I’ve been so frustrated with the narrative around the latest teen mental health study results, so I truly appreciate your thoughts and the resources you provide. I was part of a 10-year strategic planning committee with my local school district in 2019-20. The first meeting focused on a student panel. Every single one of them told us they were tired of only being a number (GPA). They said a version of this in answer to virtually every question posed. The committee had some limited discussion about eliminating class ranking, with the majority of parents being highly opposed. In the end, the district opted to continue as is. All of this made me think back to my high school years (I graduated in 1985). I honestly do not remember there ever being talk about GPA or class rank beyond who the valedictorian might be (which we only thought about in the week or two before graduation). My daughter graduated in 2020 and class rank in her peer group (all top 10% students) was a daily conversation starting in sophomore year. Our high school is so large (her class graduated 1,742 students), GPA’s are figured to five decimals, so they would freak out over a 99 vs. a 100. The pressure was intense! Referring back to my experience with the student panel and the district’s decision to maintain the status quo; adding to the intense pressure was the knowledge that they had ZERO power to change anything and that the panel had been nothing more than a performative exercise—tell us what you think, but we don’t intend to listen. I feel strongly that Mr. Greene was on to something in 2015, something that has only intensified in the years since, and that is this narrative, particularly among the upper and upper middle class, that failure simply isn’t an option. That to fail in 5th or 6th grade is to fail for the rest of your life. And, to be clear, failure here isn’t real failure. For this cohort and their parents failure is defined as ANYTHING less than perfect. Phones are not what’s wrong with kids. We parents are what’s wrong with kids!
When Haidt wrote "there is no sign of teen mental health epidemic before 2012", he was literally talking about the "Monitoring the Future" dataset (the graphic at the top of this piece), which indeed shows 35 years of flat results and then begins to spike for liberal girls in 2012 and then for everyone else shortly after.
He certainly wasn't saying that there were no issues at all with youth prior to 2012. In fact, in the very essay you're talking about, Haidt specifically talk about the how the movement toward more kids having an external "locus of control" began in the 1990s when parents stopped letting kids play on their own outside.
But he clearly does think that something important changed around 2012; he is basing that conclusion on real research data; and he makes a pretty compelling case for why we should be looking at phones and social media.
Now if you disagree with his conclusions, I'd be interested in hearing why, so I'm looking forward to your subsequent essays. But simply finding examples of people writing complaints about the youth today from before 2012 won't do the trick. Without doing any research, I'll guarantee that you can find examples of that phenomenon from every year since we've had newspapers.
If you're going to make a serious argument that Haidt is wrong, you either need to find holes in the data he's looking at that show a spike in 2012 or explain why that data isn't important and what data we should be looking at instead. Looking forward to seeing your argument.
No offense, but this is pedantry substituting for analysis. It's actually an interesting rhetorical move common online, but rooted in debate culture where one tries to put the discussion in a fall back position on which a more technical, limited point can be debated, rather than continuing the thread of the original argument and advancing the discussion. The strategy is that as long as the very limited claim (that Haidt was only commenting on that one study, and not in general) is true, the larger argument holds.
I get why people do this, but it's annoying, and in this case, it's B.S.
Haidt in both Coddling and his numerous public writings on this subject both directly and indirectly claims that the chief source of problems for young people is the phones/social media. He is so committed to this theory that he has now developed his explanation of "reverse CBT" suggesting that whatever distress young people experience over their phones (or more broadly in the culture) is a distortion, largely ungrounded in reality. As with Coddling, he's invented a pathology that some people (you among them apparently) are willing to give credence to because, in my view, it is a way to dodge the more important work of examining what's happening at the roots.
The idea that kids not being allowed to play outside is the chief cause of loss of locus of control as opposed to the copious evidence (only some of which is cited above) of students experiencing extreme pressure over their "performance" in school and life is frankly silly. The thought that if we just let kids play on their own outside more they wouldn't feel the kind of overwhelming pressure of Levine's patients or students like Kathryn DeWitt does not make sense.
How often does Haidt examine possible factors like school shootings, climate despair, the 2008 global recession as contributors to this phenomenon? Not often because his stance requires him to ignore that there may be good reasons to be distressed.
There is overwhelming evidence that something was afoot prior to widespread access to social media and its capacity to amplify negative social comparison, which truly can have a distorting effect on the self. We should look at phones and social media, but in my view we should first pay attention to what we are internalizing via social media. Just as in previous generations we needed to look at the radio or television.
The idea that the sources I shared are "people writing complaints about youth of today" is a mischaracterization and an insult to those sources. Those aren't complaints. Those are calls for attention and help, calls that were not heeded, unfortunately often not heeded by parents who are living lives under the same pressure of toxic meritocracy as their children (see both the Fleishman effect) and Marianna's comment as examples.
>"If you're going to make a serious argument...blah blah blah" is more rhetorical sophistry that is so often in evidence online and not responsive to the point at hand. The attempt to characterize someone else's argument as "unserious" is itself, the height of unseriousness.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to think analytically about the world. I don't know who taught you this, or why you've learned it, but they didn't do you any favors.
(Do you see what I just did with that last sentence, I pulled the same debate B.S. you did by challenging the very frame of your premise. Do you see how it derails things from a more robust discussion about the subject at hand and is deeply annoying?)
I don't need to "find holes in his data" in his data to or show why the data "isn't important." I reject the core part of his frame and am suggesting another. The idea that "the data doesn't lie" is a lie. Data is always embedded in an underlying system of values. I write about this in education all the time. There's reports that say, "Student achievement has increased (or decreased) but when I look at the measurement being used on student progress, that measurement is fundamentally at odds with what is actually important when it comes to learning. See this post at my other Substack on the problem of Campbell's Law, which applies here: https://educationalendeavors.substack.com/p/campbells-law-something-every-educator
We don't have a dispute about data. We have a difference of values. At the core of those differences is that Haidt essentially believes we have a just and fair world and that these problems are the result of catastrophizing. Haidt invented a pathology because he didn't like students at Yale yelling at professors. The notion that students may be exercising their speech rights doesn't seem to occur to him
While I believe that we have to be thoughtful about how social media may amplify negative messages (in the same way this is true of all media), my view is that what students are reacting to is not illusory, but genuine and real, that they are experiencing a system that is legitimately and unnecessarily punishing, and it is this underlying system that needs examining and reforming.
Some of this is on parenting, and some good can be done there. Some of this is on making sure we engage with the world at large in ways that go beyond our phones. But a lot of it, dare I say most of it, is about making a world that makes space for young people to experience the inevitable failures of youth without feeling like they're throwing away their entire futures when these bad things happen. That means making the world itself a more just place.
My focus in terms of solutions is on the nature of school, and then more specifically how we teach writing since that's my area of expertise and I happen to believe that writing is a great way for students to learn agency, self-efficacy, and self-belief. Unfortunately, the incentive structure around writing in our system of schooling is straight-up hostile to that vision, but I see some signs of progress.
By itself, it isn't going to be enough, but it's the place closest to the core of the problem where I, personally, can make a difference.
All voices are welcome here, but this comment is not a contribution. It does not advance the ball. It drags the discussion to unproductive territory where we're talking about possible semantic distinctions over Jon Haidt's interpretation of a chart. Does that seem truly meaningful to you? It isn't. If you think it is, you've been poisoned by online discourse. (See: the online warrior type from last week's post.)
Rather than doing online pedantry, let's see if you can advance the ball. What is your general theory that explains the mental health distress of young people, your theory, developed from your unique set of values and understanding of the world, not something borrowed from Jon Haidt, and then, what sort of remedies do you think will help alleviate these problems?
That's the discussion we should be having. Coming here to tut-tut about interpreting how someone else has interpreted a chart when the discussion is clearly on larger territory is a waste of everyone's time, including yours.
I think you are absolutely right that, "There is overwhelming evidence that something was afoot prior to widespread access to social media and its capacity to amplify negative social comparison, which truly can have a distorting effect on the self." But I was surprised to see in the previous paragraph, "How often does Haidt examine possible factors like school shootings, climate despair, the 2008 global recession as contributors to this phenomenon?" These seem to me to be concerns of the average NYT/NPR follower and not things that young people care much about. Perhaps "climate despair" but that seems to fit nicely with Haidt's concerns about catastrophizing (as, I suppose, would be concerns about school shootings, considering how statistically rare they are, i.e., how unlikely they are to actually happen to a particular young person). Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you or him. This is the first thing I've read by you (though I hope to read the links) and I haven't read any Haidt since "Why Good People are Divided by Politic and Religion".
