1. School times are way too early for most teens. I am sure that just not having to get up that soon is doing a lot for their overall wellbeing.
2. American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, and would give the most "hostile workplaces" a run for their money. They suck for the nerdy kid who wants to be left to his / her own devices. They suck for the middling kids who don't want to be on the perpetual status treadmill.
Since quarantine started I've noticed many more teenage daughters tagging along with their moms on errands and walks in the middle of the day.
Probably positive for self-esteem and growth. Perhaps schools now are too focused on academic scores alone and too ignorant of negative social dynamics.
You sit at your desk most of the time in your classroom. The same way you do at home in an online class.
But home is relatively more comfy. You are allowed to eat, stretch, sit anyway you like, take a walk, go to washroom as many times as you want, and play a game on the side in an online class.
Less chances for kids to bully each other and if they did, digital evidence of it is available.
Some teachers behave better.
I wish some sort of hybrid will come. Activities that require sitting in a classroom should be shifted to remote while others can be built into a separate school.
The cynical view would be that school is there to manufacture good workers for the future wage-labour rat race. So they aren't focused on things beyond so-called "practical" development by design.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with this view but I'm sure it has some grain of truth.
Trust me, high schools outside of the US as well. There’s something about that age span that is very exciting but aggravating at the same time. I am happy for me that I passed without major injuries, physical and mental.
The high school I went to in Sweden was perfectly fine. No bullying, not that much stress. And it was just a normal average public high school, nothing special. Middle school on the other hand was hell.
In general I have heard of much more people being bullied in middle school compared to only one or two in high school.
I was sexually abused in the locker room, attacked walking to/from school, had balloons filled with piss thrown at me, and constantly dealt with a feeling that I was not good enough and never would be good enough which sticks to this day. The administration encouraged much of this. I am putting serious thought into removing my children from school once this shit starts.
Teens are horrible across the world, but some cultures manage school life a bit better (of course, probably with some other trade-offs).
Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. Parents-from-hell exist but at least when I was growing up, discipline was expected, teachers were given the benefit of doubt instead of always siding with the kids, kids actually used to be somewhat scared of teachers and the principal (I mean sure they would make fun of them behind their back but at least there was some amount of deference to authority) and the overall environment kept kids in line.
The kind of bullying that passes for normal in American schools would never fly. I mean it doesn't fly in American workplaces either. It's the kind of bullshit we only tolerate in schools for some reason.
As a non american who went to a pretty strict school, I can say that my school life was hell because the teachers didn't care about the rest of the classroom bullying me until it affected their class personally, that's it, when I dared to fight back; and my parents siding with the teachers didn't help the least bit.
A strict environment might be good for education, but I don't think helps reduce bullying.
This seems to be true, some of the public high school(and middle school for the most part) are absolutely hell in US.
In Asia kids actually respect their teachers as some honorable adults or even role models, it's a culture thing. The teachers are also graduated from good colleges and earning a decent pay. It's a whole different scenario.
by the way, as for the skin-color-based and gender-based AA admission policies, that does not exist at all in Asia.
> Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers.
Chinese and Indian schools might be run like a boot camp, but that's better than running the school like a prison (forced attendance but less structure).
Really India is good?
The only things that the education system there is geared to do is have kids cram stuff and regurgitate it and create assembly lines of mindless robots.
No emphasis on analytical skills or any focus on music, theater, art or sports.
Hell, 90% of schools don't have basic facilities like a playground.
I went to a school where I got an all-rounded experience, but was fortunate and it's an elitist institution ( akin to a prep-school here), so out of reach of many.
You can criticize the American school system as much as you want, but for the most part it does a pretty good job.
Bullying can get bad, but some of it is also teaching you critical life skills. There is plenty of workplace bullying too, you know what you do, you grow some balls and stand up to the bully.
Hell holes? I see a wee bit of exaggeration there. You make it sound like West-Africa.
And Indian schools had capital punishment, you got your ass-kicked by teachers, not sure if its still the same or not?
>American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in,
I appreciate the sentiment here, but what??? I went through the biggest high school in my state. It was a meat grinder. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the nasty experiences I had in corporate America. I could write a book on all the nasty legally questionable shit I saw.
I think high school is subjectively difficult due to the stage of life you are at when you go through it. As an adult, you have likely developed coping mechanisms to deal with stressors. You have had multiple relationships, both romantic and social, and have experience in losing people and navigating those relationships and social webs. You know your own mind better and have more experience just understanding yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. You have experience balancing priorities, commitments, and goals; work time, time to recharge, time to socialize.
Going through high school now in my 30s would be trivial to my mental health, but to my underdeveloped teen brain, it was overwhelming and couldn’t have been more serious. Now of course I am not saying that means those problems aren’t important or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve them. I think we should specifically because of the unique mentally vulnerable position the teenager is in.
One of the things that I remember most from schooling (elementary through high school) was the amount of time spent doing discipline/class management. Or repeating and answering questions. Plus the whole lecture format doesn't work for everyone. Remote school probably cuts down on these things.
Furthermore, for self-directed kids, there's always the possibility of simply going mostly asynchronous, watching lectures and reading textbook at their own pace (which might be faster than regular class now that most distractions are removed!).
My kids are elementary students, both wake up at 8:30 naturally (go to bed at 7:30). To eat, get ready and bike to school for a 840 start, they need to be up by 7:30 at the very latest. Couldn't imagine having an 8am start, let alone earlier, especially as they age.
Yeah that's a good bit more than the 9-12 average. As a parent of elementary age kids myself, I'd suspect there was some amount of not-sleeping actually happening overnight. My son is particularly adept at playing with legos and such even in the dark. My daughter is fond of waking up at 1am and reading for a couple hours, then going back to sleep until 8:30am.
I am not sure exactly how widespread it is/was, but as I understand that biphasic sleep was pretty common before artificial light and the rise of civilization. With the recent dropping of external pressure to get up as early or go to bed as late, it's not terribly surprising that some people would gravitate towards that; Kids even more so -- their sleep patterns are not quite as well established.
It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.
