…and now, ten years later Christianity as a whole, but especially conservative Christianity that until recently seemed immune, is seeing a sharp drop off in youth affiliation.
david fb
(interesting times indeed, and not much fun)
I have a different theory for most of our young folk’s problems. Just cooked it up in full today.
Who is cooking at home?
Mom or dad when he cooked decided what was for dinner and it was healthy. The meals were portioned out. People were satisfied. As a friend said to me today it was not fun. As in it was not fun food.
The diabetes and obesity rates were lower. How do you feel as a 17 year old if you are overweight? It is a spiral.
Activity never burns enough calories to make up for years of overeating. You will burn out your knees and/or back first by trying to do heavy exercise.
Yes some people can do it regardless of what I am saying. But how many kids at age 16 will forever after lose the weight with exercise when the parents wont stop taking them to burger and pizza joints?
Cooking at home was the cornerstone of health in younger folks. You are what you eat.
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The iPhone came up in 2008. Give it a few years to achieve penetration within the teen segment and you have a pretty easy explanation.
Facebook came out in 2004, but until the advent of “screen in your hand 24/7” it was a sporadic, even occasional pursuit - particularly among teens who spent a lot of their time to that point having breakfast and going to school. Since the advent of “always on” we’ve seen a marked increase in mental health issues among teens (others too) which shows no signs of abating.
We cannot expect the social media companies to limit the time spent as it directly impacts their bottom line (the networks and TV stations were more amendable to “children” issues as they were regulated by government), and hoping that parents do it is fraught for all the obvious reasons.
No, I don’t have a solution, but I sincerely believe this is a big part of the problem.
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The kids don’t like being taught who to hate? Imagine that. Of course, the “remedy” offered by the “right thinking” is more government enforced religion.
Speaking of church enforced hate, watched an old movie last night, about a British bomber crew trying to make their way out of occupied Holland. The Dutch who were helping them, were laying out the escape route. One of the stops was a church. One of the crewmen asks what kind of church. The Dutch woman replies it is a Catholic church. Two of the Brits, a Methodist and a Baptist, chafed at the idea of going anywhere near a Catholic church. The Dutch woman replied, words to the effect “this is the route we have, you want to get out of here or not?” An interesting little interlude. By the way, the priest was played by an impossibly young Peter Ustinov.
Steve
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Who has time and energy to cook from scratch? Since the US got so Shiny, both husband and wife now need to work to maintain a standard of living.
Steve
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Plus, you have to want to. I’m retired and still don’t have much of any interest in cooking. Wine tasting, on the other hand, is of interest.
Steve, I get the impression you have lots of time to cook if you wanted to. And yet…
DB2
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Not so sure about this.
When I grew up in the 50s & 60s, television emerged and was within easy reach for middle class Americans. Lots of folks thought the “word I cannot use” tube would bring about the dumbing down of America (they may have been right).
The 80s & 90s brought the advent of home computers. Kids spent all their time playing games. Oh, the humanity.
In the 2000s, in another technological jump, computers got shrunk down to pocket size devices.
Is it really technology that’s the problem all of a sudden?
There have been technological changes for centuries, although I admit the pace of changes is accelerating.
Politics, on the other hand, is cyclical. I believe mankind is inexorably marching towards a worldwide form of government, if we can avoid destroying ourselves first. But it’s never been a straight forward even path. We move in fits and starts. The pendulum swings left and right.
In my lifetime, I have never experienced the divisiveness I currently see with many politicians exploiting, rather than trying to unite people through the beliefs most people have in common. Evil people will always exist. It is up to good people to not to be taken in and follow them (harder than it sounds).
Or, as my political hero once said:
“If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.”
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It’s not “technology” per se, it’s the use of technology, particularly by teenagers who already have identity and self-awareness issues, which are heightened by being constantly connected. So instead of having all those hormonal urges and doubts to compare to a half dozen friends in your various classes, you have hundreds to compare always - before school, during school, after school, as you go to bed. The teenage brain is a malleable thing, and I believe social media in its various incarnations might be deleterious, depending on the individual.
Some here may be surprised to find that I feel the same way about certain video games and music, particularly gangsta, rap, and some hip-hop, which lead to a general coarsening of the culture, and set a baseline lower than optimal for a generation about to enter adult life and situations.