I was a little surprised to see the emphasis on over-competing. I was a high school teacher (retired in 2002) and one thing that shocked me was how many young males were content to be mediocre. They just didn't seem to much care. Now perhaps this was just a reaction to years of over-pressure but it was very different from my own experience back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I also found it interesting how many of the cited "calls for attention and help" were from females. As everybody knows (and nobody much cares), females do considerably better in school than males. I taught perhaps the most stereotypically (and historically) male course, physics. Females and males performed pretty much equally well, and often the best student or students were female. But perhaps they didn't want to be there?
There's a number of things that come to mind with this comment. Re: school shootings/climate despair, in my conversations with them, it's not so much that students actively worry about the worst coming to pass - though some do obsess about these things - as they are distressed by what they perceive as the lack of substantive action around these problems. The ineffectual nature of the responses from the adults in the world sows doubt that it is even possible to make the world a better place.
It's all very complicated. There's no silver bullet to address these things.
There's a lot of research showing that younger people tend to be more politically liberal in their views, but also much more distrustful of politics as a vehicle for solving problems. They don't have a lot of faith in institutions.
I don't know that no one cares about males not doing well in school. Hanna Rosin's "the end of men" was published in article form in 2010 and book form in 2012. I've read all kinds of theories about why boys don't do as well in school from differences in socialization to learning styles to girls feeling more pressure to seize opportunities now that they're more available. The research does show that girls are more likely to experience anxiety than boys.
Yes, Hanna Rosin's "end of men" came out a decade ago and Richard Reeves "Of Boys and Men" recently came out. Certainly, some people care. But there is absolutely no urgency. And for most people in authority it is not something they feel any need to do anything about. They are still more worried that women aren't getting a good enough deal. After all, don't we live in a patriarchy?
I wonder how much young people worrying about school shootings or climate change is trickle down from adults, in particular adults who say, "the government isn't doing what I know is necessary. (we need major gun control. we need to stop using fossil fuels. But it isn't happening!)" This is, after all, the default for most major media.
I'm intrigued by a number of different things, particularly what Reeves calls the potential structural problems around school, and his suggestions that boys start schooling a year later to give them time for additional neurological development.
It also gave me some ideas about thinking more on my own theory of "toxic meritocracy" given that girls really are doing better in school than boys, and have been for a little while now. Reeves suggests that girls are doing better because they tend to be more organized. They are essentially more equipped for the "schooling" part of school, following the rules that are valued by the system, e.g., turning your homework in on time.
I'm wondering (and this is a hypothesis rooted in my own priors) if this explains some of the differences in anxiety/depression by gender that have girls at much higher levels, while boys are at higher risk for suicide.
Over time, it's my view that school has become more about schooling and less about learning, as following the rules - this is true in writing instruction - was valued over exploration and failure. If girls are better at this for whatever reason (Reeves seems to suggest it could be neurological, but certainly socialization must have a factor?), but this system is inherently stressful and unfulfilling, anxiety and depression may come coupled with this higher achievement.
The reaction among boys may be different, disengagement, meaning they don't do as well in school, which would manifest itself differently in terms of mental health.
I'll have to check it out. I would add that modern school is also more comfortable to females than males. If we applied the reasoning of discrimination law, we would even say it is a hostile environment for males.
I was recently reading Joyce Benson's Warriors and Worriers and was struck by this, "Unlike boys, girls almost never boast, command each other, tell jokes at one another's expense, try to top another's stories, call each other names, or in any way show off." If those things happened at my school, the student would have been told "inappropriate." Schools privilege what Benenson considers female behaviors, female predispositions, female predilections.
It's a pretty interesting book. Perhaps, generalizing wildly from your reply to Peter Kriens, you would consider (at least part of it) to be "essentialist nonsense". The question of just what differences there are between males and females is an extremely important one. To talk of "the male essence" or "the male principle", as was once respectable, is not helpful. But neither is denying any difference as a matter of principle.
This just popped into my head. As you say, the world is not fair and just. It has never been fair and just (I just finished Catherine Cameron's "Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World" which is way too full of slavery and semi-slavery all over the world throughout human history). Perhaps the problem with young people is that they have been taught to expect the world to be fair and just (and to have high standards about what is actually fair and just). The world doesn't measure up and they react badly.
I don't know that young people expect the world to be perfectly fair, but I think most of us desire a world where cliches like "hard work pays off" are more true than not.
It is hard to invest yourself in your work when it becomes clear that no matter what you do, that work will not be rewarded. It's not just that the world isn't just, but that justice is a literal impossibility.
Perfect justice is an impossibility. I remember when I was young hearing that old Joe Kennedy had told JFK that "life is unfair". At the time, I thought it was a terrible thing to do, but now I don't think so. Depending on the context, it may have been a very good thing. Like telling you it's cold so you put on a coat or that your fair skin means you can't expect to avoid a painful sunburn after a day of bicycling--unless you use sunscreen. I personally love biking and hate sunscreen.
And, yes, hard work pays off a lot more often than half-assing things.
I was told often by my parents that "life isn't fair" and I think it was a good message as a reminder that sometimes you want something and can do everything possible to get it, but it still isn't going to happen.
But there is a difference between "life isn't fair and you're going to get disappointed sometimes" and "life isn't fair, so it doesn't matter what you do because stuff is going to be crappy anyway."
I want to believe that the latter is not true, but in working with students over the last however many years, I know that their experience of the system - particularly of school - makes them feel more like the latter because they don't have enough of a chance to practice agency and autonomy and develop their own desires. It feels like a trap to them.
Big big difference. Which leads to the question, "why do they think that?"
How much of this is the down side of freedom and opportunity? For most of human history, young people didn't have much of a chance "to practice agency and autonomy and develop their own desires." They were probably going to do what their parents did and do what they could to keep from starving.
And how much is being told too much, "follow your dreams; you can be anything you set your mind to; you are special and wonderful"? Believing that will inevitably lead to disappointment.
The wisest man I ever knew used to say, "I know how to make my kids hate me: promise them this (holding his hand at eye level), and give them this (lowering it to waist height)."
Actually, it strikes me as a serious question. Why was there an apparent change around 2012? I agree that the problem has its roots in the past several decades, but something changed around that year. Was it an increased willingness of teens to talk about the problem or of professionals to listen? That happened with the Feminine Mystique which gave women a vocabulary to discuss what was a long standing problem.
American life does seem to have become a lot more precarious. A high school diploma is no longer enough to live comfortably if modestly, nor does a college degree suffice. The ticket seems to be a college degree at a top college or a more advanced degree, at least for now. Are children sensing and reacting to their parents' well justified anxieties? Before that came the day care center sex abuse trials and the irrational fear of children being abducted by strangers. I grew up free range in the 1960s, so I barely recognize childhood nowadays.
For all that, there was a change in the survey results around 2012, and I'm not the only one curious as to why.
I think the apparent change in the data is actually a bit before 2012, but it could be any and all of the things you mention and more. It's in the aftermath of the first major recession of a young person's lifetime and that may have an effect.
I have a vivid memory of the stock market crash of 1987 when I was junior in high school. I had classmates weeping in the hallways because their families had been wiped out. In a number of cases, their fathers had lost seats on the Chicago Board of Trade that had been in the family for multiple generations that had to be relinquished to meet a margin call.
Could something similar have scarred a generation of teens in 2008, exacerbated by other factors along the way?
Many of the books I cite above are concerned about children not just having school-related anxiety, but the over programming and the lack of attention to young people using their time to form a genuine sense of self. I can say from my experience teaching that I had many students who were not particularly in touch with what they wanted from their own lives. They'd been conditioned to try to achieve without that achievement representing anything genuine and meaningful.
For some, they despaired that they didn't feel the way they thought they were supposed to, which led to disengagement from school, which resulted in poor grades, more disengagement, etc...
I know the Great Depression scarred my parents' generation. A lot of them remember a period of prosperity followed by a period of deprivation. It's quite possible that a lot of kids were hit by the 2008 crisis in ways that will show up novels being written in the near future. If nothing else, polls indicate that "socialism" is not a curse word among that generation as it is for many older than them, and that could be a result.
I agree 100% about the over programming. That took off in the 1990s. Life is one activity after another with little or no time for just themselves. If nothing else, the drum beat of all that scheduling is bound to increase anxiety as it wipes out the ability to plan and think independently. I've seen some kids really battered by this, though I've seen a few who recognized their calling as soldier, tech executive or musician.
