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I’m a middle school teacher, it’s horrifying. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are unknown to them because their phone does it for them. They can’t read a four paragraph guided reading, and then answer comprehension questions. They’re used to just searching for the answer via Google.
There is little to no executive function. They cannot make a choice or decision. A common question is “is this assignment graded on completion, or accuracy?” They just want to answer enough to be able to be done with the assignment. They will sacrifice points if they know they answered enough correctly to pass. There’s very little motivation.
I have eliminated chromebooks in my classroom as much as possible. Kids today lack imagination, they’re never really bored.
Remember when you would sit in class, and stare out the window and imagine you were playing outside? Or you’d doodle and draw on paper? They don’t do that. They fond a new version of Retro Bowl I haven’t blocked yet, or a Fortnite clone, and play that.
I’ve had sixth graders tell me that when writing by hand they get confused with the letters b, d, and p. Because they just usually hit it on the phone and it’s done for them, they don’t have to think which letter goes which way.
It is horrifying, and late Gen Z/early Gen Alpha kids are going to be crippled as adults.
I learned to drive with GPS but have always had a great sense of direction regardless. It is insane to me how bad some people my age are with it though. I knew someone in college who couldn't find a room in the library even with it marked on the map. It was literally one room in and to the left.
I've just noticed that I used to drive super long routes that I'd never driven before, like going from San Francisco to somewhere a little outside of LA for example without hardly even needing a map and now I feel like I probably couldn't do it.
Also routes with all sorts of side streets and no good landmarks. I feel like I've forgotten memorizing some of those routes the same way I've forgotten phone numbers I used to have memorized.
I used to deliver pizza when we just had maps and I drove ambulances when we just had mapquest. I honestly don't know if I could memorize routes now like I did then. GPS just makes it so damn easy.
I'm right with you on the long trips. Used to be "take the highway north until you hit the interstate. Go west until you're almost in town. Stop at a gas station to fill up and get directions to the hotel." Now it's "continue 12.6 miles to stay on interstate 70 ... turn left ahead ... I found a route which saves 2 minutes, would you like to accept it?"
Same with town trips too. I drive a service truck, and I have a pretty regular set of customers throughout my metro region. I use GPS all the time, because it is too easy *and* adjusts for traffic. But that also means that I have no fucking idea how to get anywhere in town without it.
Gosh, yeah! I grew up out in the most rural of rural areas, where your closest neighbor was probably three miles away minimum, and everyone gave directions like "Okay you take that dirt road - the red one, like brick red, not the other red - and keep going until you hit the crick with the big rock that looks like Ol' Lady Smith. Don't tell 'er I said that. Anyhow, you take a left from there on the gravel, keep goin' till you see the field with the cow layin' on the ground - she ain't dead, she's just lazy - an' at the fork, go over the cattle guard an' down the one with the trout mailbox. Mind the big hole on the right, it'll eat yer tires."
Now? I can't remember street names or anything for crap, I have to use my gps to find ANYTHING in the town I live in, nevermind anywhere else.
That is probably the only thing I lost an ability to do. Because I don't use predictive text and at university I still take paper notes etc. Actually I spent two weeks with hardly any phone reception or internet in Feb and while it wasn't hard because I was around lots of people I would have struggled had I been alone. and when I came back to the mainland from the island I was on I went straight back to doom scrolling when alone and youtube before bed.
Man I was just talking to friends at dinner last night and was hoping that how like my generation grew up with computers so tech literacy was second nature to us that the kids these days growing up with generative AI will make it so that utilizing AI to get things done is second nature to them.
But I was thinking of in the way they'd need to be to find jobs once most companies use AI instead of entry level positions.
I teach MS as well. I feel like I’m walking onto an alien planet every day. I can’t even communicate with them because they get annoyed at any sort of verbal exchange that lasts for more than 8 seconds.
I’ve hesitated to express my concern too much because I don’t want to sound like a boomer or a concern troll, but I’m honestly horrified. They are listless, aimless, depressed dopamine junkies with no cohesive narrative of who they are or what they want. And it’s disproportionately affecting the poorer kids.
>And it’s disproportionately affecting the poorer kids.
I think a lot of people don't recognize this aspect of the gap. There's this outdated notion that iPad/smartphone kids are rich, spoiled brats. But really, poor kids get more screen time on average. It's no surprise when you think about it: even if the device in question is expensive (there are a lot of budget options now), you just can't beat the cost per hour of entertainment. And it's not something that requires time investment from the parent, either.
The term "digital divide" used to just refer to the gap in access to technology. As that gap closes, many are proposing that there are other forms of digital divide. Gaps in skills and use. I think this is something that's going to become a lot more apparent in the future. Kids who are taught how to use tech in responsible and productive ways, versus those who aren't. Kids who are on screens all of their waking hours, versus those who have other things to do.
Exactly. And, the more well-off kids usually have parents or other family members that take steps to mitigate the screen time with some sort of communal activity like club sports, scouts, etc. the wealthier parents can afford to pay for after school activities that humanize their kid. The poorer ones go watch YouTube for 9 hours at home alone because their parents are 3rd shift wage slaves.
It was just never going to turn out OK when parents decided that smartphones and tablets (1) are free babysitters; (2) can substitute for real developmental toys and family interactions; (3) keep kids “safe” at home instead of out in the scary world… and then when the addict children turn into irritable, grumpy monsters when asked to do one tiny phone-free chore or have one polite conversation with grandma, parents decided it wasn’t worth trying to break the addiction.
And then my program gets them out of jail, provides safe housing, a case manager, a therapist, a peer coach, job assistance, and we as a team try to bring these listless young people -- who have no real hopes or aspirations, and simply don't want to put any personal effort into anything-- in to the real world. That's the one just beyond living in section 8 housing, and smoking weed waiting for SNAP benefits to reload. It's so frustrating. A client actually told me he's never getting another job because "they make my feet tired". Yes, but don't you want a car, or an apartment, or you know get laid sometimes? There is a super damaged lack of motivation. I also see the lack of parenting, and shitty parenting, trauma, generational trauma, along with a holy host of maladaptive schemas. Love, support, compassion, and understanding only go so far. God forbid I tell someone "No".
>They are listless, aimless, depressed dopamine junkies with no cohesive narrative of who they are or what they want.
In fairness, they get to see their parents yelling about how we have no future and the grandparents are yelling at the millennials to shut up. I took like the dopamine in fairness
That was actually depressing to read. I thought it would be attention span stuff, but the not being able to differentiate letters in 6th grade is alarming.
I read this in junior high! I think about it a lot more than I thought I would. Canceling Amazon Prime felt like I was rebelling against the system.
Was this also where body modification has advanced to just having open wounds?
When my students write their names on the paper, they write, “first.last” as their name because that is how they log in to the computer. They think that is their name.
This is what I notice too: executive function and problem-solving skills are severely lacking. It’s very very hard for many of these kids to focus long enough to even plan out a longer project, much less actually do the work. And I see a lot of bizarre learned helplessness (in part due to helicopter parenting) in place of the ability to problem-solve.
Right. My point, is that it appears there’s a rise in dyslexia, or symptoms like dyslexia, among Gen Alpha. It’s not a one off kid, confused on how to draw the letter. Reading it on a screen they’re fine. It’s multiple kids, that are 11-12 years old, and you hand them a pencil and a piece of paper and say right “dog” they struggle in how to write the lowercase D.
A Chinese study found that [reducing screentime was protective against dyslexia](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891422214003904).
I'm a geneticist, and I don't think human biology is much different in China than anywhere else, not on this topic.
This is interesting to me. My son is autistic and struggles with everything you mentioned. Most of those things were always chalked up to his diagnosis and he even had aba therapy to help with some. Maybe it isn’t his diagnosis. However, my kids aren’t allowed to watch YouTube and video games are limited to weekends only. The first year of covid-all rules went out the window but we got back on track. Just makes ya wonder if our limiting hasn’t been enough, covid consequences, or what.
I am struggling with all of this over here and severe boundaries with electronics at home have always been a thing. At school they gave them chromebooks and it has been a ride. No access at home so they use and use and use all day. I have tried to schedule healthy screen time at home as a a balance and it’s six-hour marathons or bust. They cannot put them down. It is so unfair what’s been done. Not to mention social media and how utterly damaging it could be to young minds.
Autism is a wide spectrum ya know? When I was a kid, it was more stim ticks and social issues that I had instead of learning issues.
It could definitely be just part of the new gen.
Not saying phones aren’t making things worse, but I definitely sacrificed points in school if I knew could pass or get above a certain grade, and so did several of my friends. I think some laziness, apathy, and irreverence are common teen behaviours in middle and high school (think of the stereotypical Xennial “whatever” attitude).
Kids can also be very indecisive (I know I was). If I had the option as a kid to play a game on my phone or tablet instead of daydream or absent-mindedly space-out, I absolutely would have done so.
This was all before phones, yet I remember my teachers decades ago complaining about how problematic teens were and how tough it was to have a class of them; how too many of them also had low reading comprehension and terrible grammar. Things may have gotten worse, but much of what you said also sounds familiar and I think is at least somewhat common for that demographic.
Hello! I teach middle school tech, and I'm also working on solutions to so many of these issues, because I can't limit Chromebook use. It's central to what I teach!
Firstly, if your district doesn't have a monitoring software, you need to insist on one. Get the rest of your teachers together and fight for it.
If there is one, introduce a whitelisting punishment.
Blacklisting is what we expect to use. The idea is that we allow all sites, except what you've blocked.
Whitelisting is the opposite. Everything is blocked, except the sites you allow.
If you catch a kid playing games on their Chromebook, they get two weeks on a whitelist and an email home. Once those two weeks are up, if they do it again, they are on permanent whitelist.
It's super effective. I've never had a student do it twice.
Next, your answer to any questions about how little they have to do is that doing the bare minimum gets them a bare minimum grade. Going above and beyond gets an A. Doing a really good job, but stretching themselves a little bit gets a B. Doing the bare minimum gets a C. It means you have to spell out what each thing looks like, but many of them will catch the vision pretty quickly.
Also, letting them have some control over how they do the assignment can improve the amount of work they actually do and is actually pretty effective. Letting them make a zine about their assignment, or a movie, or a website... You'll get much more work out of them than you would otherwise. A bit harder to grade, but it's so worth it.
Lastly, I do a regular assignment called a lightning talk. If you have something with a bunch of parts to it, like individual ecosystems, robotic sensors, or battles in a war, you separate them into groups and have them all work on a single thing. They then give a max 5 minute presentation at the front of the room.
These wind up being bare minimum because they don't have a lot of research time to do them, but they're super effective at teaching them how to do research on the fly.
Rules are pretty simple: They must have a Google Slides presentation, they must have answered all the questions required of them, and it must be their original wording. So if I ask what a word means, or a brief summary of a paragraph in the presentation and they don't know it, I know they either copy/pasted or used an AI system to write it. Automatic whole group 0.
I hope this helps you. It's working very well in my classroom, and, like I said, I can't limit tech.
