ago

Can we stop pretending like being fashionably ill is a new problem plaguing our youth? This is a phenomenon that has happened before in history - Tuberculosis was seen as crazy fashionable during the romantic period, and could be part of the reason that things like pale skin, thin bodies, and fragility are STILL seen as fashionable to this day[1]. Maybe we're seeing something similar happen here?

[1] https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tuberculosis-a-fashionable...

jt2190• 4 years ago

The data for the CDC Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES) are here:

https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/abes/tables/index.htm

The survey was conducted in the first half of 2021

kurofune3• 4 years ago

Blaming it all on the pandemic is an absolutely hilarious misdiagnosis. Everything seems to be on the brink of collapse all the time, housing prices are absolutely bonkers in most cities and wages are, in the best scenario imaginable, same they were 20 years ago for your average professional who lives paycheck to paycheck. Politicians have no vision, they are just parasitic entities that benefit electorally from violent asinine confrontation between voters on pointless cultural issues that never find any satisfactory or permanent resolution. Mass media are fully immersed in a two decades long psychic war against the general public that only seems to be accelerating.

There are too many structural weakness in our society to point out without having to write a full essay, but this mental health decline is the direct result of our failing political and economic systems and our apparent impossibility to challenge them in any productive way.

onlyrealcuzzo5• 4 years ago

Everything seems to be on the brink of collapse all the time, housing prices are absolutely bonkers in most cities and wages are, in the best scenario imaginable, same they were 20 years ago for your average professional who lives paycheck to paycheck.

Personal income per Capita went from ~$30k to ~$63k in the last 20 years [1]. REAL weekly earnings are at an all time high [2].

Debt service reached an all-time low during the pandemic [3]. Even for new buyers with house prices at their peak, with interest rates where they WERE, mortgage payments were historically quite low.

Now that interest rates have gone up, payments are ~20% higher. But unsurprisingly, the insatiable demand has also dried up.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A792RC0A052NBEA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

I honestly feel sorry for all the people like you who can't see how manipulated prices are and realize that it's a good deal. The market shouldn't be this manipulated (by our government) and confusing. It's screwing over so many people who think common sense still applies.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

I really don’t understand what you are trying to say.

Are you arguing the buying a home is within reach of the average man anywhere outside of the middle of nowhere?

yobbo2• 4 years ago

You yourself actually linked to the relevant plot "Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings". If you want to make credible arguments, look for median income.

Q3 2001: $338, Q3 2021: $367, so that's an 8% increase, claimed to be CPI adjusted.

CPI measures price changes for things such as flip flops, snickers bars, and TVs - things you find in Walmarts. What people complain about is the price of housing.

disambiguation2• 4 years ago

Personal income per Capita went from ~$30k to ~$63k in the last 20 years

At an inflation rate of 3%, the value of money decreases by half every 25 years.

missedthecue2• 4 years ago

Why would the price of a single family home make a 13 year old depressed? They've easily got a decade and a half until they need to worry about that.

manuelabeledo16• 4 years ago

Because the pressure it puts on their parents and the consequences of it? I think this one is pretty obvious.

Valgrim• 4 years ago

Because even if it's their parents that pay for the mortgage, they are still affected by the consequences of high housing prices (longer travel times, less disposable income, lack of space, bad neighborhood, lack of social mobility, etc...)

mescaline• 4 years ago

13 year olds don't worry about houses, they worry about things shared online by their peers. That's on Silicon Valley, folks. Denial of our own hand in this is real.

kurofune3• 4 years ago

Are you sure you can't imagine why the terrible economic situation a family is living in could impact the mental health of a 13yo? We love problem solvers in this site.

disambiguation2• 4 years ago

because it makes the future seem hopeless

"if the adults can't figure it out, what chance do i have?"

notacoward3• 4 years ago

It depends on what you count as part of the pandemic. At its core there's just the disease itself and the risk of catching it. Then there's the chance of knowing someone who has been severely ill from it, and the precautions taken to mitigate that risk. A few kids were fine with remote learning; for many more it absolutely sucked. Then there's the fact that those precautions have precluded many other activities, leaving even more time to read all the doom and gloom online. For high-school seniors (like my daughter) there's the college-admission situation which is an absolute mess right now due to two years of pandemic-related issues. Stressed out parents, cabin fever, contentious battles with friends and neighbors over vaccines and masks ... the list goes on and on.

If you interpret "the pandemic" as just that core, maybe it's a misdiagnosis. If you include all of the secondary and tertiary effects, the case is much stronger.

frankohn• 4 years ago

This situation if the result of the destruction of the social network of relations due to the modern lifestyle. To have meaningful social relations with our peers is extremely important for humans and even more so for teenagers I guess.

First the modern lifestyle mostly destroyed the small communities where people know each other and spend a lot of time together. People began to stay in their house all the time with no contacts with a community.

At this first stage, as the local community was eliminated, the remaining pillars of social relations were school, for young people, and work for adults. I some case adults were able to maintain some degree of additional social life by having some friends and inviting them regularly to create the opportunity to meet.

Later it come all the smartphones, tablets, computers, social networks that captivated all the attention, especially of young people so even more so people were pushed to stay more at home and meet less people further increasing the social isolation.

The final blow came from the COVID-19 confinement were people were forced to stay at home reducing social contacts only to the close family members. This situation created an unsustainable isolation raising serious mental health problem especially for teenagers but also for adult people.

Modern society got it all wrong. We think having more goods and entertainment to consume make us happier but this is not how it works. Not if the social life and the social network around us is poor or non-existent.

Scientific thought that they know all and can say people what to do and they give us instruction just to avoid that people dies. The problem is that people doesn't just need to stay physically alive, we need to be also happy and fulfilled by our life.

We need to radically change modern lifestyle and stop with all the bullshit coming from politicians.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

Not sure I agree with everything you say, but having social contact is absolutely gratifying.

The lack of community in current times is absolutely a negative.

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

Yet we still collectively prefer conformity behavior shaped by media and politics.

Decentralisation and community is future.

everforward• 4 years ago

I agree with a lot of this, but I think the effect has more complex roots.

