EXPERT: Screen time ruins youth mental health

In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

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Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation.

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Jesse Booth said:

One question: what the hell is a necking spot?

As for modern teens not getting enough time in with friends, I can fully attest that this is an issue. I'd say I'm a fairly social person, but I can't say the same of a lot of people my age. Even at college, a lot of people would just shut themselves up in their rooms for much of their free time.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Used to be a place where a guy and a gal could be alone to kiss+pet sometimes even for full on sex. Cars were popular but youth today get driven by parents, they dont drive so thats out. Houses worked sometimes but who anymore knows if the parents are spying on them with technology. Actually cars were sometimes driven to "necking spots", secluded places where like minded couples did what they did, sometimes more than one couple at a time. The location of the Lacey Wa Walmart on Galaxy Dr I am told was for decades such a place.

Did you read the Atlantic Piece? Did you see any big errors?

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Jesse Booth said:

The Atlantic is usually pretty solid. I didn't see anything that immediately jumped out to me as inaccurate. I will say, though, that I certainly grew up with far less internet access than most members of my generation, and that this forum is about as much social media as I use, but I still match up with the averages for my generation in terms of technology. Can't say what that might mean for these findings. :shrug:

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The term “millennial” was invented by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who’d been stars of the generational-consultant industry since their 1991 book Generations. Coining “millennials” made Strauss and Howe name brands — even though critics found their book Millennials Rising decidedly lightweight — and in a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, Eric Hoover put Howe’s speaking rate between $5,000 and $14,000 a pop plus expenses, with too many offers to take them all. The two authors also formed a consultancy called LifeCourse Associates, which lists clients “from Disney to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Compared to all that, book money is chump change.

Twenge is featured in the 2009 Chronicle article, too, as a second-tier speaker ($1,000 to $5,000), but with a more skeptical and data-based view than the optimistic Strauss and Howe. With iGen — her own coinage — Twenge looks to be the next marquee name as the millennial boys fade from prominence. That helps explain why there’s more in the book about how textbook manufacturers can engage students (“interactive activities” and “lower their reading level”) than why most iGeners oppose the capitalist system that has gone largely uncontested by Americans for 50 years. It helps explain why she poses questions like “How can managers get the most out of the newest generation in the workforce?” or says things like “Car manufacturers should take heart” and “this is good news for advertisers and marketers.”

When David Brooks (of all people) reviewed Millennials Rising, he wrote that, “This is not a good book, if by good you mean the kind of book in which the authors have rigorously sifted the evidence and carefully supported their assertions with data. But it is a very good bad book. It’s stuffed with interesting nuggets.” Twenge seems to have followed that description like a map; iGen is a nugget cluster with the rigor of a sales brochure. I have little doubt it will take her all the way to the bank.

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Harris’s father was a “Silicon Valley corporate lawyer turned State Department diplomat.” As for Harris himself, he “was one of the very first to capitalize on the marketing possibilities of Occupy, and how he might exploit the marketing and messaging to quickly build his own brand.” Only a month after OWS got off the ground, it turns out, Harris signed up with a speakers’ agency; when a California branch of the movement, Occupy Redlands, asked him to come address its members, Harris’s agent replied “that if they wanted to hear Malcolm Harris talk about anarchism and the 99%, they’d have to pay him a $5,000 speaking fee. Not including travel and hotel expenses.” The news that an OWS “anarchist” was trying to squeeze five-grand payments out of allied groups around the country spread like wildfire, apparently, and did not exactly make Harris a movement hero

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Twenge is quick to point out that generational studies are necessarily imprecise, and she’s as aware as anybody of the perils of prophecy.

And yet at the heart of her book is a prophecy of sweeping implications: that iGen is on the brink of “the most severe mental health crisis for young people in decades”.

Like all the rest of iGen, this contention is buttressed with copious references and charts, all showing that the percentage of young people who feel lonely or unfulfilled has skyrocketed in the past 10 years.

“Given the timing,” Twenge writes, “smartphones are the most likely culprits, increasing loneliness both directly and indirectly by replacing in-person social interaction.”

It all combines to create a smotheringly dark picture, until you take a deep breath and actually spend some time with teenage members of iGen.

They doubt and worry, yes, as every generation has since the dawn of the species, but they also laugh and clown around, and they assess and multi-task with a speed and casual efficiency their grandparents only saw in air traffic controllers and New York City switchboard operators.

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After offering example after example showing the harmful effects of smartphones on young people, Ms. Twenge is still careful not to moralize. And yet, reading these stories, one can’t help asking: Why don’t parents take these kids’ phones away from them? It is hard to read the evidence that Ms. Twenge has scrupulously compiled about iGen’s technology use without experiencing the sickening feeling that we’re engaged in a massive behavioral and psychological experiment—with young people as the unwitting guinea pigs.

