Kids These Days

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• Hacker News
• > My friend Frank Keil has a terrific new book out (buy it here), in which, among many other things, he mourns the loss of tinkering. Children and teenagers used to take things apart and put them back together again—toasters, bicycles, and especially cars. Keil argues that the decline of tinkering has had profound consequences for children and adolescents’ understanding of the world.

  It is somewhat sad that things have gradually become more un-tinkerable. What used to be a bunch of large components over a large circuit board, or maybe even a mechanical system is now a tiny chip with literally no way to tell anything about it when you disassemble it.

  On the other hand, there's far, far more resources for dedicated tinkering these days. $5 microcontrollers and electronics kits 20 years ago? Not a thing. Internet guides you can follow to master it all? Good luck with books that are too hard for you to start reading without a mentor or a school. Learning tinkering has never been easier, but people's motivation for it has never been lower either.

  by moffkalast
• > but, given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

  The same was true of smoking. A combination of gov regulation and social stigma have managed to reduce smoking rates.

  by bwhiting2356
• As the author also points out.
  by jimbokun
• a lot of attention given to phones, somewhat rightly so, but little to the rest of society. class -- can we think of any current events might lead to children being despondent about their future? anything at all going on in the world?
  by undeveloper
• Compared to world wars, the threat of nuclear annihilation, widespread racism, etc.? No.
  by graemep
• The dissolution of many of the financial/social cornerstones of our society such as: class mobility, third places, education, trust in your neighbor, privacy, meritocracy, free thinking (and the right to dissent), etc.

  My question to the reader is this: Who benefits from this?

  by alphawhisky
• Im a layman... but how do you measure social medias impacts, when everyones algorithm is different? If everyone is on it but having a different experience, how can that be measured? I imagine some are better at being resistant to it and can subconsciencly push it to more positive direction and ignore the depression-bait it starts feeding them when IT knows they are down... I was in a severly nacassistic relationship for years, and while I'm mostly over it, those few times a year I log into facebook, all it wants to do is remind me of it and feed me all this victim crap. It can't be healthy for a young mind to be staring at this all day, its absolutely manipulating. It's kind of messed up.
  by hefner1456
• That was a great article, or maybe it was just a lot of gibberish that failed to say much of anything.
  by proee
• The article reveals that the broader debate is more gibberish and less settled than we tend to think.
  by jimbokun
• This bit strikes me as rather stuck in the past and oblivious to 2026:

  "the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decade."

  That statement might have been true in 1995-2012 about forums, IRC, early social media, and Tumblr. It is not really true for the average young internet user today: the corporate platforms centered around phone apps seek to maximize engagement, not provide community.

  It is a small number of people who will ever step outside the walled gardens and explore other spaces, but they might find even those other spaces unfulfilling as a sense of community. The fediverse has copied a lot of pathologies from corporate social media. Forums are ever fewer and with a graying demographic that won't necessary give a young person a feeling of connection with peers. Discord does offer some of the close-knitness of old-school IRC, but discoverability is a challenge.

  by TFNA
• 4chan is still thriving
  by gradus_ad
• The article intentionally is giving an overly optimistic view of the modern day, when giving the argument that "kids these days" are better off, and it's quickly contrasted with a pessimistic view:

  > children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure.... Our children are living in a time of crisis

  Yes it's stated less technically proficient than your version, but the point remains that you can look at the current internet as a blessing or a curse, and is mostly just an intro to the rest of the article

  by yathern
• I think that this is true to some extent, but that people often underestimate how much Discord and group chats get used compared to "traditional" (feels weird calling it that, in this context) social media.
  by ipdashc
• > They have access to cheap travel, better food

  What cheap travel? Better food compared to when? Most kids are obese eating poisoned food.

  by jsisto
• I specifically do not want kids because it feels like I would be shortchanging them. I imagine all generations think it was better in their day. But you are right. Owning a car is absurdly expensive, public transit is pretty grim in the US and definitely not cheap, plus our food supply is literal slop. Even the cheap stuff is expensive now.