I think there's an economic component to this as well. Housing prices are rising, meaning a lot of people are pushed out of their existing community, or that they perceive their community is temporary (until they all get pushed out). It starts to feel pointless to build a community of renters when you don't think it will exist in 5 years.

A lot of local shops have been overtaken by corporations, who exist in the community but aren't really part of it. Walmart/Target/Dick's/etc isn't sponsoring the local little league, or throwing a potluck, or creating any kind of space or events to build a community around.

Religious service attendance is also down, which is another way people used to build communities, and I haven't seen a lot of secular replacements (not a criticism of anyone, I don't attend myself). I think a lot of people replaced religion with politics, which has created communities more focused on things outside themselves (laws and public opinion) than within themselves.

I don't even know that social media is the cause of loss of community. It seems to me that social media was the market responding to the loss of in-person communities; it was responding to an already-established need. It might have accelerated the decline, but I think healthy communities could have withstood social media. We just didn't have many healthy communities left.

rakejake• 4 years ago

The problem with community is everyone (or at least most people in the sample space) has to buy-in for it to work. Sometime in the last 15 years, it slowly started shifting online and then beyond a critical threshold, it began to snowball. And now you have generations that play together on minecraft and roblox. And how exactly do you fight that when it is mostly frictionless and requires much less social energy? You can't.

Hmm, when we decided religion was bad and decided to phase it out of our lives, did we perhaps throw the baby out with the bathwater?

tsol• 4 years ago

Anecdotally I've seen much less damage among those who are deeply religious that I know(Muslims). Social networks are strong so they were preserved even among the pandemic. Say what you want about the problems that come with religion, but it is great at solving a lot of the issues that humans have dealt with for thousands of years. Those problems are ones modern society has done little to solve

tonymet2• 4 years ago

Communities fell apart starting in the 60-80s, well before the internet and social media.

People forget the concrete institutions that were dissolved that led to communities collapsing.

First it was families falling apart due to high rates of divorce and low birth rates. Also people moving away from home for job opportunities split the family apart. Entire towns were hollowed out.

Also the dissolution of institutions like church, political groups, fraternal orders (e.g. Elks, Kiwanis), Charity Groups. See the book "Bowling Alone".

Social media and entertainment spiked afterward to fill the void – but it was the collapse of the families, community groups & towns that were a precursor to the death of communities.

OkayPhysicist• 4 years ago

I have some first hand experience with fraternal orders. They sowed the seed of their own destruction somewhere around Vietnam.

They experienced a huge boost in popularity following WW2, where soldiers returning home looked to fill the companionship void left by leaving military service. They experienced similar boosts following Korea and Vietnam, but they got spoiled by these: they got so veteran-centric (in no small part because of the negative view Americans at large had of the Vietnam war) that they basically stopped recruiting anyone else.

Then military culture shifted, leading a lot of people to not identify with their service as much as prior generations. The fraternal orders didn't try to recruit, and by now it's too late: very few young people cherish the thought of hanging out with a bunch of septagenarians.

xwdv• 4 years ago

Another factor may be that many people that teens look up to today talk openly about mental health problems, to the point that now it seems almost trendy to struggle with mental health. Perhaps this encourages teens to let their mental health deteriorate for attention, which is the social currency of today’s society. Remember they are not entirely rational beings.

standardUser4• 4 years ago

Or if we want to be less mind-blowingly cynical about it, we could simply assume that the increased openness to discussing mental health is itself helping previously unnoticed mental health issues to come to light.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

Sure the pandemic may have accelerated or been the catalyst, but let's be honest here. TV/Internet/Video game addiction is a serious thing that nobody is paying attention to. I struggled with this personally for the last 25 years of my life and I'm 30. I now have two kids and have to ensure I moderate their usage in responsible ways as they grow up.

I was a generation before the iPad, but the current teenagers struggling have likely had a smart device from as early as 2. My smart device was a TV and nintendo. The guidelines the CDC even has for responsible device usage is reasonable, but nobody follows it. Most people are picking up their devices up to a hundred times a day or every 10 minutes. The average screen time is close to 3 hours. That's an average by the way...

We need to bring awareness to this problem like Nicholas Carr did over a decade ago. We can't let big tech companies convince us this isn't a problem with their sponsored studies to control a narrative.

notacoward3• 4 years ago

If you really want to see how bad it has gotten, try finding a therapist for a teen. Even in communities where supply is high and demand is (relatively) low, they're all absolutely overwhelmed. When I went looking, ~75% of them were explicitly not taking new clients. Working through the rest, through multiple directories and services, I was denied or simply ghosted ~20 times before I finally found someone. Naturally it was the newest, youngest member of a large practice. She has been great, but the struggle to find her was a real eye opener.

aaomidi• 4 years ago

Global warming

Economic forecasts being shit

Social media

Realizing the injustice in the world and seeing adults do nothing about it

Hyper competitive schooling

Lack of support during the pandemic

Yeah all of this has an impact.

prepend7• 4 years ago

Economic forecasts being shit

Aren’t we in the longest economic boon ever? This might be the first bear market in over 10 years.

Schools didn’t require sats and other exams and were actually easier to get into during the pandemic. The past two years were like a glorious time for school admission.

JaimeThompson6• 4 years ago

The distribution of "rewards" from this economic boom has been a bit one sided taking all factors into account.

beeboop• 4 years ago

Food and housing and education and healthcare are all more expensive than ever. I work in tech making six figures and can't afford a single family home. My employer pays $700 a month for my insurance. I spent $1000 a month on groceries.

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

I think the biggest problem with these things is not that they are actually shit, but some section of adults have convinced kids that these problems will be the death of everyone. I'm thinking of Greta Thunberg crying about not being able to have a family or kids of her own because of global warming. That's a bit melodramatic, especially for someone coming from Europe.

ck2• 4 years ago

Before 2000 or so, every stupid thing you did as a kid wasn't recorded on a phone or online somewhere permanently that you could forget it.

Maybe at school but bullying wasn't possible 24/7 online like now.

You had no idea what the latest news or political drama was as a kid before 2000 because it wasn't in your hand 12+ hours a day. No twitter/facebook or whatever they are using now.