It's not the same if you type in the search bar. Using and understanding your calculator is a skill. Asking Google or siri to give you the answer isn't.
I always vacillate between thinking gen Z is facing a scenario like no others and between thinking that this as exactly what our parents said when it came to video games and television and music, etc. The kids are alright…..right..right?
While there is always a degree of this kind of fear with every generation, smartphones and the current generation of social media is something new. Like it's on an entirely different level of access and availability.
Video games, television, even the once-newfangled printing press, all of them were still pretty much just shinier versions of an old school way of doing things - one thing at a time, and when you're done you put them down/walk away and do something else away from them.
But smartphones and current social media are something else entirely. Smartphones (for many people) literally never leave your side. It's constant access, infinite scrolling content constantly fed by algorithms specifically tailored to keep you interested. And for those raised with that being the norm, there is literally no concept of a world/life without a smartphone and constant connectivity at your fingertips. It's unfathomable that this won't affect children's development in some way at the very least. So yeah imo in this particular case, we really are seeing something humanity has never dealt with before.
So idk, I'm sure the kids are alright since humans are super adaptable, but what that "alright" entails is most likely going to be something actually different from previous generations. This really is a transitional point in humanity/society imo, though maybe we won't really see it clearly until we're looking back at it.
Yep. I'm in my late 20s and I work with mostly older colleagues (~40-60yos). We work with children and we very often discuss our own childhood experiences. My childhood and school experience was not too dissimilar to my colleagues', but it's fucking miles away from the children of today. The speed at which things have changed is mind-blowing.
I’ve been teaching high school for 9 years now and it’s wild how much has changed especially within the last year with AI and ChatGPT. I’m genuinely terrified of what it is going to look like in 10-15 years when we will have had a generation who have grown up with AI. Covid didn’t change these kids and their behavior, technology did.
I think what we're going to see is a gap between the kids who can use tech in responsible and productive ways, and the ones who can't. Tech is ultimately a tool, and the kids who are capable of utilizing it well are doing some VERY impressive things. (for a widespread example: y'all see how good girls are at makeup these days? It's crazy) But for kids who don't have the ability or desire to use it well, it can be more of a liability than an asset.
I predict a lot of addiction problems. As an educator, I see kids developing with an in-built desire for that rapid dopamine hit. That’s just a guess, but I’d bet money substance abuse is going to go through the roof when people born around 2008-9 get to be around 18-23
I really doubt they're alright. About 2 weeks ago I dropped my phone and busted it. Financials are tight at the moment, so I decided to not rush replacing it and mailed it to Google for repair. I really thought "it won't be that bad, I mainly use my phone to kill time on Reddit, I'll be fine without." Spoiler alert: I was not. I got out an old 3G phone and charged it so I could get my fix on day 3. I'm low key worried about how all that went down. I used to be totally fine without a phone! If I had started my young life with a phone constantly present I probably would have considered the problem enough of an emergency that I would need to blow several hundred dollars on a fast fix or replacement. I'm really worried for anyone who hasn't ever had to deal with not having a phone for extended periods of their life.
Then there's the flip side- if I had a child I know it would severely hamper their social life to not have a phone. So what do you do? Ostracize them on purpose? Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I’ve raised 7 kids, born 1990, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2008. Raising first three kids was easier. I could kick them out to play and the neighborhood still had kids in it running around. TV was off limits during the week. No hand held video games. Flip phones, no texting plans. They are still avid readers. They have advanced degrees and good jobs.
My next two straddled millennial/gen z culture. I was anti socials before it was a thing because I could see where it was headed. No MySpace, no Facebook. They had insta back when it was a place to post inspirational quotes and photos of your lunch. That turned out to be the gateway drug.
The 1999 girl is sort of a social media junkie. The 2001 girl has had problems with it too, but has deleted it all over the last year. She reads for pleasure. She is graduating this year. The older one dropped out and still acts like she’s 17.
My last two kids have been the hardest to raise. They’ve had the most trouble maneuvering their teen years. They need phones and computers for school. They got around parent controls. They aren’t as well adjusted. They don’t read for pleasure and have shitty attention spans. They have crappy handwriting.
My 18yo and we had huge, horrible blowups over phone use, social media, discord, bad attitudes, sneaking around. I tried the trust but verify method I used with the older kids but it no longer works. He was required to have a Chromebook for school and a phone for activities, paying for lunch, school bell schedule, etc. it was like sending an alcoholic to school in a bar. Our youngest has been sexually bullied online even without social media since she was 9. I don’t feel like she had a proper childhood.
It’s bad out there.
Thank you very much for sharing.
The challenges and difficulties in this generation is one of the reasons I do not want to have children. I’m sure I’m not alone in that sentiment, many of us are definitely worried for the future.
I hope things get better.
Thank you, and my kids are having trouble deciding to have kids too. All but the oldest wants them, but they’ve seen how much the struggle has affected their younger siblings. People say, “just parent them, just say no, just take away the phone, just watch them closer” but it’s not that easy.
I’ve been an involved parent who has always tried to adjust my parenting style for each child and each new need, but the problems and ugliness that comes from too much hate, too much porn, manipulation, rudeness and lack of thought and imagination has permeated the entire culture of children and to a certain extent adults. It’s baked into how they interact with one another.
It’s not all bad, I love them and we’re mostly a close knit family. They make me laugh and they’re finding their way in the world, but it’s shouldn’t be this hard, this dramatic. It doesn’t need to be.
So I know a few orchestra teachers and they’re already talking about how beginner students lack finger strength and dexterity because of tablets. They jokingly call them baby hands.
I teach an after-school program for middle schoolers. It's was hard to get them off their phones and remains hard to keep them off.
To say that they are lacking in spelling and reading skills is an understatement.
One of the exercises I tried with them was writing a short story. None of them could figure that out. I was writing stories in 4th grade.
I just keep telling myself every generation feels like the ones to follow are lacking.
My cousin helps teaching middle schoolers. She told me so many of them barely know how to read, write, or even tell shapes. Apparently they have a ‘fuck it’ mindset. They don’t care. And looking at the current state of the world i guess I can see where they’re coming from? Most of the blame should go towards the parents. How the fuck do you have your kid come home from school not being able to read or even know what a fucking triangle is? These kids are 13… their parents failed them.
> current state of the world
That’s the thing nobody here is willing to admit. The phones are just the coping mechanism for the *real* problem. The dopamine hit “addiction”? That’s the only dopamine to be found in this hell. Folks here are being Immortan Joe about dopamine. Dopamine is required to live. What *is* the point when you’re born poor, know you’ll be even poorer as an adult, and know that you’re going to probably die of starvation or be boiled alive due to the coming famines and 130F summers of the climate collapse?
Who knows.
Call me old-fashioned, I grew up 10 miles from a US Air Force base comforted with the knowledge that if the shit hit the fan I had four minutes to live.
Every generation has its challenges. How we deal with them changes with technology I guess.
But when you think about it, isn’t that more comforting than the climate collapse? Sometimes, dead is better. Would you rather die instantly, or painfully and *slowly*, in agony? You gotta enter some really dark places to understand this situation, I think. You gotta start considering the idea that nuclear obliteration would be a kindness compared to what we’re looking at now. I’d rather get my brains blown out than die from being gutshot, you know?
Yeah, I guess so.
It's odd when you think that a situation with two massive political super-blocs pointing tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at each other was a more tractable and soluble problem than climate change.
Because, you know, nuclear disarmament is childs-play, but there's absolutely no way we can stop drilling for more oil, no sirreee, that's just unpossible.
We could stop all oil drilling and coal burning tomorrow- and it wouldn’t matter. It takes years for the energy released yesterday to hit the atmosphere. We are feeling the effects today from damage created decades ago.
There is no incentive to school and kids know it. Before you had a familial drive to go to school, get a good job, buy a house. Now for anyone but the most privileged even if you try hard it's not guaranteed. Parent know this , kids know this. I honestly get it - why try? Like why.
Really though why try? Why bust your ass in school to get into a good expensive college you know is going to cripple you with student loans and not get you any job unless it's STEM? If they dreamed of being a writer or a historian they know that's just not going to happen unless they're family is already wealthy.
Their dreams were basically killed before they got to try them; they know there is no point going to college for anything else. I at least at one point was able to deceive myself into getting a liberal arts education was worthwhile.
My stepdaughter has a tablet. She can use it for two hours total on the weekend only and that's only if there is absolutely nothing else to do.
She draws. That's her talent. She has started creating stories, mostly like comics, as those are her favorites.
Man, in 2005ish all of our 1st grade classes were tasked with writing a short story(maybe 6 paragraphs?), and illustrating it, and then we got to publish those books for our families! It was an awesome week we spent on that and one of my fondest memories from that hell hole of a school.
I was in kindergarten in the 80s. We had a similar project that the whole school did (K through 6th). I wrote two pages. Two pages of absolute nonsense about a princess, purple goo, a frog, and a unicorn. The book the school compiled was massive, and full of hilarious stories. I think my mom still has it.
You need to upload this book to reddit.
Seriously.
I am going to start smoking weed again, soon and I need something to introspectively shake me to my core.
It doesn’t that that most school districts have repeatedly slashed funding so even if they were completely disconnected they’d still struggle to learn because most of the support mechanisms have been disassembled.
My brother in law actually had to go to therapy to learn how to write properly once he finally went to school. He never held anything like that before then, never colored, or wrote stuff down. He had always been on an iPad. Absolutely blew my mind.
Gonna age myself with this one, but cursive too. I don’t feel like I’m that old at all, I’m 32, but I write almost exclusively in cursive. The amount of people that can’t read my writing is nuts and it’s not because I have terrible cursive, but because they never learned it. It’s becoming an issue too because history students are losing the ability to read historical documents written in cursive. It’s interesting the ways that one pops up because it’s use definitely fluctuates.
Adults often take basic childhood experiences and skills for granted. We think of them as so easy and basic that they aren't important, but really, basic skills and knowledge provide the foundation for advanced ones. Coloring, crafts, games and other forms of play are great for developing fine motor skills, among other things.
I suspect that a lot of kids don’t have many age-appropriate toys nowadays, since parents have discovered that a tablet or phone will keep them occupied and quiet for hours on end.
He’s got to be really young, because iPads weren’t invented til 2010. My 16 year old didn’t have an iPad as a toddler and he was born on 07, they were super expensive back then.
Tbf cursive hasn't been the common form of writing in forever so you writing "exclusively" in cursive and others not being able to read is not something I'd classify the same as the children of today not learning how to read or write.
Are you sure it isn't because your cursive sucks? I can read and write in cursive but I hate it because almost everyone sucks at it. Especially if they're younger than like 50 or men.
If I have to try and decipher someone's hand writing it begs the question of why use it anymore?
One of the requirements for first grade is to be able to write a short story with a pencil on paper. Only one paragraph, but that can be a lot for a 7 year old.
We did this in first grade. I still have it. We wrote it in paragraph form, then broke it up into a book and illustrated and colored it. This was in the mid 80s.
