My child and the children of my friends always call someone—parents, grandparents, friends—while walking across campus. G-d forbid they should be with their own thoughts for 10 minutes. Or be available for a chance meeting or to make eye contact with other people crossing their path.
I walk around campus every day. The vast majority of students are NOT on phones in between classes. Most don’t even have headphones. They either talk to friends or, most commonly, they walk in silence.
(I people watch because people fascinate me.)
The average teen sends 30 texts a day. For older girls, it approaches 50 texts a day.
The Pew Research Center’s continuing studies on teens and technologies are worth reading. The 2015 survey outlines how much technology US teens consume every day: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/.
If they feel lonely, they can go online. It’s always on, there’s always something to look at, there’s always Facebook, Vine, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.
Does this lead to less resiliency? I don’t know. I’m not sure how one could test the proposition, as it seems nearly every teen has a cellphone (more than 70% have smart phones.)
Ugh, I DO worry about my 17-year-old daughter. For a kid from a stable family, she has had to face too many challenges this year - calling 911 for her mentally ill brother, going to her 20-year-old cousin’s funeral, helping her other cousin handle a close friend’s suicide attempt, dealing with the suicide of a classmate. Oh, yeah, and apply for colleges on top of all that. Sigh. Life really is unfair sometimes.
My oldest son went to campus counseling for about a month for a very focused issue. It affected his sleep, his grades, his friendships and a bunch of other things in his life. He was kicked out of counseling (it was OK, time to move on for him) to make room for someone in more crisis.
The wife and I are about the most emotionally resilient people you will ever meet and S1 is pretty resilient as well. We considered it more like PT for an injury; something that may have lingered with him for a year instead was done in a month by going to a professional. A number of my friends could have used easier access to therapy back in the day but it just wasn’t there.
30 texts a day? I’d have thought it would be much higher than that. 30 texts is barely a text conversation, which can take all of 10 minutes.
I thought this was interesting and is very likely related: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201001/the-decline-play-and-rise-in-childrens-mental-disorders
FWIW my kids DID roam and did play in kid-groups without supervision. It’s how I was raised and how I raised my kids, though they did so in a considerably safer community than I did.
@OHMomof2 incredibly article. I do recall one of the rare occasions where my mom interjected herself into my life as a child (not, that I would endorse it in this day and age). Anyway, I get home one day, and had a tiny bloody nose. My mom had just got home from work, and asked what happened. I told her some kid at my school was picking on me and took my spare change. She then asked if I knew the kid, to which I said yes, and said he was in my grade. Well, she immediately marched me down to the park…
I was overjoyed, and remember thinking, " boy, he is going to get his now!!" That was not the case, she asked me to pick out the kid, and then she went up to him–I was so excited I was going to get my due justice. However, it was not meant to be-- instead of giving him a stern lecture or ask for his parents number, to my shock and horror, she told the kid, “hey, you take my kids quarter? Well, know you two are going to have a fair and square fight, right now!”
He was an overweight kid, and after 15 seconds, ran out of breath, and I ended up toppling him. My grade school status was also cemented. My mom told me win or lose you sometimes need to fight, and in our neighborhood, a very tough one, people had to know you were not a pushover. Finally, in sage wisdom for a women who had just a HS degree, she said as a single mother, she would not always be there, and I had to know for myself, that I can fend for myself. My mom, while entirely unconventional and not PC, was a pretty smart lady…
^Would she have stood by if the overweight kid had beaten the tar out of you?
You don’t know my mom or my neighborhood. She would have allowed me to take my lumps…I don’t condone violence, but in 4th grade, there is a whole lot of wrestling and wild swinging. And it last all of 20 seconds.
Maybe you can find another quote that illustrates what you wanted to say, because Socrates didn’t say that.
I wonder how many posts the average CC’er makes/day? Let’s see, 67,000 posts divided by 120 months equals… high enough that if we’re texting our families too, we’re giving the teens a run for their money.
My kids call me while they are walking, and they drop me instantly if they encounter a real person they want to talk to. Then they call me back. They pretty much act as if I were there walking with them, which is how it seems to them.
@boolaHI I can relate. In my neighborhood too, you needed to be tough or you needed friends who were or you’d have to fight every day. After fighting every day for a few months I wound up with the friends who were, that was better.
My kids have no idea about that kind of childhood.
It’s true. I tease my girls they are soft. When they were younger and involved in sport’s leagues and asking for a million rides, unless that ride included a freeway or was more than several miles away–my response was consistently patented. Walk, run or bus there, and unless its on my way to something, it is your responsibility. After a bit, they got what Pops meant, but it sure did come as a surprise when their many friend’s asked for a ride and my response was, “well, girl you best start walking there…”.
64: That was exactly how we handled things with our kids. The result was that we got one kid with great pride in his ability to get anywhere on public transportation, not to mention an abiding love of public transportation systems, and another kid who was preternaturally gifted at getting other people's moms to give her rides.
When everyone entered 8th grade, the parents of one of the first kid’s best friends actually hired him to teach his friend how to get places without asking his parents for a ride. He was 14 and had never taken a bus or a train by himself. There was a younger sister with completely different interests. His parents just couldn’t cope anymore.
This could be a ploy to get some type of special dispensation to get out of a living arrangement they don’t like. My son wanted to try that to get out of a lease: “What if I can prove that I have a severe phobia of cockroaches?” I told him to suck it up and take the trash out more than once a semester.
I graduated a long time ago and recently met with some classmates. Back in school, I assumed that I was the only clueless, stupid, lonely person in the bunch. Much to my surprise, everyone had similar stories to tell. Either I was so wrapped up in my own issues that I didn’t notice or everyone did a good job of hiding their struggles.
^^ I think the saying is “Never compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”
I agree that part of it is people being more willing to seek help and more people being in college, but I also think that is has to do partly with stress brought on by worrying. We’ve seen how rough the job market is for recent graduates, and let’s be honest: there isn’t near enough full time work available for every American who wants or needs to work full time. Somebody’s getting left behind, and you need to fight to not be that somebody. Except getting a full time job may not solve all your problems, with stagnant wages, rising costs of living, and the growing concentration of wealth and resources among a small portion of the population. The situation may well improve somewhat, but it won’t stop being rough in the forseeable future. So there is that constant worry about whether you’ll actually be able to get work, and whether you’ll be able to support yourself if you do. Then you have the expense of college and the need to take on debt and pay for it. Even at a cheaper college. I did two years community college and transferred to a state uni in one of the cheaper systems, and a lot of people I know have serious trouble paying. It isn’t just people going to 40K a year LACs running into finance problems. That piles on the stress, too. Then we get into just how bad climate change projections are, and the high probability of huge numbers of climate refugees looking for new homes, reduced food supplies, wars over water in the developing world, serious damage to low lying coastal communities, ocean acidification, serious drought, flooding, larger and more frequent storms, and more, and it all comes together to make a lot of this college generation seriously worry about what kind of quality of life we are likely to have, and what difficulties our futures are going to hold. We certainly aren’t going to have something as good as our parents’ standard of living.
You dump that much worry on young college students, and of course it puts a lot of mental strain on them.