Now being a kid is as depressing as being an adult and you are wired-in to a world that's overwhelming you. Sure they don't have jobs or rents to pay but everything still feels fatalistic to them, like they can't escape the world defines them, not the other way around.

tsoukase• 4 years ago

Solid and deep points. At era around 2000 things-culture started to decline. No coincidence global IQ and many qualities (eg music, education, human relations) started to decline at that time too

johnold• 4 years ago

As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement:

There is no room for mistakes.

Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…

And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.

They see this never ending cycle of

turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.

Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Something has to give.

This is really disturbing to me.

How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.

holoduke• 4 years ago

I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and you need to win everything. Individual development is very important. Hope it will remain like that.

chrisseaton3• 4 years ago

Individual development is very important.

Not sure if you’ve misread the thread - the whole problem is too much importance on individual development and the pressure this brings.

nynx• 4 years ago

I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true.

I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.

Something will eventually give.

ZhangSWEFAANG• 4 years ago

There are homeless shelters and food stamps.

Animats4• 4 years ago

Flunking out today doesn't mean being drafted into the Army. That may come back, especially in Europe. It's shaping up to be a long war.

jseliger• 4 years ago

Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day.

That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

hettygreen• 4 years ago

It's like you're completely ignoring the fact that phones and apps are designed to be addictive.

Growing up in a world where tech companies have been given free reign to psychologically manipulate users to increase screen time is yet another pressure facing that generation, it shouldn't be thrown in their face.

ben_w• 4 years ago

Second link is broken.

School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would not even remotely surprising during the pandemic — what else are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 was the actual school day.

Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 — memories of downloading and printing pictures from an artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 — but again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200.

Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest in the tasks we had to do.

Of course, now I’m a “responsible adult” or something. Screen Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week:

• Normal office job

• 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic

• 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German)

• Daily practice in at least one other German language app

• A complete audiobook

• A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, YouTube vids, WWDC, etc.

• 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org

• I cook almost all the meals in our household

laurent922• 4 years ago

admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

- Snapchat is essential to some youth friendships nowadays, unfortunately,

- People dwell in dopamine hits, notably because their social life is broken. It’s a self-reinforcing problem, true, but initially their social life was broken. You don’t get into drugs when all is good, or at least you can resist.

mkultra95• 4 years ago

Lol literally our whole world revolves around things that don’t matter think about it our whole World revolves around things that won’t benefit us in the next life , just a bunch of people wasting their energy and time doing something another human came up with, and of course knowing how long the devil been around he’s pretty good at his job and if you look at the scripture you would know how he tried to trick the humans before us and a lot of information that most people won’t know because their so busy beeping tricked by the devil for example Solomon temple back in his time they also had technology but not as advanced if you knew what technology really was somethings will start to make sense and if you run the thought of how pretty much everything things we do in our lives was designed in a complex system by the devil and his helpers but wait you don’t want know the real truth it’s madder then anything you watched or Your small Little human brain could possibly imagine and oh covid omg wtf why so desperately did they want at least 70% of the world vaccinated and how did everyone go along that blows my mind more then anything I just told you lol I’ll predict the future so easy everything revolves around ISREAL lol too much

prepend7• 4 years ago

Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…

As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.

When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.

HollywoodZero• 4 years ago

+1. My oldest is in high school now and even in her honors classes there's the ability to turn on some things late and even some re-takes are allowed.

I don't know where these ZERO mistakes-type of mentality is coming from.

alphakilo• 4 years ago

not my experience... is this a board/school policy or a specific teacher?

never seen teaches let exams be retaken

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

Back in the day, getting a C was fine but getting an A was really hard, most students got Bs or Cs.

Now, getting an A isn’t so hard but a C is seen as a terrible, because most students are getting As.

Lots of schools have policies like yours but they’re not removing the pressure, they’re just shifting what’s “acceptable”. Sometimes they actually make it worse because now near-perfect scores are the norm, and if you mess up there’s no way to do extra somewhere else to bring you back to average.

sudosysgen• 4 years ago

There were none of these when I was in high school only a few years ago, and they still aren't a thing from the high schoolers I know.

The system is still the same - every day you miss the assignment is one fewer grade, except for some, where you automatically get zero. You cannot retake an exam without cause.

It's just selection bias.

ryandrake2• 4 years ago

I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get B’s or C’s and have a good job after high school. Now you’re competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, you’re way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of stress!

lordloki• 4 years ago

globalization doing it's thing, equalizing to the mean.

nradov14• 4 years ago

Skilled labor jobs or military service are a great option for people who didn't get excellent grades in high school but are willing to work hard to get a ticket out of poverty. Unfortunately, many educators and parents don't promote those career paths as much as they should.

https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/

nvarsj• 4 years ago

It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a rapid pace over the last 10-20 years.

Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.

notacoward3• 4 years ago

adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you

Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years.

Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

Don't forget affirmative action (sorry, reverse racism). If you are Asian (or for some schools, male), the standards are substantially higher than if you are black or Latino.

Animats4• 4 years ago

That's the super high achieving group. I saw that some decades back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high schools.[1]

Notes from then:

- Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5".

- Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down."

- One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college.

This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

vonwoodson• 4 years ago

“Something has to give.”

The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand!

As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.

9999000009994• 4 years ago

I know if I ever have kids, I'm probably going to tell them it's okay to even drop out of high school.

None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you.

You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of.

Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you.

Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA.

The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.

Clubber2• 4 years ago

I mean it really does matter. You got lucky. Compare yourself with the millions of people working at restaurants with no health insurance and nothing they own worth any value. That's the norm, not your experience.

The problem is there is a huge income gap between the people with degrees and good jobs and people with just high school educations. Much of that is due to offshoring / NAFTA / etc.

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."

-Ross Perot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

BTW, that dollar amount is double in todays dollars vs 1992 when that debate happened. Imagine if we had millions of jobs for people without college degrees paying $28 an hour with health care. That's a stark contrast with the $15 minimum wage people are clawing to get with massive resistance. Something as simple as NAFTA causing so much destruction 30 years after the fact is amazing. Imagine kids where both parents didn't have to work to make ends meet. Imagine kids where their parent's weren't exhausted from working all the time and could spend more quality time with them. Imagine kids who could have a future where they didn't have to attend college and the pressure that comes with it. imagine kids who can get regular health checkups without breaking the bank. The cascade effects are immense. But hey, look on the bright side, PROFITS!

trhway• 4 years ago

As I said to my psychologist at the beginning of the pandemic - what is done to the children as supposed pandemic fighting measures will generate as much work for him for many decades to come as he can take as naturally nobody cares about long term.

sdoering5• 4 years ago

The quality of the discussion is in parts abysmal. Assertions are thrown into the world without even mentioning a source.