So I had messed up my sleep really bad this year, to the point where I was ending up not sleeping for days or sleeping the whole day (on weekends for example) and have been slowly trying to bring myself to a more sane baseline. At one point a sort of bi-phasic schedule where I would initially sleep in the mid-late afternoon and then again either very late at night or early morning. If i had more flexibility in my schedule, I'm convicned it wouldn't be that bad.
My son (HS age) is naturally an early riser and rarely sleeps past 8am, even on weekends. I have noticed a marked improvement in his mood and reduction in his tendency to fall asleep within 5 minutes of riding in a car since quarantine began and he can get up when he prefers rather than having to leave the house by 7am every morning.
Between 5 AP courses and after school activities that kept him there until 9pm a few times a week, he was burning himself out last year. We'll be doing remote school until at least February and it's been great (for him).
So, I like to think of myself as not overly protective, but fairly early on in the pandemic, during the actual shelter-in-place part, my teenage daughter said, "It's not like anything has really changed for me all that much". Ouch. She watched more TV, and via Zoom got to see what everybody else's living rooms looked like, but in the U.S. most professional class kids don't get a lot of free-roaming time anyway, so the only difference is you're trading school time (never their favorite part) for house time. So I'm not sure this means quarantine isn't so bad, more like we have kids in quarantine all the time nowadays compared to a generation ago so it wasn't much of a change.
I went to school in Germany and famously a majority of schools in Germany are half-day. My classes started at 7:30 and ended at 12:45 pm.
I had the afternoon to myself, did a lot of reading and rode my bike around town and into the fields. I still know a lot about topics I just was curious about (alphabets and writing systems across the globe, must have spent hours reading books on those). All that I wouldn't have been able to do with a whole-day school. Although now as a parent, I have to admit that it surely is easier to have your kid in school all day while you are at work.
To be honest I would be terrified to let my kids do this, maybe because I grew up in a place where drivers are the leading cause of dead kids (the US).
This is very interesting regarding half day schools in Germany. We've considered moving to Germany for a while so our kids could learn German while they're young (also we just quite like the place). A half day school sounds enticing as well.
Do it. I'm an American who studied in Germany in college. My host family kids were so well adjusted and the education they received in public schools was a whole level above anything in any US school.
Speed limit in our neighborhood is 30kmh (18 mph). And driving the bike into the fields meant like down the Road onto ways that were only open to farmers‘ cars.
Isn’t sport massively important in US schools, and for getting into college? That must have been a big change not being able to go to ‘practice’ and all their clubs?
Athletics is one way high schoolers with less than stellar academic records can navigate past college admissions departments and get accepted at a school where they might not otherwise be qualified. Most people already knew this about scholarship athletes, but the recent college admissions scandal involved non-athletes being listed by college coaches as recruited athletes. It's basically the coach telling the admissions department that this student might play on their team and therefore should get preferential treatment with admissions.
This is such a tiny portion of the high school athletics community that is barely worth mentioning. For the vast majority of students participating in sports the only value a sport provides to college admission is as a extracurricular activity. It is no more valuable than being in the school band, acting in the school play, or being a member of the chess club.
In my opinion, I'd say being in a "varsity" sport is more valuable than being in an arbitrary club but being in a "club" sport is similar to being in an arbitrary club.
Varsity football in a state like Texas or Florida where football is king? Definitely a huge value add even if you are not going to play football in college.
Sports can sometimes show a lot of character, in a different way than things like band or school play do. Think about the amount of hard training it takes to become, for example, a state champion distance runner, or wrestler. It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.
> It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.
That’s utter nonsense. It takes more physical prowess to run 10 miles, sure, but there’s nothing mentally easy about playing the same damn four bars until you have the passage completely locked in, to put in the effort to go from ok to good to excellent.
Ah. "Working hard breeds character". I wish my parents hadn't been such blind working class people to understand that that's merely the way to stay working class.
Before high school, we had a physical education/"gym" class as part of our normal schedule where we would do various althletic things.
In high school, we needed a certain amount athletic credits in order to graduate. This worked out to be either 1 season each year on an actual team (competing against other schools); or 2 "seasons" each year of non competative play (e.g. pick-up games of ultimate frisbee, or joining the cross country team for training runs). They would take attendence each day, and you get credit based on how many times you show up (with no requirement that the days you show up are even in the same year; the only time a teacher would complain about you missing a day is if you need the credit to graduate).
You could also get credit for sports you do outside of the school.
Almost no one goes to college in the US to play a sport. Even a lot of people who go to college to play a sport (D3 athletes) don't get any kind of tangible benefit from it(e.g. salary, tuition reduction, course credits, etc).
> Almost no one goes to college in the US to play a sport.
I didn't mean that - I mean people applying for I don't know engineering or whatever having to compete by showing how good their extra-curriculars were.
Ah. That's more common, but also not required. Usually colleges will be looking for extra curriculars, of which sports might be one. But it would be just as well or maybe even better to be part of a debate club, the school newspaper, etc.
Back when I was in (US) high school, the only mandatory physical requirement to graduate was one semester of PE (Physical Education). I took mine over the summer, where it was too hot in my state to go outside, so we played volleyball and ping-pong in the air-conditioned gym all summer. I was not a very physical kid, so that was like winning the lottery for me, since those that took it the rest of the year had to run around the track, and do other outdoor activities in the sun.
If you are aiming for elite (or semi-elite) schools you need sports or clubs to appear well rounded. 95% of students aren't really trying to get into those colleges.
A lot of public colleges essentially create a formula (GPA and SAT/ACT) and the "soft factors" likes clubs and sports only decide when you are in the gray area.
In my experience it was a minority of kids. My parents pushed me into it, but I still only spent about half the years in any sport. Of my friend group, only one other person was in formal extracurriculars (jazz band) and the situation was roughly similar across the board, and many clubs are only seasonal.
A better way to think about it is that grades and test scores are probably not enough if you want to get into an elite school. Universities want interesting people who will enrich the campus and their fellow students.
One easy way to demonstrate this is through extracurricular activity. If you founded a club, excelled in a sport, engaged in charity, won contests, etc., that's a sign that you're somebody who does things in a community and not just a test taker.
(There is room at even top schools for test takers—but you're going to need extremely uncommon scores to stand out that way.)
This seems like an good way to get people to contrive as many experiences as possible for this relatively arbitrary metric. To me it seems totally irrelevant, but it seems like American universities are more of a packaged 'experience' than for specialized training specifically.