John: Will write two replies. The second will be a true response to your reply above. But before getting to that message, which I suspect you won't love, I did want to share the things I like about your Substack, so those don't get lost. And there are a number of things I do indeed like.
- I enjoy your writing. You’ve got personality, and I am a sucker for writers who add the right amount of meta to their pieces. I think you do a good job of walking up to the line where that can go from interesting to precious or distracting without crossing it.
- I appreciate your philosophy of writing and teaching writing. I thought your recent piece about ChatGPT was particularly good, and I expect your new writing course will be good as well. Will encourage my kids’ school to take a look.
- I like the conceit of the Substack. I'm realizing that I really like a site about books that isn’t simply reviews but about the role of books and reading in society. And your forays into current events, while almost unfailingly misguided, are about subjects that interest me, and it’s always good for me to read pieces I disagree with on those subjects.
- Finally, I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to engage with commenters, something that relatively Substacks writers I follow do.
So as thanks and a gesture of good faith, I subscribed for a year. Feel like I owe you that for engaging, even though I wouldn’t normally pay for a once a week Substack, much less from one whose political takes I disagree with quite as consistently as I disagree with yours. 🙂
I appreciate this very much. I enjoy disagreement. Back in the days when Inside Higher Ed had comments, I would spend far too much time going back and forth with my readers there. I even tried to establish a separate discussion board for myself when they ended comments, but it never got traction.
And whatever you have to say in the other comment, provided it advances conversation, rather than dragging it back to a pedantic debating point, I'll love it! I have no need for people to think I'm correct about anything, which is why the "debate me bro" culture that is to prevalent online is so fundamentally uninteresting to me. No one truly learns anything from that, most importantly, I don't learn anything from that.
Linking a bunch of books that make hyperbolic claims isn’t very convincing. Books are always doing that. The data does seem to suggest that there was a big change around 2010-2014 (I don’t know if we can be so precise as a single year).
However it’s also true that data from the 1980s (which Haidt doesn’t include) shows about equally bad levels of mental health as now. Then in the 90s/00s there was a big improvement (why?) and now we’ve returned. I think any good explanation should address this longer-term trend.
I have not looked at this newsletter in detail because I just saw it this morning, but to your second paragraph, it suggests that these things are cyclical and we're in a rising point of the cycle. https://nowandnext.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-cdc-yrbs-data
Seem possible, but of course it also makes one wonder what is driving the cycle? The late 90's, early 2000's were a period of relative calm and economic prosperity, jolted by 9/11, but the suicide rates didn't start climbing until years later.
How about The Split Level Trap from 1960? It's a hellish portrait of life in the rapidly growing suburbs. Was Bergen County, NJ really that awful?
You are right about the date of the change. It could have been 2012, or it could have been 2016 or so depending on how you slice the salami. The easy to find tools on the CDC site don't seem to go back past 1999.
As a dad of 2 young boys, I have been following all the back and forth on this, and just want to say thank you to everyone involved, because it is a big topic and in the end, helping (no matter the cause) will be crucial. The discourse is incredibly important.
I was really taken by your point, and wonder if as you note quickly at the end, that with further research it will prove that your theory is indeed the basis, maybe alongside some of the helicopter parenting (safetyism), that then was extremely exacerbated by comparison on social media. Seeing the "grind" culture push to attend Ivy league schools, or for dreams to be crushed if College or University didn't pan out as if there was no other option to a happy life could be the very thing that has driven this. I think Haidt makes a lot of strong points related to comparison being a key driver, and I see that here within your argument as well. The cycle we need to break out of is the constant jockeying for status within such a vast community. Its possible (and human) to want it and attain it in our small group, but expanding outward across the globe and competing with others hundreds if not thousands of miles away would be crushing.
Thank you either way for the fantastic rebuttal and I look forward to reading more.
They go over lots of different angles of the problem and one of the things it changed my mind on was phones/social media in that I've tended to be a skeptic of them as a cause of distress, rather than a possible correlate to problems with other roots, but as I understood the conversation, the problem the phones exacerbate is this idea of "negative social comparison" where one finds too much reinforcement that they aren't measuring up to others.
The problem of negative social reinforcement is not new - it's actually eternal - but social media is an obvious vector for the experience. So is school, particularly schooling that is hyper competitive.
There's also a whole other part of the problem around bullying that is not caused by social media, but where social media can be a vector for the problem.
As I say in the post, I think in terms of remedies there's a lot of agreement, but there's differences in the root of the problem. Haidt's theory of "reverse CBT" is invented from a previous theory (the great untruths) that is also unevidenced, even in his own book. He seems reluctant to go to the places that may implicate certain aspects of our culture.
Anecdotes do not make Haidt "demonstrably wrong". The tweet you highlight from him displayed a graph, so you should be responding with data rather than instances of people writing books claiming an epidemic exists.
There is a weird fetish among some folks that charts are somehow “real data” and everything else is somehow wanting, and this is a very bad thing for critical thinking and analysis. Anecdotal data is data, qualitative data and it’s often better data depending on the questions we’re trying to answer, as I observed repeatedly in my career in market research. If we want to know what is stressing young people out and understand the root causes of that stress. We should be asking them about their stress. This is what books like Levines’s reveals.
One of the chief weaknesses of Haidt’s approach is relying on aggregated data to tell human stories. That chart he shares tells us nothing about why young people are experiencing more mental health distress. He theorizes because it is linked to phones, but this chart offers no insight into that hypothesis whatsoever.
The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them. This is observational, qualitative research, and while we can go back and then create a survey instrument to try to quantify the size and scope of the phenomenon, that quantification does not necessarily give us deep insights into the nature of the phenomenon. The observational data is necessary for that.
Haidt's dives into data sets looking for evidence of cause that is not necessarily going to be found in those data sets. I'm reminded of an interesting guest post I ran at my Inside Higher Ed blog by Sara Rose Cavanagh, herself a psychology professor on the confounding nature of the data between cell phone use and mental health in which she identifies "the problem of people," namely that people are complex and it is very difficult to boil complex problems down to singular explanations. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/guest-post-confounding-relationship-between-smart-phones-and-mental-health
We want these discussions to be as complicated and ranging as possible because those are the conversations that shed more light on the problems. My worry about Haidt is that he's falling prey to the old saw about someone who has lost his keys on a street at night and is searching under a street lamp because "that's where the light is." Haidt has decided that phones are where the light is, but this is not necessarily true. It may be true in some ways, false in others.
We have some very bad habits around thinking about data in our culture that need undoing. The notion that graphs must be met with graphs is one of them.
Quantitative measures have to be used carefully and so, of course, does qualitative information. I'm not at all sure that "The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them." Say a teen is depressed and a parent asks, "why do you feel so hopeless?" The parent has been heard to say that humans are destroying the planet. The teen then answers, "Because we're destroying the planet. There's no future for me." This answer is easily available and the parent will probably be sympathetic--may even be proud of how perceptive the teen is. But it may well not be the real reason.
The scenario you describe is not how a professional does qualitative research. The kinds of questions one asks are often more indirect and designed to draw spontaneous unprompted responses from the subject, rather than the sort of scenario you describe.
Another important tool of qualitative research is observation, where we look at behaviors, make observations, draw inferences from those observations and then hypothesize from those inferences. When working in market research, I had projects where I'd spend hours just watching people shop in a big box store and noting their behaviors. Sometimes we'd follow up with questions, but not always.
Later we would create a quantitative survey based in our hypotheses to measure those hypotheses.
Quantitative research was great at trying to do something like measure which version of an ad got more clicks in an A/B test. But we'd have to do qualitative research and observation to actually understand why that might be the case. Even very sophisticated analysis like heat mapping of where people's eyeballs where going as they looked at an ad wasn't as good as either a one-on-one interview or a focus group where a professional research can engage them in a structured, exploratory discussion that draws out fresh insights.
It's pretty fascinating, even when I was working on something like displays for industrial florescent lightbulbs, as I once did.
I completely agree. I was just responding to your statement, "The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them." It sounded to me like, "If you want to know why a teen is depressed, ask that teen, "what's bothering you?" As your comment above makes clear, that's not what you meant.
One of the tragedies of early childhood "research" was the satanic abuse panic of several decades ago. Concerned, caring adults would talk with very young children, feeling sure that they had been abused, and after a while, that's just what the kids told them! But it was all bullsh*t. The adults had cued the children and had kept at them until they told the adults what the adults wanted to hear. It is a comforting myth of science that scientists are always trying to disprove hypotheses. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they are actually trying to find evidence in favor of what they already think is right.