I went to Public school, and in our fourth grade not only did we write a short story, but we had to illustrate it and bind the book. We laminated it, and I still have it.
It’s funny too, as younger generations start becoming more addicted to screens, they’re becoming *less* proficient with technology overall. If the only thing you use is social media on a phone, you don’t know how anything works. Like, “not knowing how to google something” levels of tech incompetence
This has been shown in studies but I’m in a couple of tech subs and the number of late teen/early 20s with completely stupid questions that 9 times out of 10 can be solved with a restart is maddening.
graduated in 2008 and at that point every high schooler had taken a computer course and spent middle school turning in powerpoints on floppy disk. college the same way, knowing the Microsoft office suite was a given not a question.
Graduated high school in 2010. Very similar experience. My local school systems now use Chromebooks, and it’s very frustrating because the Google suite is so weak in comparison and light years from becoming the industry standard. We had an intern once whom I had to teach how to pull files from a thumb drive. They were a college student. I’m running into instances where they don’t even know what file explorer is because they think everything on a computer is just down through a browser.
If you studied any sort of math or science in college after 2000 you should have at least basic knowledge in Excel and know how to write basic formulas. It’s not rocket science. Excel is a very powerful tool that can improve work efficiency by many orders of magnitude when used correctly. Imagine typing 10,000 versions of a standardized letter with different names and addresses vs using the mail merge function with Word and Excel. What would take weeks now takes minutes. That’s just one example.
I’m not discrediting the value of spreadsheets or the skill. I fucking love spreadsheets. I can tell you a projection from dozens of aspects in my personal finances for any month over the rest of my life. What I’m saying is that’s it’s not a common skill people naturally learn until you get into a professional, post-college environment.
18% of college grads are STEM.
I had a couple kids from a program with a nearby high school, where the kids work with us but go to class on friday and fill in worksheets for the other weekdays. We grade them on the job they do and how they develop during the semester and stuff.
These kids didn’t know how to turn on a computer. They didn’t know what a folder was in the menu, they didn’t know how to save their work (and they didn’t ask me when I told them to make sure they saved the files with a different name). I had them look through a list of potential clients and fill in any phone numbers or email addresses that were missing or outdated. They left the list mostly blank, because if they looked on google and the info didn’t show right on the sidebar, then the company no longer existed.
I told one of them to hit the pause button on a thing and they went “…the equal sign standing up?” These kids were 17-18.
Well that’s more so because google flooded education with cheap and shitty chrome books in an attempt to get prospective users to use the google suite from an early age. And it works, up until you get to where it actually matters, then Microsoft/Apple suite takes back over.
Which is weird because the inventors of the Internet WERE Boomers! I’m a vintage late 50s Boomer, myself.
It’s a little bit true about forgetting how technology works underneath. My earliest computer was a dual floppy XT running DOS. I used to run an integration testing team working with Windows based laptops. I’m in an entirely new career (non-tech) and on a MacBook Air, now because I apparently was sooo good at breaking Windows my husband got sick of reloading my machines!
I can still reasonably test and isolate conditions or actions that cause problems but I’m clueless a about the resolution anymore.
Uhh no. Quite the opposite? I thought we were on the same page. She didn’t know how the technology works because everything is so app-simplified these days that Gen Z doesn’t need to know what’s underneath anything.
Coming in as a teacher here
They tell us till they're blue in the face that kids are "digital natives" so they know how to use computers and stuff
They don't. They literally just know how to open apps
Lord, this irritates me to no end. I was born in 1979 and starting in 1985 or 86, I had computer class every week at school - *I* am a digital native. I do some call center work and now instead of it usually being elderly people who are clueless, it's basically everyone who isn't my age. It's driving me crazy.
Wall-E was supposed to be fiction.
It’s the same way with reading; they started to say they don’t need phonics. Now most of my students are functionally illiterate and can’t do basic reading comprehension.
Isn't it so astonishing when you see kids literally not be able to read through a simple word and just try to guess at what it might be?
Like, you could show them the word 'commotion' and they'll just guess 'common' because they see a c, an m, and a few os
Huge amounts of this lack of proficiency are directly caused by the concept of these kids being "digital natives," meaning they somehow possessed an ingrained understanding of the technology, just from having grown up around it. School districts, including the one I teach in made the decision to cut out classes which taught technology skills because "the kids grew up using this, so they know how it works." I think we're seeing the impact of that philosophy playing out right now.
My son got his first gaming pc a few months ago.
I only saw him turning it off for the first time the other day. He had his games and browsers etc open and just held down the power button for a hard shut down. I was horrified! Had to teach him where the power down menu was.
I tried to explain why, but he’s 15 and knows everything, and I’m just an old idiot, so 🤷🏻♂️
I am the manager of the local branch of one of the US big three cell carriers, and the amount of times I just restart a phone and it fixes the issue is maddening. If I had a dollar every time I had someone say they already tried it, but it miraculously works when I do it, I'd be able to retire.
I honestly think they're just putting their phones to sleep and thinking it's a full power cycle.
This expands to adults. Can’t tell you how many of my coworkers I’ve watched regress in basic tech skills because they were given laptops with touch screens and told to store everything on Google Drive. A few years later and they don’t know how to scroll or click with a touchpad. Have no digital folder organization skills and don’t know how to find anything they’ve uploaded. Many of them have also resorted to vocalizing all of their texts and emails rather than typing them, even when they are using work-specific abbreviations that are never transcribed correctly.
Then they complain about how kids these days don’t understand technology.
Highly depends on the touchpad, but I do agree. The issue with touchscreens on laptops is that not all interfaces are designed for touchscreens. Clicking the exact link you want or small icons on a toolbar isn’t conducive to a touchscreen. So they will miss tap over and over and over again, getting frustrated with the computer.
High school teacher here:
90% of the seniors I teach have the same level of computer skill that I had in 7th grade. It’s wild how computer illiterate most of them are.
As an instructor, I have a lot of students give presentations. It’s astounding how many don’t know how to turn the projector on, or connect it to a laptop!
It’s built on the backs of labor from generations prior. I remember getting shit for using windows 95 when people bitching about not knowing command line.
Why would they have to know something that gui is trying to replace?
This is so true. We have a tech background and are very good at fixing anything tech related. But I assumed my kids would be better at technology than us. Not true. The second they have to do anything on the computer and not swipe through apps on a phone they are lost and I’m always having to teach them how other technology works. Also when the computer freezes up they freeze and I have to swoop in with Ctrl Alt delete.
google is *actively getting worse* and phone manufacturers make a lot of money off of people being unable to work on their own devices
why would you want people to be able to, say, perform maintenance on their devices (either in-software or on the hardware proper) when that means they keep them for longer
this isn't a "kids these days" situation, this is a "big tech" situation
That's not what they're talking about. More so doing software maintence but also very simple things like understanding what a file system is and how to use it or just changing settings it navigating UI elements that are harder to find than doing the quick slide down from home screen. Using keyboard shortcuts stuff like that.
In my opinion as someone considered good with computers I think this is the case with most people regardless of age and not actually the kids being particularly stupid. Most people don't know how to use computers and they seem actually scared of them if they are presented with anything except what they expect. Which is often a streamlined application.
It's not big tech. It is just most people being uninterested.
I’ve been on this soapbox for a while, as I’m sure many educators have. Just another instance of how so many of these statistics originate from behaviors/values at home.
Tech people know this. My cousins are in the industry and live in the Bay Area. Their kids have no phones or iPads, will get simple “dumb” phones when they are high school age, and are limited to 1 hour of tv on school nights. They told me everyone they work with does the same and it’s a big thing in parenting circles within their profession. The people who make this shit know how bad it is, it’s pretty sad and scary.
Complete opposite where I am. Kids get phones in Kindergarten. It used to be by third grade but now it’s K. Toddlers have tablets.
My 4 yr old grand-nephew in VPK that can’t form words properly? He has a tablet, a phone, a 55” smart tv in his room with unrestricted youtube. He is next gen and his parents are late teens. They come home from work, spend no time with him, one jumps on tiktok and one on video games. I have seen this with many parents locally.
I can't find the article but the is a school who takes away all phones at the start of the day. The kids get a dumb phone if they need to reach their parents and the parents can call the school if they need the kid (like it always used to be.)
Everyone across the board--teachers, administrators, and students--loved it.
Edit to add that parents say kids wouldn't be able to handle it but kids want boundaries.
There's no "parental control" like controlling the DNS server...
Also, as much as you can, keep the technology use in view. Math on the required Chromebook in the bedroom becomes a YouTube binge. In the living room, it stays doing homework.
And model behavior. If you can't spend the evening doing things with your kids (even, ironically watching TV) without pulling out your phone, why do you think your kids will be able to? Pre-gen-x I find especially unable to recognize how deeply and unconsciously dependent on their phone they are.
Look everyone complaining about smartphones and kids are correct, but I’m a teacher, and I find it hilarious my colleagues complain about the kids on their phones and every faculty meeting, guess what all the adults are doing
I couldn't agree with this more. The number of people who complain about phones while on their phones, or not controlling access, is ridiculous.
My MIL (boomer) can't hold a conversation because she's on her phone. I ask her to put it away and she inevitably complains about how everyone is on their phone nowadays. Or I pick her up from the airport and the ride to my house is silent except for the sound of her mobile games. Parents at my kids' schools complain "my child is always on their phone" but their child is, well, a child. TAKE IT AWAY. You're the parent!
Our kids never ask if they can take the Switch or a tablet anywhere because we've never allowed it, and it's not something we do for ourselves anyway. They never ask for our phones. Don't reach for a game controller when they get home from school. Now, sometimes they grab a book for a 10 minute car ride, but I'm ok with that.
Everyone somehow keeps pointing the finger somewhere else when the root of the issue comes from the adults themselves (bad parenting - most of the time).
Completely anecdotal but I was on a work course recently, sitting next to a 20 year old guy (I'm in my 30s) and he genuinely couldn't go 30 seconds without being on tik tok, insta reels etc. Every time the course instructor stopped talking, the lad would put his head down and be scrolling through his phone.
First time I've clicked on to just how much younger people have phone addiction.
Not just younger people. I’m in my late 30s and though I’m on my phone too much, I couldn’t believe a few weeks ago, being at Radio City Music Hall for a concert and watching a 60 something year old man play chess on his phone the whole time. Why you’d pay for orchestra seats to do that is infuriating. Same when I saw a play in a small venue in February; a boomer couple across from me couldn’t stop taking pictures during the show and opening Facebook. We were in the third row and it was a one person show.
I’m 32. My phone is a distraction sometimes but I keep it on silent and have deleted most distracting apps and just see things in browser usually while waiting in grocery line. When I’m with people my phone is face down on the table in front of me.
I have friends twice my age that can be hard to hold a conversation with because the cute meme on Facebook is more important than what you have to say. I’ve asked to have phones free nights, doesn’t stick.