Of course my parents said the same thing about rock and roll, and with a few exceptions they were wrong - but RNR wasn’t (as noted Conservative Bill Bennett said) nihilistic, it was mostly joyous and fun, it was just LOUD and sometimes screechy, which I think is what my folks objected to most.
Anyway, we are a product of our cultural influences. The scene in “Back to the Future” where Marty gets carried away playing the feedback guitar a la Van Halen to the mystified teens of the 50’s is telling. In the 70’s or 80’s that would have been quite normal.
Back to social media, I’m not saying it will affect everyone badly, but outliers abound and based on the increasing numbers, it’s something to have a concern about.
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I have hated, despised, deprecated and shunned social media ever since someone told me about Facebook’s predecessor MySpace. BARF.
I do not know why I felt that way so vehemently and immediately and thoughtlessly, and I still try to explain myself to myself, focusing on the potent ancient distinction between what is private and what is public. I think the passage of time has confirmed me in my prejudices.
Mostly, Social Media and its productions seem to me to be
cheap (care and time needed for socializing to be truly social is rarely invested)
squalid (strangers preening for attention while money quietly controls content) and
stupifying (the REAL WORLD teaches everything, and meta unanchored to reality drains everything)
A clever portrait of this NEW MEDIA occurs in the STARZ video series “American Gods”. Watch as “Tech Boy” (think Musk/Zuck boiled down to nastiest essences) under threats and orders from Mr. World (think Totalitarian desire a la Mohammed bin Salman croxxed with x-Prez) tracks down, finds, and dragoons into duty the missing key to mass power: Mass Media, who has been hiding while transforming her potent powers of social control from a 50s 60s “I Love Lucy” and “Leave it to Beaver” format to “TikTok”
and then Mr. World gives mass media her new orders
The vids are based on a brilliant and very odd book by Neil Gaiman called “American Gods”
Yes, I guess I am now officially, possibly, a crotchety old man. Damn stupid kids of all ages…suckered into Satanism!
Snicker.
david fb
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Me neither. I have the cook books and the gadgets and the time, but it’s rare that I feel like putting together a creative meal…i.e. righteously time consuming to prepare (finding new ways to put a creative meal on the table is like finding new ways to iron a shirt, to me) Nutritious, tasty enough to enjoy but not so awesome as to be tempted to pig out…and quick.
Minimal ingredient cooking and an airfryer (grill/slowcooker in second spot) works for me.
I agree.
I just think that the political atmosphere has a greater impact (not too surprising considering I’m a political creature).
These days there are constant “wars.” War on Christmas. War on wokeness. War on science. War on LGBTQ. War on gun rights. War on the Mouse. War on beer. War on voting rights. War on country music songs. War on free speech. War on judges. War on climate change. Constant fighting. Insurrections. Constant stress.
We’re no longer red, white and blue, we’re red, purple and blue.
We’re social creatures. Most of us, anyway. We’re all stressed.
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My mom worked. She didn’t feel like cooking when she got home. I learned to use a toaster oven and heat up frozen dinners at a young age. I found better uses of my time, than dinking around with a stove, then cleaning up after. Even when I was not working 12+ hrs/day, I just never saw a reason to start spending a lot of time dinking around with a stove.
Steve
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It doesn’t always take a lot of time to cook meals. Some meals are complex and take time, but other meals are simple and quick. On work days, my wife and I cook simpler meals, on weekends, sometimes we cook more complex meals. We, as a family, cook and eat 98+% of our meals at home. With a crock pot and a pressure cooker, some meals can be cooked with very short prep times, and even relatively short waiting times.
As a kid, my mom cooked dinner every night, but simple dinners because she worked. Once we were teens, we often took over the cooking because we arrived home earlier than she did. In fact, we pretty much had the same things each week. Sunday was mostly leftovers from big weekend meals. Monday was rotisserie chicken. Tuesday was meatloaf and potatoes or sausage stew (sausage, potatoes, tomato sauce in pressure cooker). Wednesday was spaghetti and meatballs. Thursday was omelettes with sautéed pepper and tomato, maybe rice, maybe garlic bread, and some other stuff. Friday was sabbath eve dinner (wine/grape juice, challah, chicken, meat, potato, veggies, dessert, etc). Etc.
