Something I rarely see considered in hypotheses of childhood happiness and rather wish there was more discussion of, is the ubiquity of parental and state control over children’s lives. The more systems that are created to try and protect and nurture children, the more those same systems end up controlling and disempowering them. Feelings of confinement, entrapment, and hopeless disempowerment are the main pathways to suicidal ideation and our entire industrial childrearing complex is basically a forced exercise in ritualistic disempowerment. Children are legally the property of their parents and the system is set up to constantly remind them that they are property, not people, and that they can’t stand up for themselves without being infinitely out-escalated by their parents with the full backing of their governments. Technology has only made this worse, and resulted in more and more layers of control being draped over kids in a misguided attempt to steer them away from danger and leaves them feeling trapped and hopeless.
These may be true, but it is unclear how they are relevant to explaining the recent trends and how they differ by groups. There is, and long has been, intense state & parental control of childrens’ lives and often not for the better: but how does that explain a change in trends in 2011 to increase, prior decreases in the 1990s, experimental results like quitting social media (where parental/state oversight is minimal) apparently increasing mental health, or differences like ‘liberal girls are more affected than conservative girls’?
Control is not a constant, and ability to effectively control depends on the social context. The state itself has acted as a counterweight to parental control for hundreds of years, and capital also acts as a counterweight—if you don’t want to live the way your parents want you to live or marry who they want you to marry, you can run away to the city and live free, which is easier if there are strong laws preventing you from being hunted down and honor-killed and jobs waiting for you in the urban center. Control was arguably at all-time lows in the late 60s and 70s. But the 80s are a period of reaction against these excesses, and safetyism can be argued to have started in the 80s. The first law mandating car seats is passed in 1979 and the first law mandating seat belts in 1984. More tellingly, the satanic ritual abuse panic kicks off hard in 1983 with the McMartin trial and the next year satanic ritual abuse panic advocates testify before Congress. Stranger danger spreads as a meme, reducing the ability of young people to travel freely via hitchhiking, even though the actual risk remains low.
The Internet disrupts this control process by creating a new space where young people are more able to navigate than parents. I’d argue this is the cause of the decline through the 90s: increased freedom from the nascent Internet. Gradually, this is curtailed as BBSs become forums, and forums become social media. At the same time, censorship is productized and sold to parents, and as early as 2008 schools were having extracurricular brainwashing sessions designed to scare children away from using the Internet as a vehicle of expression because “what’s on the Internet is forever.” I do not understand how parental and state oversight could be said to be minimal on social media. Schools install spyware on their own devices and recommend parents do the same. “Parental control features” are ubiquitous and you can’t crack your mom’s password with a l0phtcrack CD because Windows Vista didn’t use NTLM hashes. The endpoints are controlled. You live in a panopticon. Even Kindles have parental controls, but paper books don’t.
2011 is arguably the death rattle of free speech on the Internet. Wikileaks goes from being the place where you download the Scientology PDFs to being a terrorist group in the eyes of the US government and I think promotes a lot more walling-off of the gardens of the Internet. Reddit shuts down several subreddits in 2011, going from being a free speech social media website to what it is now. SOPA is introduced in October. If the Internet gave young people hope in the 90s, 2011 is the year that hope started dying, amidst the Arab Spring, the Eurozone collapse, and the Occupy movement. The high school first years in the fall of 2011 would graduate the spring of 2016, just in time to see Trump elected.
And finally, conservatives live in the country. The country is inherently less conducive to control than the city. Insurgents hide in the countryside. People go to parties in the fields. You can light huge bonfires and get drunk next to them and nobody will see or hear you. People in cities have to have better coordinating to create spaces like this, which is limited by a censored and surveilled Internet. Conservativism as an ideology is less conducive to paternalistic control. But I think the urban/rural divide is the main driver here.
We have been going through a societal cycle of increasing control since the 80s that was disrupted by the computer and the Internet, but since 2011, smartphones, and social media, the Internet has become another vehicle of control, rather than the liberatory technology it once was that made life literally worth living for so many young people. To me, this explains all of the holes much more parsimoniously than “Socrates was wrong about books, but I’m right about network televisiontiktok.” The falsification for this is if there are any similar studies showing that abstaining from forums or BBS’s or other pre-social-media Internet coordination systems improves mental health. I don’t expect to see that. I remember the free Internet.