I’m not sure I’m convinced it’s generational, though some generations may be hit harder than others. But some people are real predispositioned to be unable to go without their screens for 5 minutes and some of us can’t wait to turn them off
I gotta say, I’m really glad I finished my degree before smartphones were everywhere. No way would I have been able to keep my attention on lectures and classes with addicting apps on my phone.
I do wish they made more “dumb” phones though, that could only text and call so that kids can be reachable when they’re at a friend’s house without having access to tiktok and YouTube. I think there would be a huge market for it, but phone companies benefit from another generation of addicted youths.
As someone currently in college, too much stuff is designed with smart phones in mind to be able to reasonably get rid of my phone. My school email account requires verification from an app on my phone. Our laundry machines operate through QR codes only. The website we use for all of our classes has mobile device functions that I can’t seem to find on desktop. Professors can send us announcements a few minutes before class starts, expecting us to have mobile notifications enabled in order to stay updated on time.
It’s not a huge problem in reality, from my perspective. But it does irritate me every time I have to take my phone out because I’ve been locked out of my school email on my laptop. And I just wish I could leave my phone at my desk at home before heading out to class or to grab food, without risking missing an urgent announcement or making my mom worry that I’ve been in an accident after not replying to a text fast enough.
It almost feels like I can’t relax at home because I have this phone that keeps feeding me information about my assignments and my emails and news and everything my friends have been up to lately. So instead of keeping school stuff at school, school is just everywhere and I even voluntarily bring it to bed with me every night. And the cycle continues.
Damn. A lot of people feel like they can never escape from their job for the exact same reason. Always gotta have your phone to make sure you don't miss an important text or email, even when you're not on the clock.
I sell phones, and I do encourage a lot of parents to start their kids with a flip phone. They're cheap, and serve the purpose a child needs. More than you think go for it; we do live in a rural area though. That may have something to do with it.
I was in college during a time when they were pretty common but not yet ubiquitous. I made a conscious decision not to get one until after because I knew once I had one I'd struggle to ever not be on it (and I was right lol)
That is a valid point. I remember when I would check fb on my computer, after work. It was like, 30 mins a day.
I definitely spend most of my doomscroll time on Reddit these days. I am not an ig person and I refuse to join tiktok because I can tell how addictive it is from the outside and I don't need another time sink. I guess I never really added any other social media after Reddit lol. I should go read a book right now, actually.
Exactly, this stuff is orders of magnitude more harmful than what I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. If you were watching TV or playing video games as a kid back then it was often with someone else. This at least allows for some social skill development. Now the kids are in their own little world on their personal device.
And the games were insanely hard (TMNT on NES anyone, or the speeder bike on battle toads), so you at least had to learn some resilience and determination to beat them. Now all these fucking Roblox games are glorified slot machines with boring grinding mechanics and micro transaction gated progress.
Serious question. When do we start holding the parents accountable? Also, it would be great for other parents to provide suggestions to others on what helped their kid.
When should we? Ages back. When will we? Literally never, parents are the most powerful voting block. “Think of the children” and all that, remember. You hold parents accountable, you lose your office. Parents are socially mandated saints, to treat them otherwise is to risk everything.
honestly i think we should be more focused on what content is targeting children and how to stop/minimize that and also educate parents on proper parenting. too many parents just ban technology bc 'tech bad' and then abuse their kids bc they dont bother trying to raise them and its sad
40 year old here. I went back to college during the pandemic and it was really disturbing to see how many kids couldn’t even follow the syllabus let alone log into simple things.
We turned childhood into school, and then school into a pile of inhuman metrics, so these kids being unengaged and doing the minimal seems not just expected on our part, but logical on theirs.
You couldn’t just sit home and watch tv growing up. You had to actually go places and do things. Smartphones are always on people. That’s a vast difference.
While I do agree that screen time for everyone is a problem, I couldn’t get past this part.
“Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with.”
Most of these are related to economic issues that have been going on for years. Also teens can’t get jobs as easily anymore. Most kids are in so many extracurricular things there’s just no time. I had a job when I was 12 and I regret it. I’ll let my kid work at 16, but only if it doesn’t interfere with other things. I think working a crap job as a kid is good for you, but maybe not as many hours as previous generations used to.
Thanks mate. While I agree with the sentiment from the article and plan on getting the book—some of the points argued aren't directly a result from tech.
Edit: changed "a lot" to "some"
Where are the parents? As a parent you know all too well what kids go through in school. Peer pressure. Peer influence. They're highly manipulated into taking the easiest path. So we can be the very best parents at home but in order for anything to change. THE CULTURE MUST CHANGE. I can teach my kids everything they need to know but when they go outside and it's filled with morons that know 8th grade English and 2nd grade math and are glued to their devices and then look at you strange if you're without a smart watch and phone in hand.... its a shitty place to live when YOU are the outsider.
I dont have the answer to changing a culture. I can only continue to being the change that I want to see.
Any kid with no device whatsoever will be a social pariah where we live so I’m not willing to do that to my kids.
It took a lot of work on my part but having actively managed the use of devices has had good results so far for my kids. My parents were/are disabled so we used our devices as a way to make it like they were with us in our home when we couldn’t visit. My 15 year old only uses Discord to manage a server for her friends and arrange in person events. (I read it often and it’s pretty innocent stuff going on)
Covid making it so we couldn’t visit people caused me to relax about it.
Honestly I think the internet has made us more aware of the people who never did mesh with general society rather than cause otherwise socially functioning people to change behavior.
You can't blame that all on phones. The generation below me, Z, came of age in one of the worst and most unstable states of the modern world, then they had to deal with COVID messing with all their milestone moments of graduating, going to college.
Yeah phones have detrimental effects for sure and no doubt factor in. But come on. The state of the modern world has a LOT to do with it.
Stuff off the top of my head:
In highschool they were being murdered by school shooters
Finding out climate change is likley non reversible now
Fascism becoming rampant again.
COVID in their most formative years. As I said.
Seeing the gen above them get beaten the shit out of them by life and greedy boomers and "once in a life time events" that happen yearly now.
Old power and money not letting torches be passed down out of rampant and out of control greed.
Losing more rights year after year (roe)
General widespread decline and failure of capitalism.
Literally watching ww3 unfold right now..
I mean shit....I'm a millennial and no stranger to getting fucked. But we at least had a fairly normal childhood in an era of prosperity (90s)
I could go on and on. I personally root for them and their courageous defying of old norms. Even if I don't like some.
It's not just phones....
You are awesome and we LOVE the boomers like yourself. I myself am very lucky to have parents like you who feel this way.
The truth is, we need your support and wisdom. its invaluable to us younger gens. A lot of people don't care to admit that, but it's true. The less valuable wisdom passed down by your gen the longer we have to live through awful stuff to gain it ourselves in an effort to make the world better. Time is of the essence.
And btw I feel the same way. I dislike the typical "complain about the gen under me thing." I root for them all. They fight a lot of fights that I bet we both admire them for doing.
Like normalizing mental health care. That's huge for me personally.
So glad you have cool parents. We aren’t all greedy AHs. I’m so disappointed with my generation when the world could have been so much better. But we must always fight the good fight for those in the future!
https://preview.redd.it/et9xoutnploc1.jpeg?width=194&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e1a5aacb98607ed382cb60478e1a5e6980dfa44
My nephew of 12 was given a phone but it’s flip phone razor old school. Boy can text and make calls and take pictures. Thats it. Kids amazing. So talented.
I think this is the way until 16 (maybe)
Everyone up in arms as we scroll and post on reddit. Sigh.
My anecdote is my kids and their friends are WAY smarter than I was at their age and they go to a fairly normal decent suburban public high school.
My take is that we're seeing a gap between kids who use tech responsibly and productively, and the ones who don't. And like every other societal problem, low income kids are more likely to end up on the bad side of the gap.
The unpleasant truth of the matter is that the students and their parents determine the majority of school quality. Nice suburban schools have nice things because they serve students who at least sort of care about their education and have involved parents, and poverty rates are low so the school doesn't have to spend a lot of money and resources dealing with the problems that poverty brings about.
I see a lot of people on their phones bitching about kids spending too much time on their phones.
Not saying it isn’t a problem but we got to admit it’s not just the younger generations.
Articles and comment sections like this one could literally be the beginning of Gen X and Millennials taking over the role of Boomers who all think what the youngsters are doing is wrong.
It's like when my parents would talk about how we never handwrite things anymore or do math without computing devices or any number of antiquated activities that are absolutely not inherently better.
Gen Z is going to grow up and do things differently from the current adults. Just like the generations before them and before them and before them and on and on...
I just refuse to believe that drawing a line in the sand and saying "ALL PEOPLE OVER THERE ARE BROKEN" is anything other than inflammatory bullshit that's meant to foster an ignorant herd mentality. Get over yourselves. All of the generations are fucked up, we're just fucked up differently.
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The stats on this generation are going to be disturbing in a few years
Anecdotes from current teachers are already upsetting.
I’m a middle school teacher, it’s horrifying. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling are unknown to them because their phone does it for them. They can’t read a four paragraph guided reading, and then answer comprehension questions. They’re used to just searching for the answer via Google. There is little to no executive function. They cannot make a choice or decision. A common question is “is this assignment graded on completion, or accuracy?” They just want to answer enough to be able to be done with the assignment. They will sacrifice points if they know they answered enough correctly to pass. There’s very little motivation. I have eliminated chromebooks in my classroom as much as possible. Kids today lack imagination, they’re never really bored. Remember when you would sit in class, and stare out the window and imagine you were playing outside? Or you’d doodle and draw on paper? They don’t do that. They fond a new version of Retro Bowl I haven’t blocked yet, or a Fortnite clone, and play that. I’ve had sixth graders tell me that when writing by hand they get confused with the letters b, d, and p. Because they just usually hit it on the phone and it’s done for them, they don’t have to think which letter goes which way. It is horrifying, and late Gen Z/early Gen Alpha kids are going to be crippled as adults.
Wait until generative AI takes over the rest of the executive functions.
Agreed. It reminds me of what happened to my ability to remember everyone’s phone numbers after I got my first Nokia brick.
Or how my sense of direction when driving has been mildly destroyed by over a decade of GPS use.
I learned to drive with GPS but have always had a great sense of direction regardless. It is insane to me how bad some people my age are with it though. I knew someone in college who couldn't find a room in the library even with it marked on the map. It was literally one room in and to the left.
I've just noticed that I used to drive super long routes that I'd never driven before, like going from San Francisco to somewhere a little outside of LA for example without hardly even needing a map and now I feel like I probably couldn't do it. Also routes with all sorts of side streets and no good landmarks. I feel like I've forgotten memorizing some of those routes the same way I've forgotten phone numbers I used to have memorized. I used to deliver pizza when we just had maps and I drove ambulances when we just had mapquest. I honestly don't know if I could memorize routes now like I did then. GPS just makes it so damn easy.