A substantive discussion is therefore not possible. It is just 'opinion porn' imho.

Regardless of whether the pandemic, social media, (real) porn, industrial food, excessive demands at school, any combination thereof or other anecdotes are used as the cause. Nothing is substantiated by linking sources. Or at least naming them.

Whatever is claimed can only be questioned, not refuted, as there is no substantive point of attack.

Thus, in the end, everyone feels good because they were able to express an opinion. But unfortunately we have learned nothing.

mlyle3• 4 years ago

You know, opinions are valuable here for hypothesis generation.

No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.

If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.

sdoering5• 4 years ago

There are for quite some time already studies happening so I doubt that random people on the internet sharing opinions help much in generating valid (or interesting) hypotheses. Also how would you validate those?

Just examples:

- https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/6/E136.short - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406494/ - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34333404/

paulcole• 4 years ago

It is just 'opinion porn' imho

Leader in the clubhouse for the 2022 Accidental HN Slogan Contest.

onphonenow6• 4 years ago

The reality is the pandemic fear mongers won't cite fataility rates for groups like 5 year olds, because the data doesn't support steps taken.

They won't cite data about N95 use because N95's DO work, and if we just let people who wanted to / were at risk wear N95's we'd solve half the problem right there without burdening anyone else. And yes, N95's with a vent are fine and should be encouraged because they make mask wearing a LOT easier.

Instead we are just fed endless BS. Citing the CDC and WHO is pointless because their stuff was not actually grounded in science but in BS. Witness their loud announcements that travel restrictions (time honored method to reduce spread) was racist and wouldn't reduce spread. Or that masks don't work etc. You have an airbone disease, masks probably help. You have a transmittable disease, reducing travel may help.

sdoering5• 4 years ago

I think we can be a little less confrontational in the discussion. I also believe that it helps not to impute bad intentions to the other side, but to assume that they make mistakes (like every side), but also try to achieve the best possible outcome under the given circumstances and knowledge at the time.

Especially during Corona I think you have to distinguish clearly between politics and science. Science has the great advantage that it does not have to deal with feasibility. It can call out what works best (after appropriate studies have been done with good study design). Does science make mistakes? Sure. Still it is the best methodology we have. Does politics make mistakes. Oh - absolutely. Also probably some politicians wet their pants in regards to the power trip they had. Still - I think the majority tried to do the best they could.

However, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of what we know today was yet unknown. So a lot of decisions were necessarily wrong in hindsight. but right under the given circumstances and the goals of the people involved.

Was it known that N95 masks (very likely) help? Yes. Were there enough N95 masks available for everybody? Probably not.

When I look at how toilet paper was hoarded in Germany at the beginning of the pandemic and how there was almost nowhere to get toilet paper, the political action was not so stupid. Because N95 masks would have been off the shelves in minutes. So letting people wear any masks (at least they help a little bit) and let as many people as possible stay at home as much as possible and in public only gather at an appropriate distance. Not too bad an idea when dealing with too few effective masks as a limitation imho.

When enough masks were available, the requirements for masks were tightened (although not enough, in my personal opinion). But again: I know a lot of people who think wearing masks is important, but have a hard time wearing N95/FFP2 but are fine with surgical masks due to for example panic attacks. The fact that currently quite a few public places like universities demand FFP2/N95 to be worn permanently makes for a bad situation for these people as they can't partake in their courses under this regime. While nearly all over Germany mask mandates fell yesterday.

Also taking into account possible long-term consequences of a Covid disease for children (or anyone), it was unclear for a long time (and partly still today) whether there is/was a corresponding danger. Therefore, one can also see appropriate measures here as a balancing of protection of society vs. individual liberties.

And that people are not the best at acting rationally in groups (sorry - but I have become very cynical and misanthropic during Corona) and to act reasonably in the masses we see again and again. Without coercion, most people (in groups) do not behave sensibly.

SixDouble5321• 4 years ago

Thanks for putting this into words. I will still probably read too many of the treads.

Meanwhile, moving into the deep woods is not just for Bible-thumping gun-nuts anymore.

lumb632• 4 years ago

It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd.

Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this to not be a major factor to their mental health.

Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of the important things in life that derive from social interaction. I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who can't choose to change their life to obtain the social interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support from their peers, elders, etc.

PathOfEclipse2• 4 years ago

People may rationalize these things because the alternative is to admit that one may have been wrong and/or caused harm to others in the process. People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.

rjh29• 4 years ago

I've used that argument and the counter is: depression due to lockdown can heal once lockdown is over. People dying because hospitals filled up and cases climbed is permanent.

giraffe_lady5• 4 years ago

Acknowledging the damage done by isolation doesn't mean you have to believe it was the wrong choice. In my country a million people have died of covid even with the isolations.

Was it "worth it"? I don't fucking know and I don't believe anyone else does either. Would it have been better to just let it rip and hope for the best? How many more would have died that way, and would our mental health be better for it? If it was, could we even live with that? If there was a button that would cure my depression and kill a stranger, I wouldn't push it.

EDIT: ok yeah I get it consensus is we should have pushed the button you can stop telling me now.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

People would rather downplay the harms caused by the pandemic to avoid guilt.

The pandemic had nothing to do with keeping kids out of school for more than a year. That was all humans doing. The virus didn't wake up some morning and tell us to shut down down schools.

Lockdowns and government caused virtually all of the lasting side-effects from the last two years.

It is my strong opinion that history will not look kindly to almost every single thing humanity did the last two years. They were humans at their absolute worst... Making knee jerk decisions based on fear and panic never end up well...

onphonenow6• 4 years ago

What a load of crock. My elderly father, terminal illness, was hit by the lockdown days before coming to visit us. He DOES NOT CARE about covid. He is dying anyways.

Then they wouldn't let our young son go play with friends or play on beach. This is lifetime impact stuff at 2-3.