Something I rarely see considered in hypotheses of childhood happiness and rather wish there was more discussion of, is the ubiquity of parental and state control over children’s lives. The more systems that are created to try and protect and nurture children, the more those same systems end up controlling and disempowering them. Feelings of confinement, entrapment, and hopeless disempowerment are the main pathways to suicidal ideation and our entire industrial childrearing complex is basically a forced exercise in ritualistic disempowerment. Children are legally the property of their parents and the system is set up to constantly remind them that they are property, not people, and that they can’t stand up for themselves without being infinitely out-escalated by their parents with the full backing of their governments. Technology has only made this worse, and resulted in more and more layers of control being draped over kids in a misguided attempt to steer them away from danger and leaves them feeling trapped and hopeless.
These may be true, but it is unclear how they are relevant to explaining the recent trends and how they differ by groups. There is, and long has been, intense state & parental control of childrens’ lives and often not for the better: but how does that explain a change in trends in 2011 to increase, prior decreases in the 1990s, experimental results like quitting social media (where parental/state oversight is minimal) apparently increasing mental health, or differences like ‘liberal girls are more affected than conservative girls’?
Control is not a constant, and ability to effectively control depends on the social context. The state itself has acted as a counterweight to parental control for hundreds of years, and capital also acts as a counterweight—if you don’t want to live the way your parents want you to live or marry who they want you to marry, you can run away to the city and live free, which is easier if there are strong laws preventing you from being hunted down and honor-killed and jobs waiting for you in the urban center. Control was arguably at all-time lows in the late 60s and 70s. But the 80s are a period of reaction against these excesses, and safetyism can be argued to have started in the 80s. The first law mandating car seats is passed in 1979 and the first law mandating seat belts in 1984. More tellingly, the satanic ritual abuse panic kicks off hard in 1983 with the McMartin trial and the next year satanic ritual abuse panic advocates testify before Congress. Stranger danger spreads as a meme, reducing the ability of young people to travel freely via hitchhiking, even though the actual risk remains low.
The Internet disrupts this control process by creating a new space where young people are more able to navigate than parents. I’d argue this is the cause of the decline through the 90s: increased freedom from the nascent Internet. Gradually, this is curtailed as BBSs become forums, and forums become social media. At the same time, censorship is productized and sold to parents, and as early as 2008 schools were having extracurricular brainwashing sessions designed to scare children away from using the Internet as a vehicle of expression because “what’s on the Internet is forever.” I do not understand how parental and state oversight could be said to be minimal on social media. Schools install spyware on their own devices and recommend parents do the same. “Parental control features” are ubiquitous and you can’t crack your mom’s password with a l0phtcrack CD because Windows Vista didn’t use NTLM hashes. The endpoints are controlled. You live in a panopticon. Even Kindles have parental controls, but paper books don’t.
2011 is arguably the death rattle of free speech on the Internet. Wikileaks goes from being the place where you download the Scientology PDFs to being a terrorist group in the eyes of the US government and I think promotes a lot more walling-off of the gardens of the Internet. Reddit shuts down several subreddits in 2011, going from being a free speech social media website to what it is now. SOPA is introduced in October. If the Internet gave young people hope in the 90s, 2011 is the year that hope started dying, amidst the Arab Spring, the Eurozone collapse, and the Occupy movement. The high school first years in the fall of 2011 would graduate the spring of 2016, just in time to see Trump elected.
And finally, conservatives live in the country. The country is inherently less conducive to control than the city. Insurgents hide in the countryside. People go to parties in the fields. You can light huge bonfires and get drunk next to them and nobody will see or hear you. People in cities have to have better coordinating to create spaces like this, which is limited by a censored and surveilled Internet. Conservativism as an ideology is less conducive to paternalistic control. But I think the urban/rural divide is the main driver here.
We have been going through a societal cycle of increasing control since the 80s that was disrupted by the computer and the Internet, but since 2011, smartphones, and social media, the Internet has become another vehicle of control, rather than the liberatory technology it once was that made life literally worth living for so many young people. To me, this explains all of the holes much more parsimoniously than “Socrates was wrong about books, but I’m right about
network television