I call this, dictatorship of the masses. Masses define « normal » as doing specific things, and normality is enforced for uni, and we don’t select enough for skills. As a person who couldn’t understand social expectations (=Asperger) this is extremely stressful, but now I just read it as the first installment of normal people’s revenge over the work-minded. For what, I don’t know, it’s not like we’ll end up with their loving wife or recognition, but I assure it takes many forms.
Meanwhile Asian countries select for skills and don’t hesitate to give 14hrs per day of courses at high school in China depending on provinces. Not that it is enjoyable, but we won’t enjoy much when we have to acknowledge their superiority.
A few spots for IQ160 people still excludes a lot of good workers. Perhaps we shouldn’t suppress our hard workers, perhaps we should even acknowledge them, even if they seem boring for normal people.
Meanwhile if those could actually help us socially, that would be a big win-win, if only because socially-excluded people are harmful to others, maybe also because most tax dollars comes from hard workers.
> Consider that a typical suburban U.S. high school might have 10,000+ kids
Not only is that not typical, there seems to be no US in-person high school in the US that has 10,000+ kids (there are a few online/distance-learning high schools that big or bigger.) It looks like the largest in-person is Brooklyn Technical High School, which has ~6,000.
I think this varies a lot, depending on town, gender, area of country, what college you're trying to get in, etc. Also, if everybody is not getting to do their sports, it's not as if that puts you at a disadvantage in regards getting into college.
Not that this would be the impact on kids' mental health, anyway, that would depend on whether they found sports to be satisfying and rewarding, or just one more stressful opportunity to be declared a failure. That, in turn, probably depends on the parents and the coaches.
It’s important to the schools to generate income and whatever weird rivalry keeps people going. If you aren’t in a rural town sports players are probably a tiny, tiny percentage of your class and I think it’s better today but they weren’t exactly the most inclusive group of people when I was in school in the late 90s/2000s.
I volunteer with a lot of high-school kids, and from what I've seen, they've been okay for the most part when it comes to mental health, except for those who have toxic families and who use school as an escape (to get out of the house, recharge, etc.). For those kids, it's been really, really hard.
When I first heard the home abuse story I shivered because I had a mere mild version as a late teenager. I literally trained for a marathon because that meant 2-4 hours/day away from the house.
The only good that came out of it was that I studied so freaking hard so I could get a job and move out.
There was no empathy for this demographic, but lots of empathy for 70+ year olds.
> There was no empathy for this demographic, but lots of empathy for 70+ year olds.
There was lots of empathy for young people, including from those 70+ folks; it's just the narrative can not sustain on a diet of empathy.
In the places where lockdowns have been both draconian and ineffective, the priority is more to give the impression that the politicians are "doing something", not to seek a good outcome on a balance of opportunities taken and missed.
Screwing over young people for the benefit of old people is kinda the norm. But at least in this case it's justified because it's literally millions of lives on the line. Its just hard for the young people to empathize sometimes given how much they are screwed over economically and environmentally constantly.
The first people I saw to break quarantine laws were teens who met up at the park, then went to someone's house to play basketball.
No school + get to see your friends? Yeah I can see that being good for mental health..
My 29 year old single male friends? Multiple told me they were going to try to get anti depressants. They refused to link it to the quarantine (politically they were in full support of the quarentine).
And me? Unemployment with my 1 year old was fun for 3 months. By month 5, the kid learned how to rule the household. I'm so glad I'm hired and the kid is in daycare.
I constantly battle with my partner because I’m perfectly happy holing Up at home until a vaccine but my partner demands outings and family visits aplenty.
In march in LA kids basically dropped off the face of the earth in terms of schooling. Parks were closed, but they were playing full court basketball at my local park anyway since march to right now, at the same levels as before the pandemic, with spectators in the bleachers too. Basically teenage summer came early and has been going on for 7 months now.
* When was the last time you had a nightmare about school?
* When was the last time you had a nightmare about work?
Regardless of the average age, I would be surprised if you found that work nightmares are more common than school nightmares. The recurrence of school nightmares even seems to be something of a running joke in our society.
FWIW, I've never had any nightmares where I dreamed I was back in secondary school. I've had many about undergrad and grad school, though. It's been more than a decade since I graduated from grad school.
However, I've also had plenty of nightmares about my first job. It's never about my performance or my co-workers, mind you, but about my immigration status back then. Currently, in my (virtual) room of co-workers, many are also immigrants; I wouldn't be surprised that they've had similar nightmares.
>It's never about my performance or my co-workers, mind you, but about my immigration status back then.
Not gonna lie, the part about immigration status hit me very strong.
I keep getting those nightmares about once a month, despite all of my actual immigration-related fears in real life being completely gone after becoming a citizen. The nightmare is always about me somehow ending up in my old country (but at the present time, not me back then) without being able to escape. It always starts as just a minor inconvenience situation (e.g., flight got canceled, just gotta reschedule it, no big deal) and rapidly escalates to the most impossible situations to get out of (e.g., got arrested at a random place and stuck in a cell without being able to leave), while my normal life in the US going on as normal, just without me present, and nobody notices my absence.
In addition to that one, the only other one I often get is the very typical one about waking up to me being my college-aged self and realizing it is the final exam day, and it is for a class that i signed up for and completely forgot about until today.
Same re university nightmares! I still occasionally get nightmares that I'm deep into a class, and I realize I haven't been doing any homework or even going to the class and I start wondering how I'm going to fix that mess and how the heck I let it happen.
I was shocked to learn, a few years ago now, that my German friends do not have these. I am out of university for over a decade and it’s still probably a monthly occurrence.
I have never had a work nightmare, but since emigrating some of the school dreams have been replaced by visa-related ones.
Well, duh. You have to ask someone to use the bathroom. A typical office is stocked with snacks and drinks. You can step away for a walk. We treat kids in school way worse than adults in the white collar working world (we basically treat them like blue collar workers).
A classmate of my sister's was once denied permission to go to the bathroom. The negotiations ended with him peeing in the classroom's waste bin. That teacher didn't make the same mistake again.