  It is truly depressing. I can’t imagine being a kid who has to navigate all that on top of social media and constant agitprop.

  by goolz
• Regarding travel, you can decide for yourself:

  https://www.bts.gov/content/annual-us-domestic-average-itine...

  by BeetleB
• It seems uncontroversial to say that young people now, and for the last 25 years, have access to cheaper travel than previous generations. The network of budget airlines in Europe, Asia, and MENA is extensive; I can often find a WizzAir flight for as little as 10€ if I'm willing to fly with just a smaller carry-on. As for long-distance bus travel, FlixBus in Europe sucks in so many ways and has a monopoly over whole countries, but its tickets (if you purchase well in advance) are often cheaper than the local operators that one had to use before.
  by TFNA
• When was the last time you met somebody who only walked all thier life? Never rode a horse because only the rich could afford such things.

  When was the last time you had no food? Starvation used to be a real problem. I'm not taking about running short at the end of the month, I'm talking about there isn't food for even the wealthy people.

  Food today is safer than ever. You talk about poison, but that is pure lie, it might not be the best, but it isn't moldy because you have a fridge.

  by bluGill
• When people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.
  by II2II
• Sounds like you had a pretty lame childhood to me, and in the 30 years since it's only become worse.

  Much like panda bears in captivity, it is unusually difficult to give a human being a life that resembles what it evolved for, which mostly involves convincing other humans to back off the safetyism a little.

  What dignity can be found in the life of the modern child?

  by qball
• One man's drugs, knives, and bombs are another mans skateboards and Amiga 500s
  by allthetime
• I feel like the same article could have written 30 years ago about smoking.

  "Look, personally I'm all for smoking bans, so don't attack me, I just want to point out those studies that show that statistically, people in no-smoking areas have almost the same amount of respiratory symptoms as people in the regular areas. Maybe the real issue is our outdated idea of 'clean air'..."

  by xg15
• If the respiratory symptom you’re talking about is lung cancer then the rate of that has dropped by hundreds of thousands.

  Not smoking works, but maybe people need more freedom to hurt themselves. I’d support that if society didn’t have to pay their bills later on.

  by EA-3167
• I think one aspect that wasn’t discussed in this article sufficiently is:

  > given that all of their peers have adopted it, there is a serious social cost to opting out.

  Unlike reading a book, or fishing, or whatever, there’s no peer pressure to pick a specific hobby. There is significant pressure to use social media. I’m usually on the authors side, the view that the youth is rotten is literally as old as time (go check out Aristotle), but unlike a claimed moral decay, we are actively forcing kids to partake.

  In Germany kids are drinking less than ever before. The education ministry went out and surveyed the kids: they don’t want to drink or party because they might embarrass themselves and it’ll be recorded and on social media and as such it might haunt them for the rest of their teen years. Albeit the outcome is good the enforcement mechanism is straight out of a 1984 horror novel kind of shit. As a teen you need to be able to experiment in a safe space somewhere somehow.

  by usernametaken29
• you need to be able to experiment

  With what? It’s not prima facie bad to have limits or bounds. I’d agree it’s good to be able to be goofy, but there’s plenty of actually-illegal activities teenagers used to “experiment” with (and skate by under the radar) that doesn't feel like a loss if it’s gone.

  by ip26
• There are a few towns around the world that ban phones and social media for kids. I really like this approach because it means nobody feels left out, and the parents are not the bad guys.

  Fingers crossed it comes to my mountain hippie town before my 2 year old wants it.

  by testing22321
• One observation I made when I was a teacher was that the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became. My theory is that teenagers are experimenting with different identities, so when you give them a seminar on anxiety and depression, some of them try those on for size. Moral of the story: trying to pre-emptively solve a problem can cause the problem or cause a different problem.
  by cjs_ac
• yeah basically like warning kids to not like frozen railing, which they would not even think about until the warning

  it's like asking on suicide hotline whether you have some weapon or object in room which could hurt you, great ideas to give to suicidal people...

  by Markoff
• > the more we did to help students (as a cohort) with their mental health, the worse it became

  An equally plausible explanation is that when the school had zero resources to help kids with depression or other mental health problems they choose to keep their mouths shut and suffer it in silence.

  Once the school started paying attention to the issue, it started surfacing people with pre-existing problems who had not previously had anyone to talk to about it.

  by quasse
• Children are easily led on, and if we’re being honest most adults are too.
  by grebc