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Good food that is healthy and tastes good (and, especially knowing what the ingredients are) are the main reasons I eat at home about 90% of the time. It’s also a palate thing as I got into wine back in the 80s and found that I wanted food that went with the wine I was newly discovering. Buying a decent bottle out at a restaurant was prohibitive for me back in the day and so making a meal that was delicious with a delicious wine became quite enjoyable. Now that I can afford pretty much anything out, I still get sticker shock so I cheap out and make my own gourmet meals. I also like tinkering around with recipes.
Fast food has never been my thing - much of it I find both salty and greasy and very suspect. To each his or her own.
Pete
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I have a different take. Being an old fart I can remember cities burning from race riots, dogs being used on Civil Rights activists, the fear of being drafted to kill and die in Vietnam, hiding underneath the school desk once a month in case of a nuclear attack, and leaders like JFK, MLK, and RFK being assassinated one after the other.
Past teens had a lot more political and cultural reasons to be depressed than those today. Yet they weren’t.
The difference I think is that back in the day, our peers were mostly limited to those we saw everyday in the neighborhood or at school. We could see their ups and downs and so had a pretty realistic view of what their lives were like, and for the most part it was not much different than ours. And so we were reasonably happy.
Today’s kids are connected to a virtual world where people create facades that are typically much better than the reality. On Facebook everyone is taking fancy vacations, eating at sophisticated restaurants, and living the life. Teens see their virtual peers living virtual lives with all the bad parts edited out, all the failures and embarrassments that everyone goes through invisible. It looks like everyone is doing better, looking better, achieving more, and failing less than they are. So much for personal self-esteem.
Here is an article written way back in 2016 about “Facebook depression” due to social comparisons.
> Their findings – published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking – suggest that there is a complex relationship between online social networking and depression. The researchers say that social comparison was the trigger in cases where there was a significant association between social networking and depression. They say that comparing yourself with others can lead to “rumination,” or overthinking. How to avoid Facebook-induced depression
Teens rarely get depressed about politics. The adolescent brain isn’t wired that way. The focus of the teen brain is to develop social connections and to create a self-image based on how they compare with their peers. Tough enough when the peer pressure is coming from your school. Nearly impossible when it is the worldwide web where most everyone is “advertising”, pretending to be more than they are.
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This is 100% accurate in my experience. And I have 5 teens (okay, some of them are in their early 20s, but they’re still “teens” as far as this stuff is concerned.)
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Frankly, mom wasn’t much of a cook. Weeknight meals usually amounted to a fried pork chop. All I could taste of those things was pepper. Meatloaf was a big production, reserved for weekends.
Fortunately, I am blessed with a tin palate. I see food as fuel, and I’m not too picky.
Steve
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Where are their parents?
According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers. One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers. Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram…
According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010. Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds. And these declines are tied to internet use.
DB2
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Three thoughts, all with economic implications:
Celebrate the diversity. Why dump on it if that’s how they choose to adapt? Do they all have to do as White people do? People don’t like it when you force or even earnestly suggest that they do as you do.
Or, alternately… hey they’re free to do as they wish and adopt new technology in their own way. Why have an opinion or even notice? If it causes them to eventually fall behind (the implication of the article) that’s on them. Choices have consequences.
Or, should “we” (whoever that would be? The Establishment? The Government? Businesses looking for workers? Academe?) intervene to “save the future economy.” Or, if the economy tanks unrecoverably, hey that’s the free market. Don’t do something. Just stand there…?
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Rather than stratifying the study’s data by race, which only invites racism, I think it would be far more interesting and useful to stratify by income or wealth.
I’d like to be able to test a hypothesis that the heavy screen time is related to low income/wealth. It’s fairly inexpensive to give your kid a phone so they can entertain themselves while you work a second job just to have food and clothing and shelter. Those with higher income can afford things like sports or travel or music lessons as a way to engage their children in activity that doesn’t involve a screen.
Marital status would be another thing to look at. Single parents have a whole lot more on their plate than a married couple, who can split the job of child rearing.
I just don’t see what benefit there is to looking at this particular subject by race.
—Peter
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