Ms. Twenge ultimately wants to be hopeful about iGen’s prospects, and perhaps we should be—up to a point. Their insistence on safety has led to some positive outcomes, such as lower rates of teen pregnancy and underage drinking. But it has also stunted the development of adult skills and created a generation that prefers the “emotional safety” of virtual relationships to the messy entanglements of real ones. (Wouldn’t want to “catch feelings,” as the kids say.) As Ms. Twenge notes, iGen-ers have greater “maturity fears” than preceding generations did, which is perhaps why they jokingly refer to responsible behavior as “adulting” and why their efforts at tolerance have taken such an illiberal turn. Like so many generations before them, only more so, they have a lot of growing up to do.
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Members of iGen, Ms. Twenge says, are more likely than their predecessors “to support restricting speech.” She found that “more than one out of four students (28%) agreed that ‘A faculty member who, on a single occasion, says something racially insensitive in class should be fired,’ ” while 16% believed a student who did the same thing once should be expelled. In a rare moment of judgmentalism, Ms. Twenge adds: “This is the dark side of tolerance; it begins with the good intentions of including everyone and not offending anyone but ends (at best) with a reluctance to explore deep issues and (at worst) with careers destroyed by a comment someone found offensive and the silencing of all alternative viewpoints.”

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Hawkeye10 said:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Course it could be that the socially ill spend more time with tech to avoid spending time with people or maybe the smartest ones put down the tech and grab a book, but I sure want to know more.

Sadly this sounds right. I have long claimed that we have completely bungled parenting, this study and the rapidly declining mental health of University students not to mention their intolerance and lack of dedication to the truth all point in the sad direction.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

This all sounds accurate to me, and is supported by other research I've seen, but I don't think tech alone is the reason. Not all countries with similar amounts of tech are having this problem to the same degree.

Partly, it's that this gen hasn't been as well-socialized to begin with. So, when they get older, it's understandable they are averse to social risk and choose screens instead.

Children are getting less quality social time than they used to, both from teachers and from family units. I'm sure our older members will remember heading out up the street on their bikes as young kids, but that too is quickly becoming a thing of the past, not just because of tech, but because parents don't allow it. That was starting to happen even when I was a kid, when cell phones and internet barely existed in the average home, because the parents don't let their kids do things independently as much as they used to.

Kids the last couple generations have less social confidence not just due to the ubiquity of online life, but also because they weren't permitted to spend their early years learning how to act socially independently, make mistakes, and pick themselves up again.

I won't necessarily say the good old days were flat-out better. Bullying was also a lot more common back then, and I know plenty of 30+ people with some serious mental scars from incidents I find appalling that I don't see happening as much in people younger than me.

But the social development of today's teenagers has its own problems, certainly.

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Kids the last couple generations have less social confidence not just due to the ubiquity of online life, but also because they weren't permitted to spend their early years learning how to act socially independently, make mistakes, and pick themselves up again.

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Hawkeye10 said:

I am really disappointed this thread did not get interest, as both the parenting and the tech intrusion into our lives angles are hugely important and interesting topics for sure, and if the trends continue also this obsession with safety and aversion to the free flow of ideas.

Ya, so they think they are easily breakable because they have never found their strength and so if they dont wise up they will be incredibly easy to push around, motivated by their betters by fear that is placed there to drive them where their herders want them to go.


I did not know how bad the socialization was till a couple of years ago I found that I needed to teach employees how to talk on the phone, something that my generation learned by age 8, in my house earlier because we got lessons....literally they were not able to conduct a 1 minute simple phone conversation without sounding like a new to America immigrant, did not know what to say, all they knew was a sort of text speak they use with their friends.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

Yeah, and I can sort of understand why today's parents are like that. As I said, barbarity in schools used to be more common than it is now, not to mention that we live in generally paranoid times.

I think there's a balance here. It'd be better if we just put more emphasis on pro-social behavior to prevent cruelty, rather than just secluding kids from independent social interaction.

But a lot of today's parents who think their kids are so fragile struggle with that, because it requires them to say no sometimes and teach their kids that while they are important and loved, they are not the only person in the family -- everyone deserves consideration.

It's made doubly hard by a lack of individual attention that comes from our very large class sizes. When I was in elementary, my class size was usually around 15, which made it a lot easier for teachers to manage. When I switched districts for 5th grade and up, the class sizes nearly doubled, and there were a lot more problems.

Today's teens are a weird mix of things. They are studious and motivated, but at the same time inept at more mundane things like self- and home-care. They are generally kind-hearted, but struggle to relate to others in real life.

They are not lazy or mean, as is often suggested. But they are frequently not given a complete set of skills to thrive in life.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

Yeah, and I can sort of understand why today's parents are like that. As I said, barbarity in schools used to be more common than it is now, not to mention that we live in generally paranoid times.

I think there's a balance here. It'd be better if we just put more emphasis on pro-social behavior to prevent cruelty, rather than just secluding kids from independent social interaction.

But a lot of today's parents who think their kids are so fragile struggle with that, because it requires them to say no sometimes and teach their kids that while they are important and loved, they are not the only person in the family -- everyone deserves consideration.

