Teens are spending less time than ever with friends
thehill.comThe article mostly seems to blame social media, but I also think that the lack of good social spaces is also key. There's fewer and fewer spaces that a group of teens can just hang out without spending money (due to "no loitering" policies/signs), and that number is even smaller if you count spaces in walking distance of most families. I've also heard/read plenty of anecdotes about malls shrinking or closing down completely, which was historically a common teen hangout spot.
Social media just removes the incentive of isolation, imo. It provides just enough social interaction that there's less reason to go out and see each other in person. I'm in my late 20's and I haven't seen some of my best friends in months, but we all chat in Discord and play games together frequently, almost daily. It's not the same as actually hanging out, but it's enough to make not hanging out less painful.
I also wonder if walkable cities and more public spaces would make social media less isolating. Technology has made it easier to meet in person in some ways so perhaps if there were fewer obstacles to teens meeting that facilitation effect would be stronger.
There’s also the fact that social media corporations are incentivized to keep you using their platform as long as possible. I saw a post pointing out that no social media app notifies friends when you happen to be nearby (presumably an opt-in system). They argued this shows where their priorities are. I’m not sure that specific feature would be so easy to implement, but it does seem like there are many ways social media is oriented away from building deep connections or socializing off their platform (including in person).
More to your second point, I think the space for teens has simply moved from the mall to Discord. If you decide to count voice calls and group chats as hanging out (which I would say a lot of young people do), I would imagine that you would find that teens are hanging out about as much as they always have.
I doubt lack of social space has anything to do with it. As a kid I would hang out at a literal dump with friends; what else were we going to do? It’s just too easy to waste an afternoon on TikTok.
I agree. Kids make the best of what's available. And in some ways they are still doing so, in this more digital age. In ways we older gens couldn't. But there's no denying that the elephant in the room is the massively pervasive, universal social and information connection that is cellphones and internet. Even we older gens have been subsumed to a fair degree - we're here right now! :)
Haha spot on. My hang out was this broken slide at an abandon playground. Or you could climb on the metal bar in the overgrown weeds.
There is just no way I would be doing that in 2023 as a kid. It was fun at the time because the alternative was even more boring.
People are also ignoring the fact that we trained children to stay home by themselves and keep themselves occupied and only interact with other kids through computers and cell phones for almost 2 years due to COVID. I think the lockdowns really reprogrammed kids to interact with each other differently than they normally would have.
> “Going to the mall has gone down. Driving in the car for fun has gone down. Going to the movies has gone down,” she said. “We’re talking about kids who are spending five, six, seven hours a day on social media.”
The malls are dead, gas is overpriced, helicopter parents don't let kids out of the house, and movies (sitting next to each other in the dark staring silently at something else) is barely social interaction anyway. That all assumes teens can afford to do anything anyway.
Give teens more freedom, give them places to hang out, give them more autonomy and trust when they're younger so they have more confidence, but they'll still be staring at their phones a lot of the time because there is a ton of pressure to respond to everything immediately. Phones are designed to encourage it and to pull our attention back to the screen every few minutes. Teens want the instant validation and some semblance of connection.
> Give teens more freedom, give them places to hang out,
They don't have bunch of disposible income, so what's the economic incentive? I mean can you imagine the shit storm if a tax was levied to fund a space of teens to hang out? I can hear the whinging from parallel universes where it happened already.
Huh? We already have taxes to fund spaces for teens to hang out.
Taxes pay for parks, libraries, nature preserves, swimming pools, schools (with after-school sports, musicals, various clubs), museums and galleries. Many local organizations receive grants from taxpayer money to provide services and activities for teens.
Within a 10-mile radius of where I'm sitting, a teenager could skateboard at a taxpayer-funded skate park, swim at a taxpayer-funded pool, read a magazine at a taxpayer-funded library, play basketball on a taxpayer-funded court, walk through a tax-payer funded art gallery, etc.