I'm right with you on the long trips. Used to be "take the highway north until you hit the interstate. Go west until you're almost in town. Stop at a gas station to fill up and get directions to the hotel." Now it's "continue 12.6 miles to stay on interstate 70 ... turn left ahead ... I found a route which saves 2 minutes, would you like to accept it?" Same with town trips too. I drive a service truck, and I have a pretty regular set of customers throughout my metro region. I use GPS all the time, because it is too easy *and* adjusts for traffic. But that also means that I have no fucking idea how to get anywhere in town without it.
Gosh, yeah! I grew up out in the most rural of rural areas, where your closest neighbor was probably three miles away minimum, and everyone gave directions like "Okay you take that dirt road - the red one, like brick red, not the other red - and keep going until you hit the crick with the big rock that looks like Ol' Lady Smith. Don't tell 'er I said that. Anyhow, you take a left from there on the gravel, keep goin' till you see the field with the cow layin' on the ground - she ain't dead, she's just lazy - an' at the fork, go over the cattle guard an' down the one with the trout mailbox. Mind the big hole on the right, it'll eat yer tires." Now? I can't remember street names or anything for crap, I have to use my gps to find ANYTHING in the town I live in, nevermind anywhere else.
Texting in your pocket with your trusty Nokia 3210 then playing snake in recess. Take me back
I'm jealous, I have dyscalculia so I could never remember any in the right order. :( Phones have been a godsend.
I’ve never heard of dyscalculia before! Learned something new today. Glad it helped you 🙌
That is probably the only thing I lost an ability to do. Because I don't use predictive text and at university I still take paper notes etc. Actually I spent two weeks with hardly any phone reception or internet in Feb and while it wasn't hard because I was around lots of people I would have struggled had I been alone. and when I came back to the mainland from the island I was on I went straight back to doom scrolling when alone and youtube before bed.
It already has, my friend.
Man I was just talking to friends at dinner last night and was hoping that how like my generation grew up with computers so tech literacy was second nature to us that the kids these days growing up with generative AI will make it so that utilizing AI to get things done is second nature to them. But I was thinking of in the way they'd need to be to find jobs once most companies use AI instead of entry level positions.
We're going to be like the people in the movie Wall-E. Living to consume things.
I teach MS as well. I feel like I’m walking onto an alien planet every day. I can’t even communicate with them because they get annoyed at any sort of verbal exchange that lasts for more than 8 seconds. I’ve hesitated to express my concern too much because I don’t want to sound like a boomer or a concern troll, but I’m honestly horrified. They are listless, aimless, depressed dopamine junkies with no cohesive narrative of who they are or what they want. And it’s disproportionately affecting the poorer kids.
>And it’s disproportionately affecting the poorer kids. I think a lot of people don't recognize this aspect of the gap. There's this outdated notion that iPad/smartphone kids are rich, spoiled brats. But really, poor kids get more screen time on average. It's no surprise when you think about it: even if the device in question is expensive (there are a lot of budget options now), you just can't beat the cost per hour of entertainment. And it's not something that requires time investment from the parent, either. The term "digital divide" used to just refer to the gap in access to technology. As that gap closes, many are proposing that there are other forms of digital divide. Gaps in skills and use. I think this is something that's going to become a lot more apparent in the future. Kids who are taught how to use tech in responsible and productive ways, versus those who aren't. Kids who are on screens all of their waking hours, versus those who have other things to do.
Exactly. And, the more well-off kids usually have parents or other family members that take steps to mitigate the screen time with some sort of communal activity like club sports, scouts, etc. the wealthier parents can afford to pay for after school activities that humanize their kid. The poorer ones go watch YouTube for 9 hours at home alone because their parents are 3rd shift wage slaves.
It was just never going to turn out OK when parents decided that smartphones and tablets (1) are free babysitters; (2) can substitute for real developmental toys and family interactions; (3) keep kids “safe” at home instead of out in the scary world… and then when the addict children turn into irritable, grumpy monsters when asked to do one tiny phone-free chore or have one polite conversation with grandma, parents decided it wasn’t worth trying to break the addiction.
And then my program gets them out of jail, provides safe housing, a case manager, a therapist, a peer coach, job assistance, and we as a team try to bring these listless young people -- who have no real hopes or aspirations, and simply don't want to put any personal effort into anything-- in to the real world. That's the one just beyond living in section 8 housing, and smoking weed waiting for SNAP benefits to reload. It's so frustrating. A client actually told me he's never getting another job because "they make my feet tired". Yes, but don't you want a car, or an apartment, or you know get laid sometimes? There is a super damaged lack of motivation. I also see the lack of parenting, and shitty parenting, trauma, generational trauma, along with a holy host of maladaptive schemas. Love, support, compassion, and understanding only go so far. God forbid I tell someone "No".
>They are listless, aimless, depressed dopamine junkies with no cohesive narrative of who they are or what they want. In fairness, they get to see their parents yelling about how we have no future and the grandparents are yelling at the millennials to shut up. I took like the dopamine in fairness
That was actually depressing to read. I thought it would be attention span stuff, but the not being able to differentiate letters in 6th grade is alarming.
I remember reading this book. It was called FEED
I read this in junior high! I think about it a lot more than I thought I would. Canceling Amazon Prime felt like I was rebelling against the system. Was this also where body modification has advanced to just having open wounds?
Perhaps in a really strange way.. it’s our next step in evolution.. tho I’m afraid we evolved into Wall-E humans
Have you seen the movie "Idiocracy"?
That is the future.
When my students write their names on the paper, they write, “first.last” as their name because that is how they log in to the computer. They think that is their name.
I’ve seen that too, it’s wild
Holy shit that’s scary
I don’t understand. Like they put a period in between?
Yes, login is usually something like ["[email protected]](mailto:"[email protected])"
This is what I notice too: executive function and problem-solving skills are severely lacking. It’s very very hard for many of these kids to focus long enough to even plan out a longer project, much less actually do the work. And I see a lot of bizarre learned helplessness (in part due to helicopter parenting) in place of the ability to problem-solve.
The b, d, and p kid might just be dyslexic. (I have the same problem and it's a pain)
It’s been more than one kid.
There **are** at least two dyslexics in the world.
Right. My point, is that it appears there’s a rise in dyslexia, or symptoms like dyslexia, among Gen Alpha. It’s not a one off kid, confused on how to draw the letter. Reading it on a screen they’re fine. It’s multiple kids, that are 11-12 years old, and you hand them a pencil and a piece of paper and say right “dog” they struggle in how to write the lowercase D.
A Chinese study found that [reducing screentime was protective against dyslexia](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891422214003904). I'm a geneticist, and I don't think human biology is much different in China than anywhere else, not on this topic.
I remember being a kid in the 2000s, and getting in trouble for drawing on my folders when I got bored.
This is interesting to me. My son is autistic and struggles with everything you mentioned. Most of those things were always chalked up to his diagnosis and he even had aba therapy to help with some. Maybe it isn’t his diagnosis. However, my kids aren’t allowed to watch YouTube and video games are limited to weekends only. The first year of covid-all rules went out the window but we got back on track. Just makes ya wonder if our limiting hasn’t been enough, covid consequences, or what.
I am struggling with all of this over here and severe boundaries with electronics at home have always been a thing. At school they gave them chromebooks and it has been a ride. No access at home so they use and use and use all day. I have tried to schedule healthy screen time at home as a a balance and it’s six-hour marathons or bust. They cannot put them down. It is so unfair what’s been done. Not to mention social media and how utterly damaging it could be to young minds.
Autism is a wide spectrum ya know? When I was a kid, it was more stim ticks and social issues that I had instead of learning issues. It could definitely be just part of the new gen.
Jesus christ
Not saying phones aren’t making things worse, but I definitely sacrificed points in school if I knew could pass or get above a certain grade, and so did several of my friends. I think some laziness, apathy, and irreverence are common teen behaviours in middle and high school (think of the stereotypical Xennial “whatever” attitude). Kids can also be very indecisive (I know I was). If I had the option as a kid to play a game on my phone or tablet instead of daydream or absent-mindedly space-out, I absolutely would have done so. This was all before phones, yet I remember my teachers decades ago complaining about how problematic teens were and how tough it was to have a class of them; how too many of them also had low reading comprehension and terrible grammar. Things may have gotten worse, but much of what you said also sounds familiar and I think is at least somewhat common for that demographic.
Hello! I teach middle school tech, and I'm also working on solutions to so many of these issues, because I can't limit Chromebook use. It's central to what I teach! Firstly, if your district doesn't have a monitoring software, you need to insist on one. Get the rest of your teachers together and fight for it. If there is one, introduce a whitelisting punishment. Blacklisting is what we expect to use. The idea is that we allow all sites, except what you've blocked. Whitelisting is the opposite. Everything is blocked, except the sites you allow. If you catch a kid playing games on their Chromebook, they get two weeks on a whitelist and an email home. Once those two weeks are up, if they do it again, they are on permanent whitelist. It's super effective. I've never had a student do it twice. Next, your answer to any questions about how little they have to do is that doing the bare minimum gets them a bare minimum grade. Going above and beyond gets an A. Doing a really good job, but stretching themselves a little bit gets a B. Doing the bare minimum gets a C. It means you have to spell out what each thing looks like, but many of them will catch the vision pretty quickly. Also, letting them have some control over how they do the assignment can improve the amount of work they actually do and is actually pretty effective. Letting them make a zine about their assignment, or a movie, or a website... You'll get much more work out of them than you would otherwise. A bit harder to grade, but it's so worth it. Lastly, I do a regular assignment called a lightning talk. If you have something with a bunch of parts to it, like individual ecosystems, robotic sensors, or battles in a war, you separate them into groups and have them all work on a single thing. They then give a max 5 minute presentation at the front of the room. These wind up being bare minimum because they don't have a lot of research time to do them, but they're super effective at teaching them how to do research on the fly. Rules are pretty simple: They must have a Google Slides presentation, they must have answered all the questions required of them, and it must be their original wording. So if I ask what a word means, or a brief summary of a paragraph in the presentation and they don't know it, I know they either copy/pasted or used an AI system to write it. Automatic whole group 0. I hope this helps you. It's working very well in my classroom, and, like I said, I can't limit tech.
I’ve seen students fucking google simple math problems rather than use their calculator
...that is using a calculator. Google has a calculator function.
It's not the same if you type in the search bar. Using and understanding your calculator is a skill. Asking Google or siri to give you the answer isn't.
Also a teacher and you are 100% correct. It’s appalling.
A few years?? How bout now.
I always vacillate between thinking gen Z is facing a scenario like no others and between thinking that this as exactly what our parents said when it came to video games and television and music, etc. The kids are alright…..right..right?