No, I can't agree that the best way to figure out why a teen is depressed is to ask them. We know that genetics plays a role in depression, but you aren't going to figure that out from asking a teen (unless that teen has read up on the research establishing that). We know anti-depressants can play a role, but if you ask a teen they probably won't tell you about their brain chemistry. If I asked a teen with cancer how they got it, I wouldn't expect them to know. And depression is specifically something that affects how people think, thus making their answers even less reliable.
Okay, so you don't understand how research works, which is fine, but what you describe is not the process that unfolds as a method of discovery.
Madeline Levine (The Price of Privilege) spends many hours talking to and observing her patients their answers and her observations filtered through her considerable expertise result in inferential conclusions about what's going on.
We can also ask students questions like those on UCLA's HERI project such as, "Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all I have to do" on a scale of agreement and observe how the number of students who agree at the highest level has markedly increased over time.
I think you just don't have a great appreciation how this kind of research works.
Robyn Dawes wrote in "House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth" about people like Levine who had high confidence in their expertise built up via spending many hours talking to and observing their patients... but had none of the actual predictive ability they believed they had, nor demonstrably better effect on their patients than college students trying to act out the same role. Dawes was about to make that evaluation of his peers & colleagues (revealing that many examples of failure to adhere to Bayesian rationality in "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" had come from them) by actually looking at data rather than assuming he could rely on their own statements.
No, anecdotes are not data. Data is systematically collected, not just what's salient enough for you to subjectively consider it significant and include it in a book. And if we're talking about change over time, then we need to have data we can compare from one time period to another. Haidt's charts do allow a comparison between time periods, and it's on that basis that he says we don't see it prior to 2012.
Again, you just don't seem to understand how to think deeply about different varieties of data in a critical thinking/analysis situation. Different questions require different types of data. I am not making a claim about what's happened over time. I am interrogating Haidt's claim that there was "no sign of a mental health crisis." Clearly there were signs and the investigations of these various books are clear data of those signs.
I don't know where you learned this about "data" but it's wrong.
A "crisis" does not consist of anecdotes. There have always been some people who were least happy, but a "crisis" is something acute rather than permanent.
I agree that "crisis" is probably the wrong word to describe these phenomena. I wrote a piece about this a while back about how we shouldn't use that language to describe something that appears more chronic, and rooted more deeply in the culture.
I recall reading somewhere that relentless parenting started among the well-educated affluent but has since become the norm across socioeconomic classes. If so, it would generate something resembling the data set you've assembled: Initially, it wouldn't show in the statistics very well because the well-educated affluent aren't a large fraction of society ... but they're a large fraction of the book market and so you'd see books about the troubles in that class. Later, as the pattern spreads, you would see it more in the statistics.
Yes, this is where my thinking tends to land. I think it not only spreads, but it's the upper socioeconomic classes that shape the institutions everyone must interact with, very much including school.
For example, the meritocratic attitude around the benefits of getting into an elite school has resulted in shaping where resources go in order to help less fortunate students. Years ago I wrote about a plan from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to provide free access to SAT tutoring through Khan Academy and how limited this help would be in providing opportunities to poorer students given that the slots in highly selective schools are extremely limited and the vast majority of colleges are not highly selective. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/chan-zuckerberg-initiatives-skewed-values
Giving students a small leg up in order to better compete with other students who have greater advantages isn't much of a help. It would be far better to help more students access some form of post-secondary education/training, and then make sure those institutions are as well resourced as those elite institutions. (That's the thesis of my book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education.
I once read a book about the culture of "moderately wealthy" people, IIRC, $1 to $10 million in non-housing assets. One chapter was about education. Its assessment of their attitude was "The college your child attends is a verdict on your life." Until that changes, driving children crazy in order to get them into the highest-ranked colleges will continue.
Do you think there's any connection to the recent-ish questioning of the value of higher education? Could that be a (possibly even healthy) response to these overbearing pressures?
I do think that's a healthy response because it's an indicator of students practicing "agency" over their own lives. The idea that college is necessary for a good life isn't true or helpful when it comes to helping young people figure these things out.
Did you also consider the changed role of women in society since the 70's? What I think is a significant factor in the stress we see today. Clearly the change of the public role of women was quite dramatic? However, as a 64 year old living through this revolution I've also seen a change in private roles: father and mothers.
Although women generally held the reins in the household in the past, especially with children, the role of the father was often to mitigate the higher levels of caring traits like anxiety and neuroticism in women with his higher levels in stoicism and pragmatism. I think roughhousing, cajoling, and conditional love provided a balance against the `devouring mother`. As the mother did against the uncaring father. In a good family the feminine and masculine are in balance. However, I noticed over the past 60 years how many women become more leading in the home and started to override the father's role. As exhibited in a word like 'mansplaining' and the female monologue of #metoo. Men were stifled and their stoicism meant they did not care that much.
In primary schools and primary care I also saw the male authority disappear. Masculine aspects like competition, 'sticks and stones', 'in love and war everything is allowed', and 'you never snitch' were replaced by adult females interfering profoundly with the group dynamics. Bullying, losing, and hurting yourself are natural mechanisms to increase resilience. What seems to be happening today is imho explained quite well with Taleb's book Anti-Fragile. When you don't exercise the defense mechanisms, you lose them.
However, there was in my observations also a secondary effect. Feminism always refused to accept that there are actually large group differences between the sexes. Since feminism was manned by women that were well educated and more masculine than average they did no fight for femininity, they just wanted access to the same jobs males in their social economic class had. And I leave you to ponder about the difference between a university processor or a sewer cleaner in this context.
They therefore actively removed systems in place to protect feminine choices. Today in the middle & lower class it is almost impossible to have a family on one salary. Tax advantages and special protections have been removed. Since many of the feminist women found a career in media, girls have been relentlessly pushed to compete with males on exactly the traits where they have a group disadvantage while at the same time the traditional feminine role of mother and carer, has been blackballed. Modern feminism somehow made the masculine the norm.
What I see around me is that this made the pressure on girls is relentless. The number of times I've seen companies I work for as a consultant push free events for girls to do STEM is embarrassing, look how many more scholarships there are for girls than boys. When we lived in Sweden, my wife was often looked down upon for not working while she often had more kids at home than her friend who worked in child care. Society is stunningly anti-feminine. My daughter in law picked physics although she really preferred English.
World wide surveys show about roughly 1/5th of women want a full time career, 1/5th want take care of children, and the remaining 3/5th want a combination. Only about 1% of men want to take full time care of children. This is not the impression an alien would get when they observe the TV, movies, press, internet, academia, and politics of our world.
The result is that the environment of young girls expects them to choose a flashing career. Since girls on average are more agreeable & have higher levels of conscientiousness than boys they really want to oblige. It is stunning how hard I see girls work sometimes while most boys tend to goof off until they find their thing (if ever). When you see the enormous pressure we put on girls you can only feel sorry and wonder why the mental health problems are not worse. Women are on average more anxious and higher in neuroticism. I expect that many also feel how bad their fit is for the career woman model that is so harshly pushed on them. Despite the enormous pressure to have a career, women on average work significantly fewer hours (for a full time job, men on average tend to work 42 mins more per day, almost 2 days per month), they still tend to take years off for raising kids, retire earlier, and are very rarely as encompassed by their work as some men. For one male dentist you need to train 3 females. Susan Pinker's 'The Sexual Paradox' is very enlightening.
Evolution made men and women different in some important traits. What is all important is that everybody can pursue happiness in their own ways, regardless of sex; those are human values we learned in the enlightenment; values that I'd be willing to die for.
However, feminism did not 'emancipate' (a term from slavery) married women, it actively worked to remove the choice for women to pursue the feminine. I think we are paying the price. Well, our girls are paying the price. At least I think.
I personally think 90% of this is overstated nonsense rooted in a kind of fear of societal change and doesn't really help us do anything to untangle present issues in a way that emphasizes freedom and agency and equality, but I very much appreciate it as a different perspective.
I do think we need to think about structures that provide opportunities for everyone to pursue the path that most calls to them, whatever that my be. Blaming problems on feminism or what have you doesn't really makes sense to me as an analysis of the present, but it's particularly unhelpful as a tool of moving forward, unless your solution is to attempt to wind back the clock to the time when there were far more structural barriers to women exploring certain paths, which I don't think is your point.