The fact that there are teachers out there who will sometimes just refuse to allow kids to go to the bathroom is just insane. What good does treating students like that actually bring?
At least in my urban high school experience, some teachers were of about equal maturity level to their students.
Also, students would go to the bathroom and then just not come back and roam the halls and enter random classrooms and say hi to all of their friends in the middle of class.
You can deal with that on a case-by-case basis. It is better to have the chance of someone skipping class than it is to tell a girl that thinks her tampon is leaking (because of surprise heavy bleeding) that she can't go to the bathroom and instead, has to hope that she didn't leak through her pants onto the chair. Or that someone has to risk soiling themselves because they have to go.
I'm really happy my mother made sure I knew she'd fight for me if a teacher wouldn't let me use the toilet. I didn't need her to, but my sister did.
I'm explaining why teachers in some schools do this, I still think it is stupid and ridiculous.
Worth noting though: no, I don't think you can deal with it on a case-by-case basis at the level at which this occurs.
What the better teachers seemed to do is find a way to set up a system with students who would lock & unlock the classroom door for students who needed to go to the bathroom. (the door was never locked from the inside, just the outside)
Teachers know when a student doesn't return to the classroom, though. Simple enough to take report that to whoever in the school handles discipline: Usually, the same person that would get involved with other sorts of skipping class. I don't really see the issue: It can't be that many kids doing it every class and having teachers and staff monitor halls, if you have well-funded schools, shouldn't be an issue.
I'm opposed to locked bathroom doors as well: Again, all it takes is one teacher saying, "no", and suddenly, the same student is out of luck.
Or we could be more lenient on students and not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
I mean, my school tried that - they implemented a hall sweeping program where teachers locked their doors and security would try to catch all the students in the halls. It didn't really prevent it because they couldn't constantly hall sweep all of the halls during the entire school day (and it increased the number of students entering other classrooms randomly to try to hide from the security guards) and it was also super racially biased in its enforcement.
> It can't be that many kids doing it every class and having teachers and staff monitor halls
No, it is quite a few students. You underestimate the dysfunction in the typical inner city school.
> Simple enough to take report that to whoever in the school handles discipline
And do what to discipline them? Kick them out of school?
> not worry so much about attendance so long as they hand in their work and get decent enough grades.
In an urban environment, "not worrying about attendance" translates to a. to very upset parents (esp. among working-class parents who are not at home and view education as a route to success), b. failing low-income students, c. more crime.
I'll be honest: if you didn't grow up in a school like this, you don't understand how disruptive it is for a student to burst into the classroom in the middle of the teacher explaining something and go around high-fiving everyone in the classroom with the teacher powerless to stop them. This was not an infrequent occurrence.
I went to a school where football was an extremely big deal and we actually had a school sanctioned spirit squad that would do this before big games. five to ten highschool juniors/seniors would barge into classes yelling, shaking desks, high-fiving people, etc. the teachers hated it, but the administration thought it was good for school spirit. tbh I kinda enjoyed the chaos, but looking back I don't understand how someone in their right mind could allow that.
If you assume that the primary purpose of the school is to produce compliant nationalists (Or people who are easily distracted by circuses), as opposed to education, this makes sense.
The pledge of allegiance is another one of those things, that were it taking place in a hostile country, would be mocked incessantly - as brainwashing.
I agree that banning bathroom breaks is stupid. But it's not as easy as "punishing disruption"
a. Because turns out the constantly suspending students is actually not that effective if our goal is to educate those students
b. Because suspending students goes on a school's record and the central office in urban areas wants to keep suspensions low.
c. Because the way they punish the disruption is oftentimes more problematic for ordinary students
ie. My school implemented hall sweeps where all of the teachers would lock the doors to their classroom and security would come through the halls and collect students for detention, but it would oftentimes catch students who were doing things like going from their classroom to the library or something.
It was also pretty clearly racially biased. I remember vividly a black student arriving maybe 10 seconds after the bell for class, getting into the class, and having security guards come into the classroom to take her out of the class because she was late. The security guards knew that the affluent, white student's parents were more likely to throw a fit if their child was treated like that.
This was honestly the most valuable lesson from that school: well-meaning discussion about how to enforce/stop certain behavior in a meeting translates into super unreasonable enforcement actions by school security. I doubt this principle is unique to schools, but I am lucky to be wealthy enough to be shielded from the brunt of the law.
I don't think suspensions are the answer either since kids will just play video games at home. But what about in school suspensions? Doing your homework in a broom closet for the entire day without your phone or seeing your friends will quell disruptive behavior quick. It worked at my school doing just that.
These schools do not always have the resources to monitor large numbers of suspended students, and it would also just lead to the exact same problems, unless students don't need to go to the bathroom anymore. They don't have enough rooms to put students on their own, so they have to put them in groups.
Your school was probably very different from mine.
Don't know why you were downvoted because you're correct. There are some teachers that, for one reason or another, were hit very hard over their years of teaching and have become hardened old coots whose only pleasure comes from limiting others.
Well looking out my window that's because they're having a whale of a time and I I haven't the heart to blame them really. They're roaming the streets here like a herd of frisky wildebeest.
The unintended consequence of the pandemic is that teenagers are getting more sleep, who now don't have to commute to school to start class at 7 am. Maybe this is a case for high schools to continue to teach classes online (or maybe partially online), even after the pandemic?
I heard a school was maintaining 50% capacity by having A and B groups of students. Group A attends school in person Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning. Then the rest of the week is online. Group B does the opposite. This seems like a good idea, not only for safety, but for balancing in person interaction and socialization with the flexibility of remote learning. I’m unsure if the classes are taught with both the in person and remote students “together” but that would be even better. It would also allow students that need to go to school full time in person or full time remote a robust infrastructure to do so, instead of an afterthought (like remote has been up until this year, if an option at all).
Sorry, I think you are mistaking what I'm writing. I'm referring to this article and basing it of PEW Research on adolescence with depression. The addition of more sleep hasn't changed anything in this survey. In regards to already existing reports by PEW on the rates of depression which in teenagers and in more specifically girls have an exponential growth in depression rates. Its not due to a change in social stigma but rather the use of social media. Specifically facebook and instagram which most teenage girls spend the majority of their time on.