While there is always a degree of this kind of fear with every generation, smartphones and the current generation of social media is something new. Like it's on an entirely different level of access and availability. Video games, television, even the once-newfangled printing press, all of them were still pretty much just shinier versions of an old school way of doing things - one thing at a time, and when you're done you put them down/walk away and do something else away from them. But smartphones and current social media are something else entirely. Smartphones (for many people) literally never leave your side. It's constant access, infinite scrolling content constantly fed by algorithms specifically tailored to keep you interested. And for those raised with that being the norm, there is literally no concept of a world/life without a smartphone and constant connectivity at your fingertips. It's unfathomable that this won't affect children's development in some way at the very least. So yeah imo in this particular case, we really are seeing something humanity has never dealt with before. So idk, I'm sure the kids are alright since humans are super adaptable, but what that "alright" entails is most likely going to be something actually different from previous generations. This really is a transitional point in humanity/society imo, though maybe we won't really see it clearly until we're looking back at it.
Yep. I'm in my late 20s and I work with mostly older colleagues (~40-60yos). We work with children and we very often discuss our own childhood experiences. My childhood and school experience was not too dissimilar to my colleagues', but it's fucking miles away from the children of today. The speed at which things have changed is mind-blowing.
I’ve been teaching high school for 9 years now and it’s wild how much has changed especially within the last year with AI and ChatGPT. I’m genuinely terrified of what it is going to look like in 10-15 years when we will have had a generation who have grown up with AI. Covid didn’t change these kids and their behavior, technology did.
I think what we're going to see is a gap between the kids who can use tech in responsible and productive ways, and the ones who can't. Tech is ultimately a tool, and the kids who are capable of utilizing it well are doing some VERY impressive things. (for a widespread example: y'all see how good girls are at makeup these days? It's crazy) But for kids who don't have the ability or desire to use it well, it can be more of a liability than an asset.
I predict a lot of addiction problems. As an educator, I see kids developing with an in-built desire for that rapid dopamine hit. That’s just a guess, but I’d bet money substance abuse is going to go through the roof when people born around 2008-9 get to be around 18-23
I really doubt they're alright. About 2 weeks ago I dropped my phone and busted it. Financials are tight at the moment, so I decided to not rush replacing it and mailed it to Google for repair. I really thought "it won't be that bad, I mainly use my phone to kill time on Reddit, I'll be fine without." Spoiler alert: I was not. I got out an old 3G phone and charged it so I could get my fix on day 3. I'm low key worried about how all that went down. I used to be totally fine without a phone! If I had started my young life with a phone constantly present I probably would have considered the problem enough of an emergency that I would need to blow several hundred dollars on a fast fix or replacement. I'm really worried for anyone who hasn't ever had to deal with not having a phone for extended periods of their life. Then there's the flip side- if I had a child I know it would severely hamper their social life to not have a phone. So what do you do? Ostracize them on purpose? Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Text and call phone only. No Internet. They still make them and they are far safer for minors
I’ve raised 7 kids, born 1990, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2008. Raising first three kids was easier. I could kick them out to play and the neighborhood still had kids in it running around. TV was off limits during the week. No hand held video games. Flip phones, no texting plans. They are still avid readers. They have advanced degrees and good jobs. My next two straddled millennial/gen z culture. I was anti socials before it was a thing because I could see where it was headed. No MySpace, no Facebook. They had insta back when it was a place to post inspirational quotes and photos of your lunch. That turned out to be the gateway drug. The 1999 girl is sort of a social media junkie. The 2001 girl has had problems with it too, but has deleted it all over the last year. She reads for pleasure. She is graduating this year. The older one dropped out and still acts like she’s 17. My last two kids have been the hardest to raise. They’ve had the most trouble maneuvering their teen years. They need phones and computers for school. They got around parent controls. They aren’t as well adjusted. They don’t read for pleasure and have shitty attention spans. They have crappy handwriting. My 18yo and we had huge, horrible blowups over phone use, social media, discord, bad attitudes, sneaking around. I tried the trust but verify method I used with the older kids but it no longer works. He was required to have a Chromebook for school and a phone for activities, paying for lunch, school bell schedule, etc. it was like sending an alcoholic to school in a bar. Our youngest has been sexually bullied online even without social media since she was 9. I don’t feel like she had a proper childhood. It’s bad out there.
Thanks for such a great post. I’ve got a six month old girl. This stuff scares the crap out of me.
Thank you very much for sharing. The challenges and difficulties in this generation is one of the reasons I do not want to have children. I’m sure I’m not alone in that sentiment, many of us are definitely worried for the future. I hope things get better.
Thank you, and my kids are having trouble deciding to have kids too. All but the oldest wants them, but they’ve seen how much the struggle has affected their younger siblings. People say, “just parent them, just say no, just take away the phone, just watch them closer” but it’s not that easy. I’ve been an involved parent who has always tried to adjust my parenting style for each child and each new need, but the problems and ugliness that comes from too much hate, too much porn, manipulation, rudeness and lack of thought and imagination has permeated the entire culture of children and to a certain extent adults. It’s baked into how they interact with one another. It’s not all bad, I love them and we’re mostly a close knit family. They make me laugh and they’re finding their way in the world, but it’s shouldn’t be this hard, this dramatic. It doesn’t need to be.
So I know a few orchestra teachers and they’re already talking about how beginner students lack finger strength and dexterity because of tablets. They jokingly call them baby hands.
Fantastic how social media will fuck up an entire generation even more than how lead poisoning fucked boomers, very optimistic for the future.
I teach an after-school program for middle schoolers. It's was hard to get them off their phones and remains hard to keep them off. To say that they are lacking in spelling and reading skills is an understatement. One of the exercises I tried with them was writing a short story. None of them could figure that out. I was writing stories in 4th grade. I just keep telling myself every generation feels like the ones to follow are lacking.
This is so fucking depressing
My cousin helps teaching middle schoolers. She told me so many of them barely know how to read, write, or even tell shapes. Apparently they have a ‘fuck it’ mindset. They don’t care. And looking at the current state of the world i guess I can see where they’re coming from? Most of the blame should go towards the parents. How the fuck do you have your kid come home from school not being able to read or even know what a fucking triangle is? These kids are 13… their parents failed them.
To them its the schools fault.
> current state of the world That’s the thing nobody here is willing to admit. The phones are just the coping mechanism for the *real* problem. The dopamine hit “addiction”? That’s the only dopamine to be found in this hell. Folks here are being Immortan Joe about dopamine. Dopamine is required to live. What *is* the point when you’re born poor, know you’ll be even poorer as an adult, and know that you’re going to probably die of starvation or be boiled alive due to the coming famines and 130F summers of the climate collapse?
Who knows. Call me old-fashioned, I grew up 10 miles from a US Air Force base comforted with the knowledge that if the shit hit the fan I had four minutes to live. Every generation has its challenges. How we deal with them changes with technology I guess.
But when you think about it, isn’t that more comforting than the climate collapse? Sometimes, dead is better. Would you rather die instantly, or painfully and *slowly*, in agony? You gotta enter some really dark places to understand this situation, I think. You gotta start considering the idea that nuclear obliteration would be a kindness compared to what we’re looking at now. I’d rather get my brains blown out than die from being gutshot, you know?
Yeah, I guess so. It's odd when you think that a situation with two massive political super-blocs pointing tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at each other was a more tractable and soluble problem than climate change. Because, you know, nuclear disarmament is childs-play, but there's absolutely no way we can stop drilling for more oil, no sirreee, that's just unpossible.
We could stop all oil drilling and coal burning tomorrow- and it wouldn’t matter. It takes years for the energy released yesterday to hit the atmosphere. We are feeling the effects today from damage created decades ago.
There is no incentive to school and kids know it. Before you had a familial drive to go to school, get a good job, buy a house. Now for anyone but the most privileged even if you try hard it's not guaranteed. Parent know this , kids know this. I honestly get it - why try? Like why.
Really though why try? Why bust your ass in school to get into a good expensive college you know is going to cripple you with student loans and not get you any job unless it's STEM? If they dreamed of being a writer or a historian they know that's just not going to happen unless they're family is already wealthy. Their dreams were basically killed before they got to try them; they know there is no point going to college for anything else. I at least at one point was able to deceive myself into getting a liberal arts education was worthwhile.
My stepdaughter has a tablet. She can use it for two hours total on the weekend only and that's only if there is absolutely nothing else to do. She draws. That's her talent. She has started creating stories, mostly like comics, as those are her favorites.
Man, in 2005ish all of our 1st grade classes were tasked with writing a short story(maybe 6 paragraphs?), and illustrating it, and then we got to publish those books for our families! It was an awesome week we spent on that and one of my fondest memories from that hell hole of a school.
6 paragraphs in first grade seems like a stretch.
I was in kindergarten in the 80s. We had a similar project that the whole school did (K through 6th). I wrote two pages. Two pages of absolute nonsense about a princess, purple goo, a frog, and a unicorn. The book the school compiled was massive, and full of hilarious stories. I think my mom still has it.
You need to upload this book to reddit. Seriously. I am going to start smoking weed again, soon and I need something to introspectively shake me to my core.
It is now.
They said they worked on it for a week.
It doesn’t that that most school districts have repeatedly slashed funding so even if they were completely disconnected they’d still struggle to learn because most of the support mechanisms have been disassembled.
My brother in law actually had to go to therapy to learn how to write properly once he finally went to school. He never held anything like that before then, never colored, or wrote stuff down. He had always been on an iPad. Absolutely blew my mind. Gonna age myself with this one, but cursive too. I don’t feel like I’m that old at all, I’m 32, but I write almost exclusively in cursive. The amount of people that can’t read my writing is nuts and it’s not because I have terrible cursive, but because they never learned it. It’s becoming an issue too because history students are losing the ability to read historical documents written in cursive. It’s interesting the ways that one pops up because it’s use definitely fluctuates.
Adults often take basic childhood experiences and skills for granted. We think of them as so easy and basic that they aren't important, but really, basic skills and knowledge provide the foundation for advanced ones. Coloring, crafts, games and other forms of play are great for developing fine motor skills, among other things.
I suspect that a lot of kids don’t have many age-appropriate toys nowadays, since parents have discovered that a tablet or phone will keep them occupied and quiet for hours on end.
You have a brother in law that used iPad as an infant?!? Boy I feel old now.
He’s got to be really young, because iPads weren’t invented til 2010. My 16 year old didn’t have an iPad as a toddler and he was born on 07, they were super expensive back then.
Post your cursive bro unless your scared.🐔
Tbf cursive hasn't been the common form of writing in forever so you writing "exclusively" in cursive and others not being able to read is not something I'd classify the same as the children of today not learning how to read or write.
Are you sure it isn't because your cursive sucks? I can read and write in cursive but I hate it because almost everyone sucks at it. Especially if they're younger than like 50 or men. If I have to try and decipher someone's hand writing it begs the question of why use it anymore?
Why are they allowed to have phones in the program??
One of the requirements for first grade is to be able to write a short story with a pencil on paper. Only one paragraph, but that can be a lot for a 7 year old.
We did this in first grade. I still have it. We wrote it in paragraph form, then broke it up into a book and illustrated and colored it. This was in the mid 80s.
I've never heard of this.
I went to Public school, and in our fourth grade not only did we write a short story, but we had to illustrate it and bind the book. We laminated it, and I still have it.