This stuff about perusing the feminine vs. pursuing the masculine is essentialist nonsense and again, not particularly useful when thinking about the structures and culture that helps us move forward, but I think I get where you're coming from, which is helpful.
Rather strange reply to a message that I tried to craft carefully and with the clear indication I do not want to touch anybody's freedom, agency, and/or equality in any way. The point is, as Mary Harrington writes about, is that maybe we're pushing them hard into a direction that they do not really want but find the heavy push hard to resist? Take an honest look around you and tell me that you do not see how hard girls are pushed in a single direction.
The change in roles in our societies over the past 60 years has been revolutionary, and even that is an understatement. But from your reaction (and many others) it does seem looking at the effect of those many changes is a giant taboo when it touches feminism.
I agree that we are pushing young people in general too hard, (or perhaps more accurately in too narrow a way) particularly when it comes to school/college/career as a pre-requisite for a good and happy life with that good and happy life being equated to making lots of money. That's what I mean by "toxic meritocracy" in the post itself.
So to that end, yes, girls are pushed in a particular direction, but so is everyone. This is important because the solution to these problems isn't to roll back what many see as the progress of the last 60 years for women in terms of creating opportunities to pursue the lives they wish for themselves, but to create systems that allow everyone a chance to identify and pursue their passions. This is not gender dependent, and none of it is caused by feminism, nor does feminism stand in the way of finding solutions. You seem to find that problematic because some of them want to be moms instead, but where is our concern for the men who primarily want to be dads but can't because of the same system?
The whole system of toxic meritocracy needs to come down so if there are women or men who want to primarily be parents they can be parents, those that don't want children don't have to have children, those that want to be teachers and nurses (regardless of gender) can actually afford to live reasonably comfortable lives of dignity
I don't enforce any taboos about discussing feminism. It's just that I'm more interested in interesting discussions about feminism, not recycled essentialist nonsense.
To try to be charitable to Peter Kriens, perhaps he is saying that pushing "school/college/career as a pre-requisite for a good and happy life with that good and happy life being equated to making lots of money" hurts women more than men because women are more likely to want something different. They are more likely to want to do things that are traditionally "feminine" or "woman's place". E.g., more women would like to be stay at home moms than men want to be stay at home dads. (And it is possible to be a stay at home dad; I did it for almost 20 years--though the latter five or so included a part time job.)
"Essentialist nonsense" says all women are one way and all men are another. It is indeed nonsense. But saying women are "more likely" than men to feel a certain way, to want to do certain things, to have certain feelings is not essentialist and is probably more true than conventional wisdom says. Everyone agrees that women are "more likely" to be short, or to put it a different way, are "on average" shorter.
Essentialist nonsense is not just about "all" of one category being one way or another, but assigning a likelihood of traits to a category based on them belonging to that category.
That essentialist nonsense is not particularly helpful or responsive to the questions of how we help people have good lives. It doesn't matter if more women want something different or more men want something different. It's why we should have things like paid family leave or tuition-free public higher ed that protect the choices of everyone regardless of status and identity.
You make a category leap error in that last paragraph. Height is overwhelmingly coded in our genes (with some additional factors like nutrition, etc...) while attitudes and beliefs like what we want out of life is almost certainly not part of our genetic coding and to treat it as such is indeed, essentialist nonsense.
Predispositions and predilections to think certain ways and desire certain things are indeed part of our genetic coding. There are things that humans find easy to think and feel, things that humans find difficult to think and feel, and things that are impossible--and there is some variance between people. Recognizing that is indeed helpful.
One of our predispositions is to like sugar and fat and salt. Recognizing that warns you not to take an "if it feels good, do it" attitude toward eating. Be careful what you feed your kids. Else you set them up for metabolic syndrome and diabetes and all the rest. When you lose weight, you will want, not just want but crave, to eat enough to put that weight back on. Thus, the truth that keeping weight off is a lot harder than taking it off. And the great untruth, "Losing weight is simple; just take in fewer calories than you use." You can't just flip a switch in your brain, "I will not desire to eat more than 1800 calories."
The brain is not some empty general purpose computer that can be programmed any way one wants. Some ways are easier, some are harder, and some are impossible. By the time one is born, there is a limited amount of plasticity. Try turning a gay person straight.
What? They used this algorithm to force people to take certain classes or not take others? It's one thing to tell a kid, "this is what we recommend because this is how we think you will do 'based on comparative data from other students who had taken a course.'" It's quite another to force the student to go along.
I believe if push came to shove a student could petition to override the recommendation, but the overwhelming message was that they should stick to the path that the AI believed was best. The concept of "guided pathways" toward graduation is pretty widespread, but I think it's fundamentally anti-student because it channels students towards paths that have nothing to do with them as individuals, and more about general characteristics. I just see it as a kind of violation of the core values of education.
But aren't their "general characteristics" also part of what make them who they are, what make them the individuals they are? You seem to be saying that only what's not in the algorithm is individual. If an algorithm said that, given the data it was fed, you would probably become a writer, would that take away your individuality? Would you have to not become a writer to reclaim your individuality? (shades of the underground man's "I am not a ciphering machine.")
General characteristics like one's gender and race are not ones we should use to determine the fates of individuals, not if we privilege freedom of choice over aggregate outcomes.
The occupational fit test I took in high school said I was suited to be a librarian or a CIA analyst, as I recall. Information that helps someone exercise their agency is fine, but the problems arrive when we substitute AI for human judgment and agency.
Do you deny the tendency of boys to engage in more boisterous, competitive play than girls, of girls to engage in more "nurturant" play than boys? Or is that just something their empty heads picked up from society?
I know that these phenomenon are accurate in aggregate, but I also know that we don't have a genetic or biological determinant for these things that declares these are nature over nurture. Reeves' argument that boys hit developmental milestones later than girls is interesting and suggests we should look at something like starting boys in school later, but in terms of play styles and behaviors there's no genetic link, so it does seem like something that is shaped by culture.
Why do you say there is no genetic link? Has that particular negative been proved? As far as I know, it has not. We do know that males and females are genetically different, males being XY and females being XX, and we certainly know those genetic differences cause physical differences. Tissue that becomes the clitoris in females becomes the penis in males; females get a uterus and fallopian tubes, males get testicles and vas deferens. Sexual behavior differs between men and women.
You're describing biological things, not sociological things, and the burden of proof is not in proving the negative, but providing proof of the positive, of which there is little to none. There is, in fact, far more evidence of the influence on nurture over nature when it comes to these specific attitudes you're talking about.
Even for less mutable characteristics like "intelligence," which can be measured by a common instrument, twin studies show that nurture has a huge influence in terms of variation.
You're making a leap from biological feature of women to sociological features of women and that leap is not supported by evidence.
I’ve been so frustrated with the narrative around the latest teen mental health study results, so I truly appreciate your thoughts and the resources you provide. I was part of a 10-year strategic planning committee with my local school district in 2019-20. The first meeting focused on a student panel. Every single one of them told us they were tired of only being a number (GPA). They said a version of this in answer to virtually every question posed. The committee had some limited discussion about eliminating class ranking, with the majority of parents being highly opposed. In the end, the district opted to continue as is. All of this made me think back to my high school years (I graduated in 1985). I honestly do not remember there ever being talk about GPA or class rank beyond who the valedictorian might be (which we only thought about in the week or two before graduation). My daughter graduated in 2020 and class rank in her peer group (all top 10% students) was a daily conversation starting in sophomore year. Our high school is so large (her class graduated 1,742 students), GPA’s are figured to five decimals, so they would freak out over a 99 vs. a 100. The pressure was intense! Referring back to my experience with the student panel and the district’s decision to maintain the status quo; adding to the intense pressure was the knowledge that they had ZERO power to change anything and that the panel had been nothing more than a performative exercise—tell us what you think, but we don’t intend to listen. I feel strongly that Mr. Greene was on to something in 2015, something that has only intensified in the years since, and that is this narrative, particularly among the upper and upper middle class, that failure simply isn’t an option. That to fail in 5th or 6th grade is to fail for the rest of your life. And, to be clear, failure here isn’t real failure. For this cohort and their parents failure is defined as ANYTHING less than perfect. Phones are not what’s wrong with kids. We parents are what’s wrong with kids!
When Haidt wrote "there is no sign of teen mental health epidemic before 2012", he was literally talking about the "Monitoring the Future" dataset (the graphic at the top of this piece), which indeed shows 35 years of flat results and then begins to spike for liberal girls in 2012 and then for everyone else shortly after.