10 miles how is the teen supposed to cover 10 mile distance in urban America? No sidewalks or safe bike routes
I know long term thinking is basically impossible for most people, but their could be economic advantages over the long term. If teens start spending more time in person and have spaces to run away to maybe they'll start having sex again and the population will boom.
Yeah, but will that make money next month?
Didn't think so. New plan: let's rip society apart and sell it. Huge profits right now in that market.
School systems have also been moving to starting high school later which has an effect. My high school daughter starts her school day at 9:18am and gets out at 4:08pm. If you participate in any after school activities such as a sport you aren't getting home until 5:30-6pm. She then has 2-3 hours of homework a night. Doesn't leave at lot of time social get togethers during the week.
When I was in high school we got out at 1:50pm and had maybe 1-2 hours of homework, not that I did any of it, per night. There was a lot more free time during the week for social interaction outside of school.
Amazing how the west blasts the east for child slave labour yet we subject our own children to 12 hour days and call it “school”. Very sad.
Although I got out at 1:50, I worked driving a fork lift in a warehouse from 2-6pm after school. A job I couldn't have in most places today as a teen. The 80s were a different time. Even then I still had more free time for friends than my daughter. She is pretty studious and cares about school which makes a difference. I cared more about drinking and getting high with my friends and didn't really do anything for school outside of it.
> Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.
On this point, I’d say the problem lies with the former becoming irrelevant. This is why I’m really interested in creating new types of IRL social spaces and shared experiences. There’s just not a lot of options really, and for The Kids, bars are out.
The whole concept of Third Places[1] is kind of dying out. Like you said, bars don't work for kids, and other common places are either dwindling or just don't allow loitering - which is basically what teens are doing when they go hang out somewhere.
It would be interesting if libraries could be used for this purpose. Most close early so they could be used in the evenings for social gatherings, etc.
They are in lots of places, my suburban library is teeming with kids from the end of school till 8 when it closes.
The cost of rent is so high that providing space to linger is non economical
Yeah, one of the fundamental tenants of behavioral economics is that economic structures drive how people interact in society. So rising rent prices create a less livable world
Hadn't heard of this concept, super interesting, thank you so much!
Bars (and cafes) have also learned to absolutely blast music to stop people talking and make them drink up.
So not only can you not afford to drink at many bars as a teen, you can't talk to your friends there either.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2008...
About the only place to hang out that doesn't demand money is a library, assuming you can find one, and that's not exactly the right place for chattering and larking about.
Library, park, church, (after) school, friends' houses, your house. I don't think this is actually that huge of a delta from the historical norm.
In the context of "third places" (which excludes work/schools and homes), there's a pretty seismic shift in churches from the historical norm of virtually 100% attendance.
Malls took up some slack for a few decades but they're on the way out in many places too.
Good riddance. Teens don't need to be told how born defective they are and for the low, low cost of 10% of all future income they too can be made right with imaginary sky daddy.
Also, let's be honest - we older generations set this scene. It's us who began this pattern of behaviour, starting with the home computing boom in the 1980s. Game consoles. Handhelds. It's us who truly began to normalise the behaviour of spending significant amounts of time in leisure at the desk or couch. It's us who were entirely enthralled and captured by the early years of the internet, and digital content. We're doing it right now, as we speak. I'm not sure we can talk of the younger generations as having coined a problem, when it's our very example (and the products we made and marketed) that they learned from.
I suggest we need to broaden our gaze - the recent decades of digital social revolution have greatly affected the behaviour of us all.
Pokemon Go had a unique approach to shared experience in augmented reality. Arcades are dead, movies are for the wealthy, but you can still make your own fun chasing invisible objects around the city.
Almost like it's a shared hallucination experienced by multiple users. (We could call the concept...a SHMU.)
I blame most of this on the rise of suburbs. There are so few places for children to hang out. Car-centric infrastructure that forces kids to sit inside results in this. Bad for adults too.
We're letting technology direct us to social interactions in ways that are pretty scary actually.
Oh but soon they'll all have Vision Pro goggles and will facetime their friends' avatars!