When I wore an N95 mask I was told over and over it didn't help. Hello, it's an airborne disease, why wouldn't my mask help?

So we can't wear an N95, we CAN go to crowded grocery stores, we CAN'T go outside to the beach (huge volume of onshore fresh air and sunshine) and school is remote only (for a 2 year old this is TERRIBLE).

Worst of all, despite the talk of being "science driven" they have not been releasing age banded fatality rates by variant and a timely basis so folks can make informed decisions.

We got fed so much BS that the hit is going to be very long lasting in terms of credibility of the "establishment".

My father has a phd in a hard science. My wife has a phd in a hard science. If you are losing these folks, you are losing LOTS of folks.

That makes me wonder, what IS the fatality rate for 5 year olds. Seriously give me a table. Is it lower than just random accidents per 100?

Finally, why can't I wear a mask (N95 with ventilator) that is comfortable so easier to wear and protects me. ANd others can make their own decisions. Instead we spent huge amounts of effort trying to force people who may not have believed in mask wearing to wear masks, but these masks (cloth / surgical) were I suspect largely ineffective.

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone.

I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and I am an extreme outlier. But I would have been delighted. Alone, I could spend my time how I want, learn what I want, and associate with who I wish. There is also a much larger pool of love interests online than offline, especially in small town Missouri.

People just feel differently.

newsclues• 4 years ago

I’m a loner. I’m happy alone with a PC and internet, when it’s my choice.

During the pandemic, I live alone and have had minimal contact with family. Going months on end, lack of sun in northern climate, not seeing human faces in real life… the government said we had stay at home. Nope, I’m going out for a bike ride.

Choosing to be a basement dweller is one thing but this has been close to prison.

sva_2• 4 years ago

There was a discussion on here, about how the Covid pandemic may have been one of the, or even the biggest transfers of wealth from "the poor" to "the rich" in the history of our civilization. Somebody remarked, that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old. The measures taken against the pandemic undoubtedly had a huge impact on young people's mental health, but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years, and are probably not measurable. People who deny this must be willfully ignorant.

after_care3• 4 years ago

From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.

radicalbyte• 4 years ago

If we didn't do the lockdowns then we would have seen a huge increase in mortality over all age groups as hospitals where overwhelmed.

Also, Long Covid is very much a thing.

I get it though: teenagers are growing up during a once in a century pandemic in the middle of an existential climate crisis which the old leaders (all 70+ in the US!) are not addressing.

lumb632• 4 years ago

It's certainly a difficult cost/benefit analysis, preserving the lives of the elderly, at the expense of quality of life for a younger generation, versus the opposite. The effects are, as you said, probably not measurable, and so the calculus is near-impossible. However, the answer has seemingly been to not even try, and to "stop covid" at all costs, laying waste to any holistic arguments that perhaps prioritizing societal wellbeing was a better route than declaring war against a virus.

In my opinion, the vast majority of the world lost its cool in the pandemic, and in our panic, we may have made mistakes. Or maybe not. The long term results remain to be seen. Certainly, however, we as a society did not act with a level head and think things through rationally before acting.

alsetmusic2• 4 years ago

[…] but the effects of it will only really unfold in the coming years[…]

I believe that we'll see studies for the rest of our lives on the effects of the pandemic / lockdown among different age groups. Young people will likely be the most affected longterm. This will be the new "lead paint" for a generation.

moralestapia2• 4 years ago

that it has also been the biggest transfer of lifetime from the young to the old, as the lockdowns were mostly to protect the old

Holy crap, never thought about it that way. Add to the equation that it was the generation that gave us climate abuse, debt and pretty much loaned themselves out of our future (I'm in my 30s ...) and I don't think that's fair, at all.

hoseja• 4 years ago

The necroplutarchy demands its due.

thr0wawayf005• 4 years ago

You're absolutely right, and I've heard firsthand accounts of this.

My sister-in-law is a middle school counselor at a large midwest US public school system and her stories about kids dealing with the pandemic are heartbreaking, the mental health support system in some US schools is completely falling apart due to the workload.

She's never seen a mental health crisis on this scale in schools in her entire career. She remarks that kids really weren't able to learn much during the pandemic due to remote learning and in many cases are now playing catch-up to get back on track. The school system she works for basically didn't hold anyone back for a year because they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing.

Anyone who believes that the pandemic wasn't a serious setback for many kids developmentally is woefully out of touch with reality.

WalterBright8• 4 years ago

they had no real way of knowing who progressed as her school district cancelled standardized testing.

The schools want to remove all evidence that would contradict their claims of doing a great job.

henrikschroder4• 4 years ago

Not just the isolation, there are so many crazy covidian rules that some schools have pushed on the kids to uphold the safety theatre.

In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes, but you still have to serve school lunch to kids.

Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature.

Some schools solved this by giving the kids a 14 minute lunch break.

No talking, no socializing, no enjoying the meal together in peace. This is how you give kids eating disorders.

henrikschroder4• 4 years ago

Of course, while these rules were in place, any schoolkid could go to a restaurant with their parents and enjoy a meal together in peace for hours if they so wished.

No rhyme, no reason.

mlyle3• 4 years ago

In California, it was absolutely forbidden for anyone to be indoors without a mask for more than 15 minutes

False. There was no such directive.

We were one of the first schools in California to reopen, too.

I think you may be referring to what was initially considered a close contact under the CDPH guidance: unmasked and close for more than 15 minutes.

Some schools solved this by moving lunch outside. No matter the temperature.

This is our normal procedure at our school on non-rainy days, COVID or not.

There were 2 or 3 rainy days (yay drought!). Kids ate indoors, spread out, with the doors open. It was a stricter lunch environment than they're used to for those few days.