He certainly wasn't saying that there were no issues at all with youth prior to 2012. In fact, in the very essay you're talking about, Haidt specifically talk about the how the movement toward more kids having an external "locus of control" began in the 1990s when parents stopped letting kids play on their own outside.
But he clearly does think that something important changed around 2012; he is basing that conclusion on real research data; and he makes a pretty compelling case for why we should be looking at phones and social media.
Now if you disagree with his conclusions, I'd be interested in hearing why, so I'm looking forward to your subsequent essays. But simply finding examples of people writing complaints about the youth today from before 2012 won't do the trick. Without doing any research, I'll guarantee that you can find examples of that phenomenon from every year since we've had newspapers.
If you're going to make a serious argument that Haidt is wrong, you either need to find holes in the data he's looking at that show a spike in 2012 or explain why that data isn't important and what data we should be looking at instead. Looking forward to seeing your argument.
No offense, but this is pedantry substituting for analysis. It's actually an interesting rhetorical move common online, but rooted in debate culture where one tries to put the discussion in a fall back position on which a more technical, limited point can be debated, rather than continuing the thread of the original argument and advancing the discussion. The strategy is that as long as the very limited claim (that Haidt was only commenting on that one study, and not in general) is true, the larger argument holds.
I get why people do this, but it's annoying, and in this case, it's B.S.
Haidt in both Coddling and his numerous public writings on this subject both directly and indirectly claims that the chief source of problems for young people is the phones/social media. He is so committed to this theory that he has now developed his explanation of "reverse CBT" suggesting that whatever distress young people experience over their phones (or more broadly in the culture) is a distortion, largely ungrounded in reality. As with Coddling, he's invented a pathology that some people (you among them apparently) are willing to give credence to because, in my view, it is a way to dodge the more important work of examining what's happening at the roots.
The idea that kids not being allowed to play outside is the chief cause of loss of locus of control as opposed to the copious evidence (only some of which is cited above) of students experiencing extreme pressure over their "performance" in school and life is frankly silly. The thought that if we just let kids play on their own outside more they wouldn't feel the kind of overwhelming pressure of Levine's patients or students like Kathryn DeWitt does not make sense.
How often does Haidt examine possible factors like school shootings, climate despair, the 2008 global recession as contributors to this phenomenon? Not often because his stance requires him to ignore that there may be good reasons to be distressed.
There is overwhelming evidence that something was afoot prior to widespread access to social media and its capacity to amplify negative social comparison, which truly can have a distorting effect on the self. We should look at phones and social media, but in my view we should first pay attention to what we are internalizing via social media. Just as in previous generations we needed to look at the radio or television.
The idea that the sources I shared are "people writing complaints about youth of today" is a mischaracterization and an insult to those sources. Those aren't complaints. Those are calls for attention and help, calls that were not heeded, unfortunately often not heeded by parents who are living lives under the same pressure of toxic meritocracy as their children (see both the Fleishman effect) and Marianna's comment as examples.
>"If you're going to make a serious argument...blah blah blah" is more rhetorical sophistry that is so often in evidence online and not responsive to the point at hand. The attempt to characterize someone else's argument as "unserious" is itself, the height of unseriousness.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how to think analytically about the world. I don't know who taught you this, or why you've learned it, but they didn't do you any favors.
(Do you see what I just did with that last sentence, I pulled the same debate B.S. you did by challenging the very frame of your premise. Do you see how it derails things from a more robust discussion about the subject at hand and is deeply annoying?)
I don't need to "find holes in his data" in his data to or show why the data "isn't important." I reject the core part of his frame and am suggesting another. The idea that "the data doesn't lie" is a lie. Data is always embedded in an underlying system of values. I write about this in education all the time. There's reports that say, "Student achievement has increased (or decreased) but when I look at the measurement being used on student progress, that measurement is fundamentally at odds with what is actually important when it comes to learning. See this post at my other Substack on the problem of Campbell's Law, which applies here: https://educationalendeavors.substack.com/p/campbells-law-something-every-educator
I don't need to pour over that evidence because I think Haidt is looking in the wrong place. I've made my arguments as to how and why periodically over the years with the Coddling book: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/million-thoughts-coddling-american-mind
We don't have a dispute about data. We have a difference of values. At the core of those differences is that Haidt essentially believes we have a just and fair world and that these problems are the result of catastrophizing. Haidt invented a pathology because he didn't like students at Yale yelling at professors. The notion that students may be exercising their speech rights doesn't seem to occur to him
While I believe that we have to be thoughtful about how social media may amplify negative messages (in the same way this is true of all media), my view is that what students are reacting to is not illusory, but genuine and real, that they are experiencing a system that is legitimately and unnecessarily punishing, and it is this underlying system that needs examining and reforming.
Some of this is on parenting, and some good can be done there. Some of this is on making sure we engage with the world at large in ways that go beyond our phones. But a lot of it, dare I say most of it, is about making a world that makes space for young people to experience the inevitable failures of youth without feeling like they're throwing away their entire futures when these bad things happen. That means making the world itself a more just place.
My focus in terms of solutions is on the nature of school, and then more specifically how we teach writing since that's my area of expertise and I happen to believe that writing is a great way for students to learn agency, self-efficacy, and self-belief. Unfortunately, the incentive structure around writing in our system of schooling is straight-up hostile to that vision, but I see some signs of progress.
By itself, it isn't going to be enough, but it's the place closest to the core of the problem where I, personally, can make a difference.
All voices are welcome here, but this comment is not a contribution. It does not advance the ball. It drags the discussion to unproductive territory where we're talking about possible semantic distinctions over Jon Haidt's interpretation of a chart. Does that seem truly meaningful to you? It isn't. If you think it is, you've been poisoned by online discourse. (See: the online warrior type from last week's post.)
Rather than doing online pedantry, let's see if you can advance the ball. What is your general theory that explains the mental health distress of young people, your theory, developed from your unique set of values and understanding of the world, not something borrowed from Jon Haidt, and then, what sort of remedies do you think will help alleviate these problems?
That's the discussion we should be having. Coming here to tut-tut about interpreting how someone else has interpreted a chart when the discussion is clearly on larger territory is a waste of everyone's time, including yours.
I think you are absolutely right that, "There is overwhelming evidence that something was afoot prior to widespread access to social media and its capacity to amplify negative social comparison, which truly can have a distorting effect on the self." But I was surprised to see in the previous paragraph, "How often does Haidt examine possible factors like school shootings, climate despair, the 2008 global recession as contributors to this phenomenon?" These seem to me to be concerns of the average NYT/NPR follower and not things that young people care much about. Perhaps "climate despair" but that seems to fit nicely with Haidt's concerns about catastrophizing (as, I suppose, would be concerns about school shootings, considering how statistically rare they are, i.e., how unlikely they are to actually happen to a particular young person). Forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you or him. This is the first thing I've read by you (though I hope to read the links) and I haven't read any Haidt since "Why Good People are Divided by Politic and Religion".
I was a little surprised to see the emphasis on over-competing. I was a high school teacher (retired in 2002) and one thing that shocked me was how many young males were content to be mediocre. They just didn't seem to much care. Now perhaps this was just a reaction to years of over-pressure but it was very different from my own experience back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I also found it interesting how many of the cited "calls for attention and help" were from females. As everybody knows (and nobody much cares), females do considerably better in school than males. I taught perhaps the most stereotypically (and historically) male course, physics. Females and males performed pretty much equally well, and often the best student or students were female. But perhaps they didn't want to be there?
There's a number of things that come to mind with this comment. Re: school shootings/climate despair, in my conversations with them, it's not so much that students actively worry about the worst coming to pass - though some do obsess about these things - as they are distressed by what they perceive as the lack of substantive action around these problems. The ineffectual nature of the responses from the adults in the world sows doubt that it is even possible to make the world a better place.
It's all very complicated. There's no silver bullet to address these things.
There's a lot of research showing that younger people tend to be more politically liberal in their views, but also much more distrustful of politics as a vehicle for solving problems. They don't have a lot of faith in institutions.
I don't know that no one cares about males not doing well in school. Hanna Rosin's "the end of men" was published in article form in 2010 and book form in 2012. I've read all kinds of theories about why boys don't do as well in school from differences in socialization to learning styles to girls feeling more pressure to seize opportunities now that they're more available. The research does show that girls are more likely to experience anxiety than boys.