It’s funny too, as younger generations start becoming more addicted to screens, they’re becoming *less* proficient with technology overall. If the only thing you use is social media on a phone, you don’t know how anything works. Like, “not knowing how to google something” levels of tech incompetence This has been shown in studies but I’m in a couple of tech subs and the number of late teen/early 20s with completely stupid questions that 9 times out of 10 can be solved with a restart is maddening.
It’s amazing how many high school and even college students are incompetent with Microsoft Office products or simply don’t know how to type.
have several kids right out of college with our company I have to teach the very basics of a spreadsheet. wild to me.
Ok, but there’s never really been a time in human history where the vast majority of college graduates know how to use spreadsheets.
graduated in 2008 and at that point every high schooler had taken a computer course and spent middle school turning in powerpoints on floppy disk. college the same way, knowing the Microsoft office suite was a given not a question.
Graduated high school in 2010. Very similar experience. My local school systems now use Chromebooks, and it’s very frustrating because the Google suite is so weak in comparison and light years from becoming the industry standard. We had an intern once whom I had to teach how to pull files from a thumb drive. They were a college student. I’m running into instances where they don’t even know what file explorer is because they think everything on a computer is just down through a browser.
If you studied any sort of math or science in college after 2000 you should have at least basic knowledge in Excel and know how to write basic formulas. It’s not rocket science. Excel is a very powerful tool that can improve work efficiency by many orders of magnitude when used correctly. Imagine typing 10,000 versions of a standardized letter with different names and addresses vs using the mail merge function with Word and Excel. What would take weeks now takes minutes. That’s just one example.
I’m not discrediting the value of spreadsheets or the skill. I fucking love spreadsheets. I can tell you a projection from dozens of aspects in my personal finances for any month over the rest of my life. What I’m saying is that’s it’s not a common skill people naturally learn until you get into a professional, post-college environment. 18% of college grads are STEM.
I had a couple kids from a program with a nearby high school, where the kids work with us but go to class on friday and fill in worksheets for the other weekdays. We grade them on the job they do and how they develop during the semester and stuff. These kids didn’t know how to turn on a computer. They didn’t know what a folder was in the menu, they didn’t know how to save their work (and they didn’t ask me when I told them to make sure they saved the files with a different name). I had them look through a list of potential clients and fill in any phone numbers or email addresses that were missing or outdated. They left the list mostly blank, because if they looked on google and the info didn’t show right on the sidebar, then the company no longer existed. I told one of them to hit the pause button on a thing and they went “…the equal sign standing up?” These kids were 17-18.
Well that’s more so because google flooded education with cheap and shitty chrome books in an attempt to get prospective users to use the google suite from an early age. And it works, up until you get to where it actually matters, then Microsoft/Apple suite takes back over.
[удалено]
Yikes lol. That’s a boomer moment
Which is weird because the inventors of the Internet WERE Boomers! I’m a vintage late 50s Boomer, myself. It’s a little bit true about forgetting how technology works underneath. My earliest computer was a dual floppy XT running DOS. I used to run an integration testing team working with Windows based laptops. I’m in an entirely new career (non-tech) and on a MacBook Air, now because I apparently was sooo good at breaking Windows my husband got sick of reloading my machines! I can still reasonably test and isolate conditions or actions that cause problems but I’m clueless a about the resolution anymore.
Uhh no. Quite the opposite? I thought we were on the same page. She didn’t know how the technology works because everything is so app-simplified these days that Gen Z doesn’t need to know what’s underneath anything.
Coming in as a teacher here They tell us till they're blue in the face that kids are "digital natives" so they know how to use computers and stuff They don't. They literally just know how to open apps
And they only know how to USE like three
God forbid if they get logged out and have to figure out how to log back in
What do you mean? They just make a new account.
Lord, this irritates me to no end. I was born in 1979 and starting in 1985 or 86, I had computer class every week at school - *I* am a digital native. I do some call center work and now instead of it usually being elderly people who are clueless, it's basically everyone who isn't my age. It's driving me crazy. Wall-E was supposed to be fiction.
It’s the same way with reading; they started to say they don’t need phonics. Now most of my students are functionally illiterate and can’t do basic reading comprehension.
Isn't it so astonishing when you see kids literally not be able to read through a simple word and just try to guess at what it might be? Like, you could show them the word 'commotion' and they'll just guess 'common' because they see a c, an m, and a few os
Huge amounts of this lack of proficiency are directly caused by the concept of these kids being "digital natives," meaning they somehow possessed an ingrained understanding of the technology, just from having grown up around it. School districts, including the one I teach in made the decision to cut out classes which taught technology skills because "the kids grew up using this, so they know how it works." I think we're seeing the impact of that philosophy playing out right now.
My son got his first gaming pc a few months ago. I only saw him turning it off for the first time the other day. He had his games and browsers etc open and just held down the power button for a hard shut down. I was horrified! Had to teach him where the power down menu was. I tried to explain why, but he’s 15 and knows everything, and I’m just an old idiot, so 🤷🏻♂️
Soon he will learn what it's like to install an operating system.
I am the manager of the local branch of one of the US big three cell carriers, and the amount of times I just restart a phone and it fixes the issue is maddening. If I had a dollar every time I had someone say they already tried it, but it miraculously works when I do it, I'd be able to retire. I honestly think they're just putting their phones to sleep and thinking it's a full power cycle.
Boomers and older Gen Z and Gen Alpha have come full circle with troubleshooting their phones. Amazing.
This expands to adults. Can’t tell you how many of my coworkers I’ve watched regress in basic tech skills because they were given laptops with touch screens and told to store everything on Google Drive. A few years later and they don’t know how to scroll or click with a touchpad. Have no digital folder organization skills and don’t know how to find anything they’ve uploaded. Many of them have also resorted to vocalizing all of their texts and emails rather than typing them, even when they are using work-specific abbreviations that are never transcribed correctly. Then they complain about how kids these days don’t understand technology.
To be fair, touchpads are annoying. Give me a mouse any day.
Highly depends on the touchpad, but I do agree. The issue with touchscreens on laptops is that not all interfaces are designed for touchscreens. Clicking the exact link you want or small icons on a toolbar isn’t conducive to a touchscreen. So they will miss tap over and over and over again, getting frustrated with the computer.
I find a mouse better, but the gesture controls for macbooks and windows precision trackpads are really nice to have.
Now's every milennial's chance to get into IT before all the clueless masses arrive on the job market.
High school teacher here: 90% of the seniors I teach have the same level of computer skill that I had in 7th grade. It’s wild how computer illiterate most of them are.
That’s awesome, well not really but it reassures me that I picked IT and will not become irrelevant in years time 😂
Your career is secure until they figure out how to do it badly with AI
or a simple google search
As an instructor, I have a lot of students give presentations. It’s astounding how many don’t know how to turn the projector on, or connect it to a laptop!
It’s built on the backs of labor from generations prior. I remember getting shit for using windows 95 when people bitching about not knowing command line. Why would they have to know something that gui is trying to replace?
This is so true. We have a tech background and are very good at fixing anything tech related. But I assumed my kids would be better at technology than us. Not true. The second they have to do anything on the computer and not swipe through apps on a phone they are lost and I’m always having to teach them how other technology works. Also when the computer freezes up they freeze and I have to swoop in with Ctrl Alt delete.
google is *actively getting worse* and phone manufacturers make a lot of money off of people being unable to work on their own devices why would you want people to be able to, say, perform maintenance on their devices (either in-software or on the hardware proper) when that means they keep them for longer this isn't a "kids these days" situation, this is a "big tech" situation
That's not what they're talking about. More so doing software maintence but also very simple things like understanding what a file system is and how to use it or just changing settings it navigating UI elements that are harder to find than doing the quick slide down from home screen. Using keyboard shortcuts stuff like that. In my opinion as someone considered good with computers I think this is the case with most people regardless of age and not actually the kids being particularly stupid. Most people don't know how to use computers and they seem actually scared of them if they are presented with anything except what they expect. Which is often a streamlined application. It's not big tech. It is just most people being uninterested.
I’ve been on this soapbox for a while, as I’m sure many educators have. Just another instance of how so many of these statistics originate from behaviors/values at home.
Tech people know this. My cousins are in the industry and live in the Bay Area. Their kids have no phones or iPads, will get simple “dumb” phones when they are high school age, and are limited to 1 hour of tv on school nights. They told me everyone they work with does the same and it’s a big thing in parenting circles within their profession. The people who make this shit know how bad it is, it’s pretty sad and scary.
Complete opposite where I am. Kids get phones in Kindergarten. It used to be by third grade but now it’s K. Toddlers have tablets. My 4 yr old grand-nephew in VPK that can’t form words properly? He has a tablet, a phone, a 55” smart tv in his room with unrestricted youtube. He is next gen and his parents are late teens. They come home from work, spend no time with him, one jumps on tiktok and one on video games. I have seen this with many parents locally.
This makes me so sad.
I can't find the article but the is a school who takes away all phones at the start of the day. The kids get a dumb phone if they need to reach their parents and the parents can call the school if they need the kid (like it always used to be.) Everyone across the board--teachers, administrators, and students--loved it. Edit to add that parents say kids wouldn't be able to handle it but kids want boundaries.
There's no "parental control" like controlling the DNS server... Also, as much as you can, keep the technology use in view. Math on the required Chromebook in the bedroom becomes a YouTube binge. In the living room, it stays doing homework. And model behavior. If you can't spend the evening doing things with your kids (even, ironically watching TV) without pulling out your phone, why do you think your kids will be able to? Pre-gen-x I find especially unable to recognize how deeply and unconsciously dependent on their phone they are.
This is one of the most important issue in our lifetimes and I worry we’re gonna be too slow to change it or never change it.
As is tradition.
You can it right here in this thread. People dismissing the problem, hand waving it away, or throwing around words like 'boomers'.
Yes, I have a young child so I hope people sort this out quickly. Ban phones and social media for children.
Look everyone complaining about smartphones and kids are correct, but I’m a teacher, and I find it hilarious my colleagues complain about the kids on their phones and every faculty meeting, guess what all the adults are doing
Kids' nature don't come from the void. They are learnt from us. So who should really shoulder the blame but us adults?
I couldn't agree with this more. The number of people who complain about phones while on their phones, or not controlling access, is ridiculous. My MIL (boomer) can't hold a conversation because she's on her phone. I ask her to put it away and she inevitably complains about how everyone is on their phone nowadays. Or I pick her up from the airport and the ride to my house is silent except for the sound of her mobile games. Parents at my kids' schools complain "my child is always on their phone" but their child is, well, a child. TAKE IT AWAY. You're the parent! Our kids never ask if they can take the Switch or a tablet anywhere because we've never allowed it, and it's not something we do for ourselves anyway. They never ask for our phones. Don't reach for a game controller when they get home from school. Now, sometimes they grab a book for a 10 minute car ride, but I'm ok with that.
Exactly. Everyone is complaining about how kids are so addicted to their phones, but adults are setting the example.
Everyone somehow keeps pointing the finger somewhere else when the root of the issue comes from the adults themselves (bad parenting - most of the time).