My kids are a bit younger, but the article reads a lot like our life during the hard quarantine period in Spain.
They couldn't set a foot out of the door for 52 straight days and only walk around the block for a few more weeks, but they adapted perfectly, slept more, never were bored or sad, did great with their remote school tasks, enjoyed the extended family time and even had a fun and instructive peek into adult work life: they were surprisingly insightful and critical about the good and bad aspects of mom&dad jobs.
And while the reason for it was bad and my wife and me were worried, anxious and sleepless, in retrospect our life was good in a lot of ways: The kids were OK, we ate better, we exercised, work got done beyond expectations, we had more free time and discovered that many of the disagreements and tensions in our marriage come from the outside. Being together 24/7 was easier than getting along living the usual crazy "normal life".
This is an odd finding to me. The CDC found that of 18-24 year olds surveyed June 24-30, one in four seriously considered suicide within the past thirty days.
>I find it somewhat incredible that the results would be going essentially in opposite directions so close in age range.
I wonder if the kids studied were more from higher socio-economic strata than the median. The methodology section of the appendix to the study linked[0] by the Atlantic article is vague on socio-economic status.
Since many of those who are on the high end have had significantly less disruption than those on the lower end. If the sample was skewed toward the higher end of the spectrum, perhaps that could account for the results.
It shouldn’t be that surprising. The change in the way your life is structured and how you are treated by society drastically changes after high school.
Oh man this is great. This is basically saying what every other scientific paper has been saying for years. The decrease in the usage of social media led to a decrease in depression in teenagers. It's almost like facebook and instagram are inherently toxic by design and should not exist.
To further clarify a 15% rate of depression in teens is higher than it was in 2017. The article lists in their survey for families who were well off during the pandemic still 15% which is really high. And 33% for those who were not. The fact the article ignores that fact is concerning to me. And makes this seem like a piece trying to claim social media isn't as "bad" as it seems. Claiming that sleep was beneficial for teens. When it in fact is suggestive otherwise that it is negligible.
In my mind, that anonymity is what makes 4chan _not_ "social media" -- the "social" aspect is eliminated. When nobody is identifiable, the conversation necessarily becomes an exchange solely upon the content of the posts [1], not about the people posting. This distinguishes it from sites like Facebook and Twitter where identity is central to the discussion no matter how you try to ignore it and also from pseudonymous sites like Reddit and traditional forums where a person doesn't necessarily have a "real" identity tied to their post but does have an established identity, where other posters can see and bring up somebody's posting history. On a truly anonymous platform like 4chan, the only thing you can possibly know about the people you're talking to is what they've said in that one thread -- all other aspects of their identity are unavailable and irrelevant.
[1] (and, unfortunately, projections and inferences and ad-hominems...)
something can't be anonymous and social at the same time, social engagement requires personal contact and identity. And that's also what's relevant for depression on social media. A mismatch between personal identity and perceived identity on those websites is what can create skewed self-perception.
On anonymous sites you may get into a generic argument, but you don't lose reputation, you're not personally attacked in your identity, and you can't be ostracised.
>something can't be anonymous and social at the same time, social engagement requires personal contact and identity.
I don't really agree with that. Going to a bar or a club is absolutely social. And can absolutely be anonymous.
Granted, that does include personal contact, but there's no requirement to identify yourself, or if you do, provide accurate information.
I'd say the same is true for online interaction. When you interact with others (such as me responding to your comment) that's a social interaction.
Whether it's a meaningful or useful social interaction is a different question, but definitely social interactions, IMHO.
>On anonymous sites you may get into a generic argument, but you don't lose reputation, you're not personally attacked in your identity, and you can't be ostracised.
That's absolutely true. At the same time, it doesn't make those interactions not "social interactions," just anonymous or pseudonymous ones.
Just like the ones you might have on a subway or in the checkout line at a supermarket.
As a child I really loved being left at home, preferably alone, for as long as possible. So I can have no doubt there are many children who actually enjoy a lock-down. Introverts are real and introvert children can do even better (than adults) entertaining themselves at home.
Considering just my own observations they did well because for the most part many of them totally ignored any of the quarantine advice that was given out an only were impacted by it when establishments they frequent were closed or enforced rules.
If anything it drove more gatherings at each others homes. I have seen an entire wrestling team at homes along with parents around. Seems there was this super brief restraint that suddenly blew out especially when so many didn't want to be inhibited.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson.
My 16 y.o. son is not struggling with quarantine at all, but his education is taking a massive nosedive - something he's not yet mature enough to worry about. So yeah, mental health-wise he's fine. Education-wise he's in a bit of a pickle. I say "a bit" because we've been supplementing his education with STEM tutoring for the past 3 years or so, which is not something poorer people can afford to do. _Those_ kids are fucked like you wouldn't believe. I think we'd be better off canceling the entire school year, furloughing all teachers, and keeping kids in the same grade for the time being.
When I was a teen it would have been very hard. Basically nothing but TV and a landline (and calls "aren't free" as per my parents).
But, as a parent myself now, I can see that my children have stayed in contact with their friends almost continuously with text messaging and audio and video calls. I think that technology has been a tremendous help.
Even school continued remotely on its normal schedule. As others have mentioned, this also allowed more pupils to sleep until later in the morning, which was probably a good thing as well, though obviously the level of physical exercise plummeted.
There was no FOMO because everyone was in quarantine too. A lot of times you were quarantined with your parents, so you have your family to support you.
It's also less stressful, it's ok to skip stuff. Results don't matter as much.
Next year when some of their parents are still unemployed, expectations back, but some kids will be further behind. Everything that seems to matter now will be forgotten.
That's when I'd expect to start seeing them top themselves at an increased demographic level.
Maybe it's just because the article refers to a specific study that surveyed teens from May to July. It's probably hard to make a concise headline that is true to that limitation and also conveys that the pandemic isn't over.
> survey of 1,523 U.S. teens from May to July this year
Given that, I would take this with a grain of salt. Half of that time is summer, when teens normally aren't in school anyway.
So if being able to socialize with friends and peers is an important part of teens' mental health (I think it is), then this study doesn't really cover that very well.
Also, July was a few months ago. It's possible things get worse over the long haul.