It's made doubly hard by a lack of individual attention that comes from our very large class sizes. When I was in elementary, my class size was usually around 15, which made it a lot easier for teachers to manage. When I switched districts for 5th grade and up, the class sizes nearly doubled, and there were a lot more problems.

Today's teens are a weird mix of things. They are studious and motivated, but at the same time inept at more mundane things like self- and home-care. They are generally kind-hearted, but struggle to relate to others in real life.

They are not lazy or mean, as is often suggested. But they are frequently not given a complete set of skills to thrive in life.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Seems like you need to factor in that Freshman year at University is now fully what used to be High School work.....they do make good worker bees, all studious and polite and willing to do their chores if any be demanded but the sad fact is that one of the main problems of high School is that not enough learning gets done, not enough is asked of the students.

So you see, the failure of the generation is rather more complete than you let on, their lack of growing up and their lack of accomplishing is all across the board. .

We should be noticing, we should be alarmed, but look how this person who uses data to make her case rather than faith "THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT" and rather than anecdotal evidence gets dismissed...I linked to two reviews that shut it down, dont want to hear it, and near as I can tell the buzz off the Atlantic piece rather follows....I am still trying to look into the reaction though, and it is still forming.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

I don't really think that's true. Studies show the younger gens are actually the most literate generation ever. But despite their skills, they are also one of the worst-paid due to a lack of job opportunities beyond entry level.

Though it is true high school is failing our students due to focusing on testing culture rather than learning culture, younger people are taking advantage of the vast amount of free information that we have now, and using it to fill the gaps.

It's true more kids go through remedial courses, but also keep in mind more kids go to college. Those kids who weren't fully prepared used to just not go to college at all because remedial wasn't offered. Now they do, but they take remedial. I don't think more kids are unprepared for college. I think more unprepared kids are trying to go to college.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Did you read the part about how they rarely touch books?

This is your "most literate generation ever".....based upon what do you make that call?

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

I rarely touch books either, and I read for hours every day -- often academic material.

Get with the times.

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Average scores for high schoolers in the class of 2015 were 1490 points out of a maximum of 2400, down 7 points from last year. The decline was equally spread across the test’s three sections of reading, writing, and mathematics. With a score of 1550 considered the threshold for college and career readiness, that average means over half of high school seniors taking the test are unprepared for a college education.

In reading, the situation is actually even worse. The average score of 495 on that section is the lowest it has been in over 40 years. The average math score of 511 is a decline, but is still several points above the averages of several decades ago.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Evasion....what gives you the idea that they are either good readers or well read?

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

Studies on generational literacy.

Also, the article does not say they read less. It says those that read physical books rather than using screens (to read or do whatever else) sleep better. This is because the light output of screens disrupts sleep. It says nothing about them reading fewer books (which, in physical copy, I'm sure they do, but taking all formats, that's not true at all).

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

I don't really think that's true. Studies show the younger gens are actually the most literate generation ever. But despite their skills, they are also one of the worst-paid due to a lack of job opportunities beyond entry level.

Though it is true high school is failing our students due to focusing on testing culture rather than learning culture, younger people are taking advantage of the vast amount of free information that we have now, and using it to fill the gaps.

It's true more kids go through remedial courses, but also keep in mind more kids go to college. Those kids who weren't fully prepared used to just not go to college at all because remedial wasn't offered. Now they do, but they take remedial. I don't think more kids are unprepared for college. I think more unprepared kids are trying to go to college.

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Hawkeye10 said:

I edited that post but I have now proven that the SAT test says you are wrong.

It's time for you to present evidence for your assessment.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

Quite simply: so?

Standardized Testing Fails at Measuring Knowledge | The Emory Wheel
Even when test scores go up, some cognitive abilities don?t | MIT News
https://www.insidehighered.com/news...c-success-students-who-do-and-dont-submit-sat
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...sat don't measure student performance&f=false

All that says to me is that wealth is declining in the general population. What's new?

Tests like that don't accurately measure much of anything. If you think a fill-in-the-blank is an accurate measure of fluid comprehension, then I can't help you.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Running down my evidence is not presenting evidence....what evidence do you have that todays students are highly literate compared to previous generations? Given that we have watched the collapse of high stakes testing as a requirement for graduation because no matter what was done educators cant get the students to a place where they can pass the tests I tend to think that you dont have any because it does not exist.

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SmokeAndMirrors said:

Disproving your evidence certainly does throw out the basis of your claim. But anyway...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...als-are-out-reading-older-generations/379934/

Apparently I underestimated. Not only do Millenials dominate online written media, but they read more books too. I expect Gen Z will be similar.

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In recent years, a number of international surveys have raised alarms that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of educational achievement. Now there is another one, and its findings represent a serious threat to the country’s future prosperity. In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries
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The first chart shows proficiency in literacy among sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds. Finland’s youth came out on top, with a score of 296.7; the average score was 277.9. The United States scored 260.9, which put it second to last, above Italy.

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Hawkeye10 said:

Evasion....what gives you the idea that they are either good readers or well read?

EDIT: 2015:

SAT Scores In The U.S. Are Collapsing | The Daily Caller

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