Our biggest change was cohorting for those in elementary. You really only could play with your own class.

legulere• 4 years ago

It also astonishes me that people put all blame of the pandemic's effects on the counter-measures and none on the pandemic itself. Having seen the situation in Wuhan or Bergamo, fearing about loved ones also puts a lot of stress on kids.

onos• 4 years ago

I agree with you: fundamentally a bad thing happened. Mitigating the harm may have been possible to some degree but perhaps a more significant degree of freedom was simply choosing which form the negative consequences would take: more deaths or more isolation / economic problems. Since they are in different units, I’d say it’s subjective how to decide what’s optimal there.

mindslight• 4 years ago

Does it make sense to specifically focus on Covid response here? By which I mean, is this not really just the same problem of an overbearing system continuing to turn the screws, and now the system input contains the additional stressor of Covid? Some of the response is seemingly necessary, and ignoring the issue is certainly not the answer. But administrators craft obtuse top-down policies, announce "Mission Accomplished", and don't particularly examine their effectiveness from the perspective of those on the receiving end of their blunt tools.

It's the same exact dynamic as how the media scares everyone with sensationalized school shootings, and then schools respond by making kids go through metal detectors and draconian zero tolerance policies and the like (also horrible for kids' mental health). We've built this no-win bureaucracy where the primary dynamic is avoiding any blame. Because if the blame does come, it will itself be merciless and unempathetic, despite how reasonable or well-intentioned an administrator's motive was.

ranger_danger• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895642

tablespoon8• 4 years ago

It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd.

It shouldn't be so astonishing. People who wanted to take a laissez faire approach to COVID (especially pre-vaccine) would often incoherently throw literally every idea they could think of against all the mitigation measures, including various mental health arguments. Of course, that approach didn't change a thing except 1) lead to more polarization, 2) harden people against those arguments forever.

COVID was a serious problem, and it's rare that serious problems can be addressed without cost.

nradov14• 4 years ago

COVID was a serious problem, but that doesn't mean any of the mitigation measures were helpful or justified. That's a total non sequitur. Many of the areas which took a more laissez faire approach came through fine.

MaxBarraclough2• 4 years ago

COVID was a serious problem

It's still killing >4000 per week just in the USA.

joaogui1• 4 years ago

Wasn't there a reduction in suicides? Not that that's the only factor when it comes to mental health, but it's probably something to take into account when you talk about the mental health toll of the past 2 years

henrikschroder4• 4 years ago

Total suicides went down, but child and teen suicides are way up, and "deaths of despair", i.e. people drinking or drugging themselves to death are up considerably. So while it's true that total suicides went down, it's masking the reality of the situation.

antattack• 4 years ago

Lock-downs didn't just have effect on social life.

Young people's education during lockdown have been pretty much written off as a casualty of pandemic. Suspending state testing or admission requirements was just a band-aid solution. Now young people are left to fend for themselves, to try to plug holes in education they received. No wonder their stress levels are high.

zeckalpha• 4 years ago

I agree with your high notes, but also imagine the adults in your life sending you to a place that is unsafe every day. There’s a double edged sword effect of the pandemic here.

nradov14• 4 years ago

Where were children sent that was unsafe? I don't understand your point.

incomingpain• 4 years ago

It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this.

The CDC study was specifically in relation to covid lockdowns. Virtually everyone pointed out how this would happen and that this unprecedented move to lockdown the healthy vs the standard for thousands of years of quarantining the sick. The cost is far worse than the healthcare system melting down. Then again you look at Quebec nurses... they literally went to the United Nations to say they are slaves. Provincial government is doing it to them. Federal government is tyrannical. They had to go to the UN. Insanity how bad our healthcare system is collapsing.

I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health.

So something that north america doesnt seem to have that most of the world does have... imagine you are poland or somewhere in the middle east. You fear war every single day. People who live there think about having to escape every day.

North America doesn't have that. Nobody fears a surprise war because thousands of nukes will launch out of fear wiping out whoever is attacking. Flipside, Russia's new threat of imminent nuclear war means North American teens will now have to worry about their impending doom.

This return of the cold war will make things worse; not measured in this study.

Animats4• 4 years ago

Note the date: "survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021."

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

1) how am I missing the link to the actual CDC study? or did WaPo not even post the link to the survey results they were discussing?

2) disappointing not to see any comparison to other advanced economies. Is this happening everywhere with high internet usage? Did the severity correlate at all to how severe the pandemic was or what the responses were? Does it correlate to income levels or political polarization or religiosity or any of the other things that vary (at least somewhat) between different advanced economies? Maybe the CDC study looked at this, but if so WaPo said nothing about it. Hard to know what to do with this information with nothing but a WaPo text wall talking about it.

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

Found the CDC link, at least: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm

tzs• 4 years ago

That seems to just cover 2009-2019. The article is talking about a study from a survey conducted in the first half of 2021.

stakkur• 4 years ago

My wife's a middle school teacher for over 22 years. If you want an unvarnished view into just how bad things have gotten since the pandemic begain--for mental health, school engagement, and all things related--talk to a teacher. It's unprecedented, and the long tail of the damage will take decades to understand.

ccbccccbbcccbb• 4 years ago

When CDC warns about society as a whole being subjected to total and deliberate menticide and discloses all means towards that end, it is only then that there will finally arrive some substance to discuss.

Otherwise it sounds like researching the swaying of trees without ever mentioning the wind.

evocatus• 4 years ago

I've already walked this path of self-isolation. The pandemic, quarantine, none of it are new to me. This was my life for years.

I feel for this upcoming generation, in the most real way possible.

They are fucked.

Lammy4• 4 years ago

“When you make schools less toxic for the most vulnerable students, all students benefit — and the converse is also true,” Ethier said.

Who is making schools more toxic for the least vulnerable students? I need a hit, baby, give me it.

dadjoker• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what you expect when you instill constant fear of simply getting sick, take away all of their social structure, and isolate them in front of a screen, all for a virus that doesn't affect kids barely at all. Per the CDC there is a 0.003% chance of someone under age 20 dying from COVID; they have greater risk driving to school.

It's no wonder their mental health is so poor, even if the trend was starting before the pandemic.

aedocw• 4 years ago

The point was to limit the spread of the virus throughout the entire population, and an attempt to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by the infected.

vinyl7• 4 years ago

Whatever helps you rationalize that we basically destroyed the younger generation in hopes of saving the old/dying generation

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

Too bad you'll never really know if any of it worked. Kinda would have been nice to stick with proven mitigations we had planned out for decades instead of chuck it all out of the window in search of a miracle cure. If you read pre-covid pandemic planning, virtually everything they suggestion you dont do society decided to do. Everything they suggested you should do, we ignored.

spookthesunset34• 4 years ago

It disgusts me to see this downvoted. There isn't anything false about what you said. What we have done to children the last two years is absolutely disgusting. The fact so many people seem to cheer it on makes it even worse--especially how so many of the "pro-education" crowd cheers it on too.