School system here is basically hell, they picked the worst parts of USA and EU styles of education and mixed them into some kind of unholy beast designed to break children.
Here many schools have the building literally designed after prisons, something that kids DO pick up (the most important school in my town had the nickname when I was teenager, of "Cadeião", that means "big jail", a nickname also used to refer to supermax prisons).
Although we don't get a ton of mass shootings like USA, non-mass shootings are normal (and mind you, in a country where guns are banned... people still find a way to get guns anyway, also axes, knives, etc... we had a "mass axing" here...), violence between not just students, but students and teachers.
Much of this I suspect is because my country is one of the few ones in the world where homeschooling is 100% illegal, with no exceptions, attempting homeschool here is a serious crime that results in the parents being arrested and the kids sent to orphanage, so you have schools full of kids that DO NOT want to be there, ever, so they focus their time on making life hell for everybody around them, hoping that maybe someday, people will kick them out of the system (but they won't, because it is illegal).
About EU vs USA vs Brazil schooling system:
I lost the excellent article I read about it years ago, but basically in USA the students can choose what classes they want, this including theoretically let them switch what classes their are going if they want to avoid a certain student. Meanwhile in Europe the classes are fixed, everyone go to same classes, but in many places you can choose the curriculum, so if you want to be an engineer for example you can pick an engineering focused curriculum, classes will be fixed, and all students you see every day won't chance, but you will learn more about what you want.
In Brazil the government decided somehow, that the best path was not choose anything, all schools have same curriculum, all university entry exams are obligated to ask some mininum about subjects even if they are irrelevant (ie: if you are offering a physics course, you still need to ask literature questions in your entry exam), you can't choose time, can't choose curriculum, nothing. Basically you go to school when it opens, stick with same students even if they hate your guts, see the same subjects as everyone else, even if they are completely irrelevant, and then you go home, and you keep repeating this until you have to get into a university, when you then have to take a government-ran test (that often includes propaganda) and whatever test that the universities you want to enter have, such test must ask along whatever the university wants to know, also some questions about subjects the government wants all universities to ask to all students, no matter if it is completely irrelevant or useless for their lives.
I had to go through an x-ray and metal detector to get into my school starting in 6th grade. I think many of the problems you identify with the Brazilian education are not unique to Brazil.
My friend and I were recently discussing how both our middle school kids seem much happier since the lockdown. We speculated it is stressful to be constantly trying to appear cool and normal in the school environment several hours a day, especially for introverted kids who have no break to be alone and recharge.
I took a second to think about how I'd respond to a survey that asked these questions.
I'd lie. I don't want to get singled out for home abuse or bullies. There are people that have it worse. And having to talk to people that are powerless to remove bullies is a huge mental drain.
School is tough for sure, but it can be seen as a place to learn coping strategies against shitty people. In remote learning (or homeschooling), kids are sheltered from these problems until later in life, where they have to compete against much higher baseline level of competency and in situations where stakes are higher. So, maybe school is bad, but no school is worse?
Yet. Teenage girls have a depression rate that has been rapidly increasing through the years. Currently at 20%. Which would suggest the increase in the use of social media is the main cause. Especially when this study did nothing to correlate against it with its weak argument for sleep which if you look at statistics on depression had no effect on it.
It is possible that op school had different social issues among boys then among girls. It is possible that op had no experience with girl-on-girl interactions while having bad experiences with boy-on-boy interactions.
I had to read a couple of books about teen girl psychology to understand just how badly teen girls bully and mistreat each other. It was a real eye-opener.
But then the bullying never really goes away for either gender. It's disguised and legitimised as various commercial, professional, political, and social activities, but the motivations are similar - just more covert.
Though some people continue bullying into adulthood, many of us have more control of our situations as we grow older, and in we can often avoid situations where we will be bullied. Students usually have so little control of their situation that they are really stuck and can't get away from bullies. School can be a special kind of hell if you don't fit in and can't get away.
But it is not like every single female group had massive bullying problem. Just like there are plenty of boy groups who don't bully each other.
This is like saying "I had no idea how severely boys beat or insult each other". It is absolutely true that such problem exists among boys. But you still have a lot of groups where boys don't beat each other.
If anyone is looking for how interaction between teen girls look like, this parody made by The Onion is the best depiction I've ever seen: https://youtu.be/XUT8ec24anM
Then again, boys had more social interactions during lockdown due to online gaming being way more prevalent among boys. For many boys, they kept gaming and thus socializing largely as before. Girls social was more in person or composed of general "keeping in touch" and not much was happening to talk about.
I purposefully shown some online games to my daughters so they can socialize with friends. But looking around, it was quite exceptional move for parent of girls. They had more schoolmate boys playing with them although they normally socialize more with girls. And some of those girls were the ones I told the parents about the option. I did not asked single boy to join, they were already gaming.
High school is a complete hell-hole full of warring social factions. I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't try to physically decimate each other when in-person classes return.
Politically in support of quarantine? It's established medical science. That we're at a point where epidemiology is political is truly worrying.
Donald Trump learned that ignoring science doesn't make it go away to his detriment; I really hope others will take note and follow prevailing medical advice to keep themselves and their loved ones safe, rather than pretending it's political.
You can accept the science that a quarantine prevents disease from spreading. You can also take the stance that the quarantine isn't worth it. Not mutually exclusive ideas.
The problem with that stance is that you're taking it on faith that the economy will do better without a quarantine than with one. A large number of sick and dead people and the fear of such will destroy an economy, quarantine or not.
These aren't the only options though. At least not in a "all in or all out" kind of way over a large area and length of time. You can aggressively test and trace and separate just those that test positive. You can quarantine those most prone to be affected/infected. You can quarantine specific localized areas where there is infection.
These all require that you actually implement these things effectively and comprehensively of course.
And just for the record, I think in early March we absolutely made the right decisions, and the "lockdowns" that are still in place are still the right way to go considering how terribly the US has managed all this. In general though, this doesn't seem to be the only or even the best tool we have in our toolbox to fight a pandemic like this. Had the NYC area started an extensive test and trace program when we were in our lulls in August (NJ was down to under 300 cases a day across the state), and enacted forced quarantines with criminal consequences, I think we would be in a much better place now.