Yes, Hanna Rosin's "end of men" came out a decade ago and Richard Reeves "Of Boys and Men" recently came out. Certainly, some people care. But there is absolutely no urgency. And for most people in authority it is not something they feel any need to do anything about. They are still more worried that women aren't getting a good enough deal. After all, don't we live in a patriarchy?
I wonder how much young people worrying about school shootings or climate change is trickle down from adults, in particular adults who say, "the government isn't doing what I know is necessary. (we need major gun control. we need to stop using fossil fuels. But it isn't happening!)" This is, after all, the default for most major media.
Came here to recommend this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast with Reeves if you haven't heard it: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-richard-reeves.html
I'm intrigued by a number of different things, particularly what Reeves calls the potential structural problems around school, and his suggestions that boys start schooling a year later to give them time for additional neurological development.
It also gave me some ideas about thinking more on my own theory of "toxic meritocracy" given that girls really are doing better in school than boys, and have been for a little while now. Reeves suggests that girls are doing better because they tend to be more organized. They are essentially more equipped for the "schooling" part of school, following the rules that are valued by the system, e.g., turning your homework in on time.
I'm wondering (and this is a hypothesis rooted in my own priors) if this explains some of the differences in anxiety/depression by gender that have girls at much higher levels, while boys are at higher risk for suicide.
Over time, it's my view that school has become more about schooling and less about learning, as following the rules - this is true in writing instruction - was valued over exploration and failure. If girls are better at this for whatever reason (Reeves seems to suggest it could be neurological, but certainly socialization must have a factor?), but this system is inherently stressful and unfulfilling, anxiety and depression may come coupled with this higher achievement.
The reaction among boys may be different, disengagement, meaning they don't do as well in school, which would manifest itself differently in terms of mental health.
Lots to think about.
I'll have to check it out. I would add that modern school is also more comfortable to females than males. If we applied the reasoning of discrimination law, we would even say it is a hostile environment for males.
I was recently reading Joyce Benson's Warriors and Worriers and was struck by this, "Unlike boys, girls almost never boast, command each other, tell jokes at one another's expense, try to top another's stories, call each other names, or in any way show off." If those things happened at my school, the student would have been told "inappropriate." Schools privilege what Benenson considers female behaviors, female predispositions, female predilections.
It's a pretty interesting book. Perhaps, generalizing wildly from your reply to Peter Kriens, you would consider (at least part of it) to be "essentialist nonsense". The question of just what differences there are between males and females is an extremely important one. To talk of "the male essence" or "the male principle", as was once respectable, is not helpful. But neither is denying any difference as a matter of principle.
This just popped into my head. As you say, the world is not fair and just. It has never been fair and just (I just finished Catherine Cameron's "Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World" which is way too full of slavery and semi-slavery all over the world throughout human history). Perhaps the problem with young people is that they have been taught to expect the world to be fair and just (and to have high standards about what is actually fair and just). The world doesn't measure up and they react badly.
I don't know that young people expect the world to be perfectly fair, but I think most of us desire a world where cliches like "hard work pays off" are more true than not.
Losing faith in those sort of precepts can cause despair, or worse, demoralization, as I realized only in hindsight that I personally experienced it when I left full-time teaching: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/not-quit-lit-essay
It is hard to invest yourself in your work when it becomes clear that no matter what you do, that work will not be rewarded. It's not just that the world isn't just, but that justice is a literal impossibility.
Perfect justice is an impossibility. I remember when I was young hearing that old Joe Kennedy had told JFK that "life is unfair". At the time, I thought it was a terrible thing to do, but now I don't think so. Depending on the context, it may have been a very good thing. Like telling you it's cold so you put on a coat or that your fair skin means you can't expect to avoid a painful sunburn after a day of bicycling--unless you use sunscreen. I personally love biking and hate sunscreen.
And, yes, hard work pays off a lot more often than half-assing things.
I was told often by my parents that "life isn't fair" and I think it was a good message as a reminder that sometimes you want something and can do everything possible to get it, but it still isn't going to happen.
But there is a difference between "life isn't fair and you're going to get disappointed sometimes" and "life isn't fair, so it doesn't matter what you do because stuff is going to be crappy anyway."
I want to believe that the latter is not true, but in working with students over the last however many years, I know that their experience of the system - particularly of school - makes them feel more like the latter because they don't have enough of a chance to practice agency and autonomy and develop their own desires. It feels like a trap to them.
Big big difference. Which leads to the question, "why do they think that?"
How much of this is the down side of freedom and opportunity? For most of human history, young people didn't have much of a chance "to practice agency and autonomy and develop their own desires." They were probably going to do what their parents did and do what they could to keep from starving.
And how much is being told too much, "follow your dreams; you can be anything you set your mind to; you are special and wonderful"? Believing that will inevitably lead to disappointment.
The wisest man I ever knew used to say, "I know how to make my kids hate me: promise them this (holding his hand at eye level), and give them this (lowering it to waist height)."
Actually, it strikes me as a serious question. Why was there an apparent change around 2012? I agree that the problem has its roots in the past several decades, but something changed around that year. Was it an increased willingness of teens to talk about the problem or of professionals to listen? That happened with the Feminine Mystique which gave women a vocabulary to discuss what was a long standing problem.
American life does seem to have become a lot more precarious. A high school diploma is no longer enough to live comfortably if modestly, nor does a college degree suffice. The ticket seems to be a college degree at a top college or a more advanced degree, at least for now. Are children sensing and reacting to their parents' well justified anxieties? Before that came the day care center sex abuse trials and the irrational fear of children being abducted by strangers. I grew up free range in the 1960s, so I barely recognize childhood nowadays.
For all that, there was a change in the survey results around 2012, and I'm not the only one curious as to why.
I think the apparent change in the data is actually a bit before 2012, but it could be any and all of the things you mention and more. It's in the aftermath of the first major recession of a young person's lifetime and that may have an effect.
I have a vivid memory of the stock market crash of 1987 when I was junior in high school. I had classmates weeping in the hallways because their families had been wiped out. In a number of cases, their fathers had lost seats on the Chicago Board of Trade that had been in the family for multiple generations that had to be relinquished to meet a margin call.
Could something similar have scarred a generation of teens in 2008, exacerbated by other factors along the way?
Many of the books I cite above are concerned about children not just having school-related anxiety, but the over programming and the lack of attention to young people using their time to form a genuine sense of self. I can say from my experience teaching that I had many students who were not particularly in touch with what they wanted from their own lives. They'd been conditioned to try to achieve without that achievement representing anything genuine and meaningful.
For some, they despaired that they didn't feel the way they thought they were supposed to, which led to disengagement from school, which resulted in poor grades, more disengagement, etc...
I know the Great Depression scarred my parents' generation. A lot of them remember a period of prosperity followed by a period of deprivation. It's quite possible that a lot of kids were hit by the 2008 crisis in ways that will show up novels being written in the near future. If nothing else, polls indicate that "socialism" is not a curse word among that generation as it is for many older than them, and that could be a result.
I agree 100% about the over programming. That took off in the 1990s. Life is one activity after another with little or no time for just themselves. If nothing else, the drum beat of all that scheduling is bound to increase anxiety as it wipes out the ability to plan and think independently. I've seen some kids really battered by this, though I've seen a few who recognized their calling as soldier, tech executive or musician.
John: Will write two replies. The second will be a true response to your reply above. But before getting to that message, which I suspect you won't love, I did want to share the things I like about your Substack, so those don't get lost. And there are a number of things I do indeed like.
- I enjoy your writing. You’ve got personality, and I am a sucker for writers who add the right amount of meta to their pieces. I think you do a good job of walking up to the line where that can go from interesting to precious or distracting without crossing it.
- I appreciate your philosophy of writing and teaching writing. I thought your recent piece about ChatGPT was particularly good, and I expect your new writing course will be good as well. Will encourage my kids’ school to take a look.
- I like the conceit of the Substack. I'm realizing that I really like a site about books that isn’t simply reviews but about the role of books and reading in society. And your forays into current events, while almost unfailingly misguided, are about subjects that interest me, and it’s always good for me to read pieces I disagree with on those subjects.
- Finally, I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to engage with commenters, something that relatively Substacks writers I follow do.
So as thanks and a gesture of good faith, I subscribed for a year. Feel like I owe you that for engaging, even though I wouldn’t normally pay for a once a week Substack, much less from one whose political takes I disagree with quite as consistently as I disagree with yours. 🙂
Anyway, onto the real reply next.