We fucked kids the last two years and it requires some serious mental gymnastics to rationalize it away.

standardUser4• 4 years ago

"all for a virus that doesn't affect kids barely at all"

It's downvoted because the above line is either a willful misrepresentation in service of a political gripe or, less likely, a genuine ignorance that should not be promoted.

manuelabeledo16• 4 years ago

We fucked kids the last two years and it requires some serious mental gymnastics to rationalize it away.

How, exactly? Teen mental health has been in decline for decades now.

It seems to me that some people just don't want to take responsibility for fucking their own kids up.

pcarolan3• 4 years ago

I am helping a family member recently diagnosed with ADHD during the pandemic. I looked up this google trend and my jaw dropped. Clearly the world has yet to come to terms with the social, emotional and psychological effects of this pandemic. If anyone here knows anything about what's causing the rise in adhd specifically, I'd love to hear about it: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

elcritch2• 4 years ago

You don't really "get" ADHD as it's generally lifelong. Symptoms can wax and wane over time though and can be exacerbated. Combine that with diagnosis getting better, especially for women and non-hyperactive subtypes.

pcarolan3• 4 years ago

Right, so why did the trend explode during the pandemic?

superfrank• 4 years ago

I don't have an answer or even a guess really, but I want to bring up that "autism" shows a strikingly similar trend in google searches and searches for "depression" kind of go down starting at the same time.

Apocryphon8• 4 years ago

Search terms for ADHD doesn't necessarily mean that ADHD prevalence is increasing. ADHD awareness is increasing, which can be anecdotally observed everywhere from HN to TikTok.

pcarolan3• 4 years ago

I also wonder how much ADHD disinformation is driving this: https://www.psypost.org/2022/03/misleading-videos-about-adhd...

indymike• 4 years ago

This coincides with about seven months of going back to school.

My kids did so much better when they were not in school. They got plenty of time with other kids, but none of the toxic middle school culture.

sammalloy• 4 years ago

Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus — falling ill and dying at much lower rates than older people — they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil and, for many, grief.

The honest truth that most people don’t want to face is that there is a direct relationship between economic turmoil and mental health. Instead, we will get politicians and community leaders blaming everything else for the problem, when all you have to do to address it is to pay people a living wage and provide an adequate social net to fall back upon. Our leaders will never admit this.

phs318u2• 4 years ago

I'll post my own anecdote regarding this topic. Not drawing global conclusions but perhaps providing a different perspective. This will probably be a long read.

I am almost 57. I have two daughters aged turning 25 and 23 this year. Before COVID here were our various diagnoses. Me: clinical depression, poor impulse control (addiction, in long-term recovery). "High functioning". Eldest daughter: borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, poor impulse control (addiction). Relatively "high functioning". Youngest daughter: ADD, anxiety, depression. Not "high functioning". My wife: "doesn't need to see a psychologist".

During COVID, my eldest who had moved out, moved back in with us. Despite the difficulties of COVID, being together probably helped in that we were able to support each other and any deterioration in mental health was moderated. It helps that I totally lifted my game as a practicing stoic during this time and led by example (not bragging, but that's how it played out).

I earn a VERY good living in IT.

I also have a pre-diagnosed heart condition (growing aneurysm on the ascending aorta, not yet at "needs surgery" stage) and hyper-tension. Otherwise in reasonable fitness (another area I lifted my game in during COVID). I'm one of the category of people that lockdowns protected. If I had gotten (or get) COVID, there's a decent chance things won't go too well for me (am fully vaccinated and boosted).

Because I make a good living, I was able to pay for a two week stay in a really good private rehab/mental-health retreat (multi-dimensional professional care) for my eldest - during one of the many lockdowns. We're talking decent 5-figure cost - not covered by our insurance (I should point out that we live in a country with national health insurance, though there's a vast gulf of difference between private and public systems when it comes to mental health). Of all the help she's gotten during the last ten years she's been battling her issues and addictions, it was the single most effective thing she's ever done, to the point that I feel I've gotten her back. She's the best "her" she's ever been. She's now moved out again and living with her boyfriend (a lovely kid, also with pre-COVID mental health issues). They are making a good fist of it, and are both doing really well and feeling very happy despite living largely hand-to-mouth.

I'm about to send my youngest to the same place my eldest went to.

If I had gotten COVID and died, chances are very high that both my daughters would have had worse outcomes. The reality is they wouldn't have been able to afford the help they need. And this is help that they needed before COVID.

I'm not saying that COVID hasn't made it worse. It has. But to those who are looking at some kind of naive calculus as if there's an inverse correlation between "protecting old folks from death" and "protecting young people's mental health" - I say the world isn't that simple.

Listening to my kids and understanding both what makes them happy and hopeful, and depressed and anxious, I'd say that the former is primarily related to connection, love and focusing on what they can control vs what they can't. The latter, seems to a great degree related to focusing on what they can't control - the state of the world, its politics, climate change and "the fact that everything is turning to shit".

This is where I encourage them (by example and through discussion) to adopt stoic philosophy as a way of living and being. It's been what kept me sane during COVID and helps me deal with the shittiness of life while focusing on the beauty that life still holds.

My 2c (probaly $20 going by the length of this post. Apologies).

Nemrod674• 4 years ago

thank you for you side of the story, now imagine the situation if you were not earning a good living.

Hope you and your family do well

phs318u2• 4 years ago

I hear you. But chances are that the parents will be earning more than the children on average. But I agree I'm not most people either in my salary or my situation (adult kids).

tastysandwich2• 4 years ago

The entire pandemic felt like screaming in an empty room sometimes.

My wife is a teacher in a low-SES area, and my sister-in-law is a psychologist dealing specifically with at-risk youth.

From the start they could see first-hand the detrimental impact lockdown had on the poorest and most vulnerable.

For many of these kids, school is a sanctuary from a dysfunctional and/or abusive home life. They don't have quiet places to study, let alone the means (laptop, internet).