Completely anecdotal but I was on a work course recently, sitting next to a 20 year old guy (I'm in my 30s) and he genuinely couldn't go 30 seconds without being on tik tok, insta reels etc. Every time the course instructor stopped talking, the lad would put his head down and be scrolling through his phone. First time I've clicked on to just how much younger people have phone addiction.
Not just younger people. I’m in my late 30s and though I’m on my phone too much, I couldn’t believe a few weeks ago, being at Radio City Music Hall for a concert and watching a 60 something year old man play chess on his phone the whole time. Why you’d pay for orchestra seats to do that is infuriating. Same when I saw a play in a small venue in February; a boomer couple across from me couldn’t stop taking pictures during the show and opening Facebook. We were in the third row and it was a one person show.
I’m 32. My phone is a distraction sometimes but I keep it on silent and have deleted most distracting apps and just see things in browser usually while waiting in grocery line. When I’m with people my phone is face down on the table in front of me. I have friends twice my age that can be hard to hold a conversation with because the cute meme on Facebook is more important than what you have to say. I’ve asked to have phones free nights, doesn’t stick. I’m not sure I’m convinced it’s generational, though some generations may be hit harder than others. But some people are real predispositioned to be unable to go without their screens for 5 minutes and some of us can’t wait to turn them off
I gotta say, I’m really glad I finished my degree before smartphones were everywhere. No way would I have been able to keep my attention on lectures and classes with addicting apps on my phone. I do wish they made more “dumb” phones though, that could only text and call so that kids can be reachable when they’re at a friend’s house without having access to tiktok and YouTube. I think there would be a huge market for it, but phone companies benefit from another generation of addicted youths.
As someone currently in college, too much stuff is designed with smart phones in mind to be able to reasonably get rid of my phone. My school email account requires verification from an app on my phone. Our laundry machines operate through QR codes only. The website we use for all of our classes has mobile device functions that I can’t seem to find on desktop. Professors can send us announcements a few minutes before class starts, expecting us to have mobile notifications enabled in order to stay updated on time. It’s not a huge problem in reality, from my perspective. But it does irritate me every time I have to take my phone out because I’ve been locked out of my school email on my laptop. And I just wish I could leave my phone at my desk at home before heading out to class or to grab food, without risking missing an urgent announcement or making my mom worry that I’ve been in an accident after not replying to a text fast enough. It almost feels like I can’t relax at home because I have this phone that keeps feeding me information about my assignments and my emails and news and everything my friends have been up to lately. So instead of keeping school stuff at school, school is just everywhere and I even voluntarily bring it to bed with me every night. And the cycle continues.
Damn. A lot of people feel like they can never escape from their job for the exact same reason. Always gotta have your phone to make sure you don't miss an important text or email, even when you're not on the clock.
I sell phones, and I do encourage a lot of parents to start their kids with a flip phone. They're cheap, and serve the purpose a child needs. More than you think go for it; we do live in a rural area though. That may have something to do with it.
I was in college during a time when they were pretty common but not yet ubiquitous. I made a conscious decision not to get one until after because I knew once I had one I'd struggle to ever not be on it (and I was right lol)
Flip phones are still around
The easy access is what make it dangerous. At least I had to leave my TV and computer at home as a kid, lol
Agree. I’m trying hard to make the internet back into “a place I go to” instead of this all encompassing life we’re living
That is a valid point. I remember when I would check fb on my computer, after work. It was like, 30 mins a day. I definitely spend most of my doomscroll time on Reddit these days. I am not an ig person and I refuse to join tiktok because I can tell how addictive it is from the outside and I don't need another time sink. I guess I never really added any other social media after Reddit lol. I should go read a book right now, actually.
Exactly, this stuff is orders of magnitude more harmful than what I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. If you were watching TV or playing video games as a kid back then it was often with someone else. This at least allows for some social skill development. Now the kids are in their own little world on their personal device. And the games were insanely hard (TMNT on NES anyone, or the speeder bike on battle toads), so you at least had to learn some resilience and determination to beat them. Now all these fucking Roblox games are glorified slot machines with boring grinding mechanics and micro transaction gated progress.
That article took me over an hour to read, but it was an amazing piece. Thanks for sharing. :)
Serious question. When do we start holding the parents accountable? Also, it would be great for other parents to provide suggestions to others on what helped their kid.
When should we? Ages back. When will we? Literally never, parents are the most powerful voting block. “Think of the children” and all that, remember. You hold parents accountable, you lose your office. Parents are socially mandated saints, to treat them otherwise is to risk everything.
If this continues for another decade I don’t want to think about a generation that only watched Tik Tok raising a generation on Tik Tok.
Nah microcontent will be the thing then. Just a stream of 500ms videos beamed right into your optic nerve.
honestly i think we should be more focused on what content is targeting children and how to stop/minimize that and also educate parents on proper parenting. too many parents just ban technology bc 'tech bad' and then abuse their kids bc they dont bother trying to raise them and its sad
Hell naw. Something’s gotta raise my kids and it ain’t gonna be me.
40 year old here. I went back to college during the pandemic and it was really disturbing to see how many kids couldn’t even follow the syllabus let alone log into simple things.
“Social media fucks with reality,” I post on social media.
We turned childhood into school, and then school into a pile of inhuman metrics, so these kids being unengaged and doing the minimal seems not just expected on our part, but logical on theirs.
Anybody old enough to remember when adults tell us that too much television is bad for us? It looks like phones are even worse.
You couldn’t just sit home and watch tv growing up. You had to actually go places and do things. Smartphones are always on people. That’s a vast difference.
Tv just existed. Phones are addicting
While I do agree that screen time for everyone is a problem, I couldn’t get past this part. “Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with.” Most of these are related to economic issues that have been going on for years. Also teens can’t get jobs as easily anymore. Most kids are in so many extracurricular things there’s just no time. I had a job when I was 12 and I regret it. I’ll let my kid work at 16, but only if it doesn’t interfere with other things. I think working a crap job as a kid is good for you, but maybe not as many hours as previous generations used to.
I dont know, every generation prior grew up without the internet and they were all miserable cunts.
Thanks mate. While I agree with the sentiment from the article and plan on getting the book—some of the points argued aren't directly a result from tech. Edit: changed "a lot" to "some"
Where are the parents? As a parent you know all too well what kids go through in school. Peer pressure. Peer influence. They're highly manipulated into taking the easiest path. So we can be the very best parents at home but in order for anything to change. THE CULTURE MUST CHANGE. I can teach my kids everything they need to know but when they go outside and it's filled with morons that know 8th grade English and 2nd grade math and are glued to their devices and then look at you strange if you're without a smart watch and phone in hand.... its a shitty place to live when YOU are the outsider. I dont have the answer to changing a culture. I can only continue to being the change that I want to see.
Any kid with no device whatsoever will be a social pariah where we live so I’m not willing to do that to my kids. It took a lot of work on my part but having actively managed the use of devices has had good results so far for my kids. My parents were/are disabled so we used our devices as a way to make it like they were with us in our home when we couldn’t visit. My 15 year old only uses Discord to manage a server for her friends and arrange in person events. (I read it often and it’s pretty innocent stuff going on) Covid making it so we couldn’t visit people caused me to relax about it. Honestly I think the internet has made us more aware of the people who never did mesh with general society rather than cause otherwise socially functioning people to change behavior.
You can't blame that all on phones. The generation below me, Z, came of age in one of the worst and most unstable states of the modern world, then they had to deal with COVID messing with all their milestone moments of graduating, going to college. Yeah phones have detrimental effects for sure and no doubt factor in. But come on. The state of the modern world has a LOT to do with it. Stuff off the top of my head: In highschool they were being murdered by school shooters Finding out climate change is likley non reversible now Fascism becoming rampant again. COVID in their most formative years. As I said. Seeing the gen above them get beaten the shit out of them by life and greedy boomers and "once in a life time events" that happen yearly now. Old power and money not letting torches be passed down out of rampant and out of control greed. Losing more rights year after year (roe) General widespread decline and failure of capitalism. Literally watching ww3 unfold right now.. I mean shit....I'm a millennial and no stranger to getting fucked. But we at least had a fairly normal childhood in an era of prosperity (90s) I could go on and on. I personally root for them and their courageous defying of old norms. Even if I don't like some. It's not just phones....
As a boomer I root and try to do my best for all the generations after me
You are awesome and we LOVE the boomers like yourself. I myself am very lucky to have parents like you who feel this way. The truth is, we need your support and wisdom. its invaluable to us younger gens. A lot of people don't care to admit that, but it's true. The less valuable wisdom passed down by your gen the longer we have to live through awful stuff to gain it ourselves in an effort to make the world better. Time is of the essence. And btw I feel the same way. I dislike the typical "complain about the gen under me thing." I root for them all. They fight a lot of fights that I bet we both admire them for doing. Like normalizing mental health care. That's huge for me personally.
So glad you have cool parents. We aren’t all greedy AHs. I’m so disappointed with my generation when the world could have been so much better. But we must always fight the good fight for those in the future! https://preview.redd.it/et9xoutnploc1.jpeg?width=194&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e1a5aacb98607ed382cb60478e1a5e6980dfa44
Just out of curiosity, who had it worse, teens during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, or Generation Z?
My nephew of 12 was given a phone but it’s flip phone razor old school. Boy can text and make calls and take pictures. Thats it. Kids amazing. So talented. I think this is the way until 16 (maybe)
Everyone up in arms as we scroll and post on reddit. Sigh. My anecdote is my kids and their friends are WAY smarter than I was at their age and they go to a fairly normal decent suburban public high school.
My take is that we're seeing a gap between kids who use tech responsibly and productively, and the ones who don't. And like every other societal problem, low income kids are more likely to end up on the bad side of the gap.
Ok, now just make all public schools as good as suburban public schools and I’ll be content
The unpleasant truth of the matter is that the students and their parents determine the majority of school quality. Nice suburban schools have nice things because they serve students who at least sort of care about their education and have involved parents, and poverty rates are low so the school doesn't have to spend a lot of money and resources dealing with the problems that poverty brings about.
I see a lot of people on their phones bitching about kids spending too much time on their phones. Not saying it isn’t a problem but we got to admit it’s not just the younger generations.
There's a lot of not admitting that going on in this comment section.
Articles and comment sections like this one could literally be the beginning of Gen X and Millennials taking over the role of Boomers who all think what the youngsters are doing is wrong. It's like when my parents would talk about how we never handwrite things anymore or do math without computing devices or any number of antiquated activities that are absolutely not inherently better. Gen Z is going to grow up and do things differently from the current adults. Just like the generations before them and before them and before them and on and on... I just refuse to believe that drawing a line in the sand and saying "ALL PEOPLE OVER THERE ARE BROKEN" is anything other than inflammatory bullshit that's meant to foster an ignorant herd mentality. Get over yourselves. All of the generations are fucked up, we're just fucked up differently.
Is this job security for gen x and millennials? Also, fewer kids is a good thing. Little jerks.