As an aside on a personal level, I am livid that I am being forced to go back in the office on Monday 5 days a week despite being able to be able to do my job 100% effectively. Its completely irresponsible and has permanently damaged my view of my employer.
I think its pretty clear that places where the economy shut down longer are affected more, at least in the US. In the midwest where I live everything is almost back to normal, Main difference is you have to put a piece of cotton over your face when you walk into a bar. Housing market is still strong and jobs are to be had. Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy
The evidence is strongly suggestive that consumer behavior has more of an impact on business success than lockdown, which is why business in Sweden suffered. You can't separate consumer sentiment and lockdown just by looking at the midwest.
The question is more - in places where the population voted for people who did lockdown, would lifting the lockdown lead to a resumption of economic activity? The answer to that question appears to be a tentative no. The best way to resume normal activity is to control the pandemic.
>Meanwhile NYC and other shut down areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy
I think you're not as informed as you think you are.
I live in NYC and we started opening back up in late June. In fact, pretty much everything but indoor dining, gyms and large indoor gatherings have been open since August.
We've had some hot spots recently which have necessitated geographically isolated restrictions, but the majority of the city is open, as is indoor dining and gyms.
Sure, there has been a goodly bit of economic impact, as many continue to work from home (before the pandemic, the population of Manhattan would roughly double on a working day) which has impacted much of the hospitality industry.
Broadway theaters, the Opera and the Philharmonic are all closed until at least next summer, but those require being in large groups indoors to be profitable.
But museums are open.
NYC is certainly not "back to normal," but in a place where the population density is 27,000/sq mi (what's the population density where you live?) that's not surprising.
What is surprising is how low we've kept the infection rate since the end of May[0].
In fact, given the circumstances, once we got things under control (mid March- late May were horrific and deeply disturbing here), we've been doing really well.
High cost areas are seeing an exodus of the wealthy because they now have the ability to work from places where they don't have to pay $4000/mo for a tiny apartment.
In the US places that were shut down longer were also places that were affected by the virus more.
A more relevant comparison is Sweden with its neighbors. If you simply compare Sweden to Denmark (which was the worst performing Swedish neighbor), Sweden which never had an official lockdown, still saw its economy contract more than all its neighbors, had a death rate 5x that of Denmark (and 10x other neighbors) and a case rate 2x that of Denmark.
Of course, it's hard to compare different economies, but the initial evidence indicates that not locking down does not help the economy either.
Another interesting bit of evidence is that mobility data showed that in cities that were affected by the virus, reduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns. Which indicates that the economy would be affected negatively irrespective of the lockdown.
It's also not all that surprising. The reality is that the majority of people are not gonna want to be active while a deadly disease for which we have no cure/vaccine is running rampant. So a lockdown effectively only affects the behavior of those at the margin. Their activity affects the economy linearly, but will affect the spread of the disease exponentially.
The marginal linear economic benefit of not having a lockdown could very easily be dwarfed by the economic impact of the greater spread of the virus.
That being said, now that we have a much better understanding of the virus and how it spreads (we had absolutely no idea in the beginning when the blanket lockdowns were issued), targeted and limited lockdowns should be more than sufficient in societies where people generally tend to follow rules.
"eduction in economic activity preceded lockdowns."
In Montreal, the coffee shops were almost empty when the PM's wife was diagnosed, some time before the official shut downs.
It may very well be that social interaction is only partly controlled by 'shut downs'.
I suggest that there is probably a 'form of staying open' that would actually limit COVID spread, and that if the communications used by government were more effective (i.e. 'instead of going to the coffee shop, make sure to buy coffee takeout) - we may have been able to 'have our cake and eat it' which is to say keep the economy running while limiting infections.
The economic shock is real, I don't think people realize how upside down our system is right now. We've been basically avoiding total social meltdown by printing money out of thin air in historical proportions.
If we don't play our cards right, and we screw this up, it will be 'Weimar Republic' all over again and things could melt down very badly. Someone much worse than Trump will come along and take advantage of that.
Have a look here [1]
In 10 years the US Fed has gone from 800B in assets to 7 Trillion. It's very scary.
That's true. I find that most of the "not worth it" crowd seems to be making post-fact justifications for why it's not worth it after they've already decided they don't like quarantine.
There's no reasonable evidence suggesting, for instance, that a shutdown is causing more deaths than it is preventing, and yet we continuously hear that take.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
I'm pretty sure these conditions applied when the lockdowns were imposed in most countries.
So the WHO does not disagree with the poster at all.
And yeah, no one thinks lockdowns should be the primary or only way of addressing the pandemic.
Please do not take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. Those are like black holes, and the idea here is to resist their gravitational pull. Otherwise everything ends up getting sucked into the same few places, which is repetitive, which is tedious.
If you wanted to, you could use that logic to justify quarantines for as long as influenza and HIV are present in society (they kill people too, and a heavily enforced quarantine would prevent them from spreading). One has to balance the benefits of slowing the spread of a virus against the costs of policy decisions.
FWIW, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that how justifiable a policy decision like quarantine is depends on how sensitive the decisionmaker is to a cost-benefit analysis.
Both the extent of social distancing mandates and the severity, spread rate and deadliness of viruses exist on fluctuating scales, and reasonable people can disagree on where the appropriate intersection of the two sits without having to accuse them of ignoring either science or economics.
It is true that there are people ignoring science/economics on both sides. That said, there are more people on the "no lockdown" side that I've seen blatantly pushing misinformation/ignoring facts. Of course, that doesn't mean that the "no lockdown" side is wrong.
HIV was much more deadly for certain groups (IV drug users and homosexual men) during the late 80's through early 90's than COVID is to the general public.
10% of self-identifying gay men in America born in the baby boomer generation died from AIDS by 1995. Nobody locked them in their houses for 6 months.
HIV treatments were a miracle that saved a lot of lives.
> 10% of self-identifying gay men in America born in the baby boomer generation died from AIDS by 1995. Nobody locked them in their houses for 6 months.
The government policy response for most of the first decade the AIDS epidemic was known about was “do nothing, it's just killing undesirables we'd like to eliminate, anyway”, so it's kind of a weird model to hold up for emulation.