Just a little example here, based on a close friend's upbringing. A young teen can't sleep because her degenerate father is blasting music from 11PM to 3AM. Fortunately, her grandparents live up the road, and their house has become a bit of a safe-haven. So she runs down there, and gets a good night sleep. When things are tough at home, she knows she can always stay there a few nights.

In lockdown world, that option is totally removed. The father, now out of work, is verbally abusive and blasts music all night. How do you think she's going to fare with "remote learning"?

2 years cut off from their peers, stuck in toxic environments, these kids have come back terribly damaged. My wife says she has never seen so many fights at school. My sister-in-law says they are so short-staffed right now they're having to turf kids because they're not "at-risk" enough.

Of course, politicians kept assuring us this was not the case, that there was no data showing any negative impact. Of course there was no data yet - it was still being collated! But talk to any person on the frontline and they could tell you.

But I suppose politicians' kids go to pretty nice schools, with supportive family environments and the means to support remote learning (laptops, fast internet, a quiet place to study).

A more disconnected, clueless lot, I have never seen.

alar443• 4 years ago

Ok, well my sister is a doctor and she got to watch bodies get shoveled out of her hospital for 2 years.

Who wins? Did I do it right? Do I win?

tastysandwich2• 4 years ago

That's a little fatuous, and it does disappoint me a bit how we devolve to this immediately. I guess we're all a bit on high-alert when it comes to politics?

It's not really an either/or. I don't advocate for zero measures. More like, there's a range of different measures we could have taken, with varying of positive vs negative side-effects.

We should of course take measures that have lots of positive side effects, and relatively few negative side effects. Things like contact tracing, and the vaccines of course. Masking early on was a good idea when we didn't know much.

However it's a little silly to deny that there's some measures taken that didn't have so many clear positive benefits, but definitely had negative ones. For example, in my state they closed all the playgrounds & skate parks, even though there was no evidence of transmission there. For some kids, blowing off a little bit of steam by riding their bike at the local skate park is a huge deal, and not at all trivial.

Similarly, my sister-in-law had to conduct all her appointments remotely. She's dealing with traumatised kids that struggle to maintain eye contact, let alone human connection. That face-to-face time is really crucial for establishing rapport with these kids. Not to mention the fact that many just didn't bother dialling in.

These aren't kids presenting with anxiety btw. These are kids with some of the worst trauma imaginable.

tonymet2• 4 years ago

Before you blame circumstances, remember that even people with seemingly perfect lives (money, fame) still suffer. I can think of a wealthy public figure who's full time job was to travel and enjoy great food, yet still abused drugs and committed suicide.

Suffering is part of life. Until recently, poverty, starvation & disease were universal. We certainly have it better than that, even with "social media", "bullying", "college acceptance" threatening teens.

The bigger problem is that we haven't given young people a solid sense of purpose. If their only purpose is money and fame, they will certainly fall apart, even if it goes well. You can never have enough.

No amount of money, anti depressants or therapy will make up for a lack of meaning.

Sure we should work to improve circumstances, but unless we give people a reason to live, it won't matter.

wolverine8764• 4 years ago

I worry that it is the expected result of taking away hope. Powerful actors try, and have succeeded - with our unwitting help - in spreading a highly reactionary message of despair, disabling those who might challenge their power. You have no power; only the wealthy and large corporations, and all that matters is profit.

Progress; the equal value of individuals from any class, status, ethnicity, gender, etc; the power of any individual to change the world through hard work; - the things humanity has worked for since the beginning of the Enlightenment, with incredible success - are derided, even here in the heart of innovation and entrepreneurialism, which fundamentally depend on those notions. The garages of Silicon Valley defeated IBM.

Younger generations now believe they have no power, that humanity is fundamentally evil and corrupt, that progress isn't possible. Look at climate change: most believe not that, 'the people, united, can never be defeated', but that nothing can be done. We have the tools, the knowledge, the need is clear, but the powerful have created despair. That's not what I grew up with; I grew up with hope, and people who changed the world, from George Washington to Dr King, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, from Edison to Jobs.

Even the left-of-center and many progressives have adopted this message. Somone - that means you - needs to start spreading one of hope. I think they would be incredibly popular.

atoav2• 4 years ago

This is unsurprising. There are no good prospects — war, climate change, a divided society — in all of this: You, a teen with a digital mirror, that keeps you updated on how much more you seem to suck than all the others you have to compare yourself against. Your parents who constantly tell you your generation has to fix and/or safe the planet, while you wonder if you will even be able to fix and/or safe yourself. Meanwhile even people who you see as adults have given up of ever being able to retiring, but you know it is quite definitly going to get worse for you.

phil213• 4 years ago

I think this is a great underappreciated comment.

I often feel my development went... much different than most in my peer group due to my much earlier access to the Internet/on-line services and me being a "curious hacker" getting into places and reading things I definitely should not have at that age. Seeing how utterly incompetent "powerful" institutions were (combined with teenage arrogance) that I was raised to deeply respect is still something I have difficulty processing.

I can't imagine being bombarded not just with 100x more information about how the future is f*cked and how incompetent those running the show are, but also it being amped up to 11 by hucksters selling "engagement" and ads. The content is coming to you now.

I think a lot of early adulthood is just brazen naivety. For example, I'd never have started the company I did at 17 at age 37, there would be too many reasons I know it'd fail. If you lose that naivety too early, at least personally I would have utterly lost any motivation to "try" since the odds were so astronomically against me.

When a generation collectively believes they will have it worse than their parents I'm not entirely sure what to expect the outcomes to be.

atoav2• 4 years ago

I think it is our responsibility as older generations to show them that the world can be changed, even if it is just on a small scale. Too many people view everything around them (including themselves!) as immutable. What people are trying to do is getting a better spot on the sinking ship. Happyness defined as drowning just a little bit later than your neighbour (but focus, you could slip at any moment). The pumps that could easily keep the ship from sinking are mounted only by a few idealists, which are called names by those with the most fear in their eyes. Some, with their feet already in the water vehemently insist water is not real — their anger directed at those busy pumping the water. Those higher up the ship tell those stories, because they hope it will keep them dry till some divine help arrives. In the end, everybody dies, but those on top die a little bit later.

CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health

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