But (1) HIV isn't a respiratory virus, so taking the kind of precautions that apply to a respiratory virus wouldn't make any sense; (2) prevrnting the spread of the epidemic outside of the undesirable groups was used as a pretext for the Justice Department permitting employers to fire people for having AIDS, and was part of the overt pretext in a number of new adopted (and more proposed) laws across the US extending discrimination against and exclusion of homosexuals.
As a member of the healthy and under 30 demographic, influenza is a more serious threat to my health. I see no reason I shouldn't treat influenza as a more serious risk
That's not even true, although you're right that the risk of both are extremely low for our age group.
Do you think the lives and health of others have no impact on your decision making? If so, you might be interested to learn that drunk drivers actually have a higher rate of survival than people who walk home drunk from the bar. Never mind those pesky pedestrians you might hit, drunk driving is the safest option for the driver!
Will you feel the same when you are unable to receive life saving care because health care resources are tied up dealing with the flood of COVID victims?
wtf?! why is the headline photo an upskirt shot? regardless of your opinion on how young is too young (these girls are too young), a professional news outlet shouldnt photograph peoples underwear up a skirt.
I'm a bit older, but I found as well that my mental health didn't fare as bad as I'd feared it would when I first figured out (February) how bad this thing was going to be. In the 2010s, corporate capitalism seemed eternal and unassailable. Dysfunctional, yes, but geared toward entrenchment and self-acceleration (fascism) rather than collapse.
COVID-19 proved corporate capitalism invalid. I would have rather seen socialism succeed than capitalism fail and certain I wish we hadn't had to see over a million people die because of our economic system, but nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the left. Universal basic income is now a mainstream position. Trump, who would have probably be winning if COVID-19 hadn't happened, is now the underdog.
I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are, for the first time in their life, experiencing mental distress, serious ill-health, and disability. I don't mean to understate that. I'm not happy that COVID-19 happened, and I don't think anyone is. For me, though, the uncertainty has kept me going. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there's also cause for hope. It is now not merely a growing sentiment but common knowledge that our economic elite must be overthrown, no matter the cost.
Parts of the US are already like that. You're lucky you don't live in one, but many people do. And unless you have significant savings, even more people are less than six months and a depression/recession job loss away from there.
Venezuela was done-in by so-called "Dutch disease"-- over-reliance on natural resource extraction, including subsidies for gasoline that made it nearly free-- and Chavez's corruption. He allowed his buddies to buy dollars at the "official" exchange rate which was 4 orders of magnitude out of line with the market rate. Flat-out robbery of the Venezuelan people.
Corporate capitalism is theft, but that doesn't mean all socialists are good or that no socialists are thieves.
Socialism has seen plenty of successes. And yes, it has seem some failures.
The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claimed (and claim) to be "communists".
The problem with capitalism is that it has no history, no memory. It doesn't get better, and it doesn't learn. It's the same shit today that it was in the time of the Pinkertons. Government did get better at regulating it, but in the past 40 years it has gotten worse at doing so.
Capitalism has yielded more benefits including raising the global GDP per capita since the industrial revolution. Now centuries later its capitalism thats the problem all of a sudden, am I misunderstanding you?
Socialism on full blast will eventually run itself dry especially if enough people just seize to work driving down the profits keeping the system running.
Would be nice if people who downvote were forced to comment as part of the process, if I am wrong tell me why. I post for discussion, disagreeing is part of a discussion. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Here's some reality about the global GDP rising since the industrial revolution:
It is favor politically unsavory right now to acknowledge any good capitalism has done. You’re going to be downvoted because people have been trained to react to what you said like you just suggested slavery wasn’t too bad.
If my country goes socialist I'd move my profits offshore and I imagine most other productive members of society would as well. I think most socialism believers fail to understand how globalism will play into all of this
You write, I reply, you reply to me and so on. You do your neighbour a favor and remember that. If you keep doing them favors and they won't help you, you'll stop helping them. The list of examples is long and and pattern is the same: humans keep track of "balances". This isn't a system that we invented or discovered, it's who we are and how we work.
And don't forget, Venezuela isn't really led by folks that care about their people nor do the elections seem free or fair. I think one of the real issues in doing socialist policies in the US is that the US's level of corruption and lack of care for other folks (at a government level) is more reminiscent of Venezuela and other corrupt regimes - and has been for years. There is not much trust in government and government doesn't seem keen on building such a thing.
We could go and base things more off of Nordic nations, but it is going to require more transparency, front-facing government that simply works without punishing people for not being perfect, and some major trust-building. (Initiatives like the reworking of the Indiana DMV are in order: I no longer hated the DMV there, and it can be even better with some work). We don't necessarily need any of this for some socialist policies, such as health care. There are plenty of examples around the globe we can source from to customize it to our population. We can make the tax code easier for average people in most situations to deal with as well simply to remove some friction.
That term is funny because it basically means capitalism with a human face these days, but if you read Lenin, the big communists were talking about the fight for "Social Democracy" in the early 20th century. Terms get so diluted lol
Like others have pointed out, "socialist democracy" is a thing, and folks trying to pass these sorts of policies are outed as socialists in the US. Like everything else, socialism has a range of ways to see itself through.
There are so many little things you just couldn't do in the US. For example, the largest dairy coop - Tine - has to distribute goods from smaller dairies. I buy my wine and liquor at a state run store, which is nicer than any liquor store I knew in the US.
Health care is so much more efficient and you get things you can't have in the US: For example, they send a nurse to your house up to 6 times a day before you qualify for a nursing home. The nurse is free: The nursing home is a percentage of your pension (and everyone gets one). A bonus is that folks live longer than they did going to a nursing home sooner.
The state inspects chimneys to cut down on fires. Schooling doesn't really depend on the taxes in your local area, though is run more locally (as is some of the health care), and the libraries are nation-wide and can get books from other places.
Venezuela was done in by severe sanctions imposed on the country by USA. Any other excuse is just the typical propaganda you see in American news media.
If you wanna avoid becoming Venezuela, just avoid being specifically targeted by US economic siege ("sanctions"). Which is pretty simple if you are the US.
2. American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, and would give the most "hostile workplaces" a run for their money. They suck for the nerdy kid who wants to be left to his / her own devices. They suck for the middling kids who don't want to be on the perpetual status treadmill.