I appreciate this very much. I enjoy disagreement. Back in the days when Inside Higher Ed had comments, I would spend far too much time going back and forth with my readers there. I even tried to establish a separate discussion board for myself when they ended comments, but it never got traction.
And whatever you have to say in the other comment, provided it advances conversation, rather than dragging it back to a pedantic debating point, I'll love it! I have no need for people to think I'm correct about anything, which is why the "debate me bro" culture that is to prevalent online is so fundamentally uninteresting to me. No one truly learns anything from that, most importantly, I don't learn anything from that.
Linking a bunch of books that make hyperbolic claims isn’t very convincing. Books are always doing that. The data does seem to suggest that there was a big change around 2010-2014 (I don’t know if we can be so precise as a single year).
However it’s also true that data from the 1980s (which Haidt doesn’t include) shows about equally bad levels of mental health as now. Then in the 90s/00s there was a big improvement (why?) and now we’ve returned. I think any good explanation should address this longer-term trend.
I have not looked at this newsletter in detail because I just saw it this morning, but to your second paragraph, it suggests that these things are cyclical and we're in a rising point of the cycle. https://nowandnext.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-cdc-yrbs-data
Seem possible, but of course it also makes one wonder what is driving the cycle? The late 90's, early 2000's were a period of relative calm and economic prosperity, jolted by 9/11, but the suicide rates didn't start climbing until years later.
How about The Split Level Trap from 1960? It's a hellish portrait of life in the rapidly growing suburbs. Was Bergen County, NJ really that awful?
You are right about the date of the change. It could have been 2012, or it could have been 2016 or so depending on how you slice the salami. The easy to find tools on the CDC site don't seem to go back past 1999.
"If it is the phones, they opened the gates on a well-documented, pre-existing phenomenon."
Yes, that phenomenon is called human nature.
As a dad of 2 young boys, I have been following all the back and forth on this, and just want to say thank you to everyone involved, because it is a big topic and in the end, helping (no matter the cause) will be crucial. The discourse is incredibly important.
I was really taken by your point, and wonder if as you note quickly at the end, that with further research it will prove that your theory is indeed the basis, maybe alongside some of the helicopter parenting (safetyism), that then was extremely exacerbated by comparison on social media. Seeing the "grind" culture push to attend Ivy league schools, or for dreams to be crushed if College or University didn't pan out as if there was no other option to a happy life could be the very thing that has driven this. I think Haidt makes a lot of strong points related to comparison being a key driver, and I see that here within your argument as well. The cycle we need to break out of is the constant jockeying for status within such a vast community. Its possible (and human) to want it and attain it in our small group, but expanding outward across the globe and competing with others hundreds if not thousands of miles away would be crushing.
Thank you either way for the fantastic rebuttal and I look forward to reading more.
In terms of research and additional perspective, I highly recommend this episode of Derek Thompson where he talks to Dr. Matthew Biel, a child and adolescent psychologist at Georgetown. https://www.theringer.com/2023/3/3/23622606/why-are-american-teens-so-unhappy-how-do-we-solve-this-crisis
They go over lots of different angles of the problem and one of the things it changed my mind on was phones/social media in that I've tended to be a skeptic of them as a cause of distress, rather than a possible correlate to problems with other roots, but as I understood the conversation, the problem the phones exacerbate is this idea of "negative social comparison" where one finds too much reinforcement that they aren't measuring up to others.
The problem of negative social reinforcement is not new - it's actually eternal - but social media is an obvious vector for the experience. So is school, particularly schooling that is hyper competitive.
There's also a whole other part of the problem around bullying that is not caused by social media, but where social media can be a vector for the problem.
As I say in the post, I think in terms of remedies there's a lot of agreement, but there's differences in the root of the problem. Haidt's theory of "reverse CBT" is invented from a previous theory (the great untruths) that is also unevidenced, even in his own book. He seems reluctant to go to the places that may implicate certain aspects of our culture.
Anecdotes do not make Haidt "demonstrably wrong". The tweet you highlight from him displayed a graph, so you should be responding with data rather than instances of people writing books claiming an epidemic exists.
There is a weird fetish among some folks that charts are somehow “real data” and everything else is somehow wanting, and this is a very bad thing for critical thinking and analysis. Anecdotal data is data, qualitative data and it’s often better data depending on the questions we’re trying to answer, as I observed repeatedly in my career in market research. If we want to know what is stressing young people out and understand the root causes of that stress. We should be asking them about their stress. This is what books like Levines’s reveals.
One of the chief weaknesses of Haidt’s approach is relying on aggregated data to tell human stories. That chart he shares tells us nothing about why young people are experiencing more mental health distress. He theorizes because it is linked to phones, but this chart offers no insight into that hypothesis whatsoever.
The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them. This is observational, qualitative research, and while we can go back and then create a survey instrument to try to quantify the size and scope of the phenomenon, that quantification does not necessarily give us deep insights into the nature of the phenomenon. The observational data is necessary for that.
Haidt's dives into data sets looking for evidence of cause that is not necessarily going to be found in those data sets. I'm reminded of an interesting guest post I ran at my Inside Higher Ed blog by Sara Rose Cavanagh, herself a psychology professor on the confounding nature of the data between cell phone use and mental health in which she identifies "the problem of people," namely that people are complex and it is very difficult to boil complex problems down to singular explanations. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/guest-post-confounding-relationship-between-smart-phones-and-mental-health
We want these discussions to be as complicated and ranging as possible because those are the conversations that shed more light on the problems. My worry about Haidt is that he's falling prey to the old saw about someone who has lost his keys on a street at night and is searching under a street lamp because "that's where the light is." Haidt has decided that phones are where the light is, but this is not necessarily true. It may be true in some ways, false in others.
We have some very bad habits around thinking about data in our culture that need undoing. The notion that graphs must be met with graphs is one of them.
Quantitative measures have to be used carefully and so, of course, does qualitative information. I'm not at all sure that "The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them." Say a teen is depressed and a parent asks, "why do you feel so hopeless?" The parent has been heard to say that humans are destroying the planet. The teen then answers, "Because we're destroying the planet. There's no future for me." This answer is easily available and the parent will probably be sympathetic--may even be proud of how perceptive the teen is. But it may well not be the real reason.
The scenario you describe is not how a professional does qualitative research. The kinds of questions one asks are often more indirect and designed to draw spontaneous unprompted responses from the subject, rather than the sort of scenario you describe.
Another important tool of qualitative research is observation, where we look at behaviors, make observations, draw inferences from those observations and then hypothesize from those inferences. When working in market research, I had projects where I'd spend hours just watching people shop in a big box store and noting their behaviors. Sometimes we'd follow up with questions, but not always.
Later we would create a quantitative survey based in our hypotheses to measure those hypotheses.
Quantitative research was great at trying to do something like measure which version of an ad got more clicks in an A/B test. But we'd have to do qualitative research and observation to actually understand why that might be the case. Even very sophisticated analysis like heat mapping of where people's eyeballs where going as they looked at an ad wasn't as good as either a one-on-one interview or a focus group where a professional research can engage them in a structured, exploratory discussion that draws out fresh insights.
It's pretty fascinating, even when I was working on something like displays for industrial florescent lightbulbs, as I once did.
I completely agree. I was just responding to your statement, "The best way to understand why teens are depressed is to actually ask teens about what's bothering them." It sounded to me like, "If you want to know why a teen is depressed, ask that teen, "what's bothering you?" As your comment above makes clear, that's not what you meant.
One of the tragedies of early childhood "research" was the satanic abuse panic of several decades ago. Concerned, caring adults would talk with very young children, feeling sure that they had been abused, and after a while, that's just what the kids told them! But it was all bullsh*t. The adults had cued the children and had kept at them until they told the adults what the adults wanted to hear. It is a comforting myth of science that scientists are always trying to disprove hypotheses. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they are actually trying to find evidence in favor of what they already think is right.
No, I can't agree that the best way to figure out why a teen is depressed is to ask them. We know that genetics plays a role in depression, but you aren't going to figure that out from asking a teen (unless that teen has read up on the research establishing that). We know anti-depressants can play a role, but if you ask a teen they probably won't tell you about their brain chemistry. If I asked a teen with cancer how they got it, I wouldn't expect them to know. And depression is specifically something that affects how people think, thus making their answers even less reliable.
Okay, so you don't understand how research works, which is fine, but what you describe is not the process that unfolds as a method of discovery.
Madeline Levine (The Price of Privilege) spends many hours talking to and observing her patients their answers and her observations filtered through her considerable expertise result in inferential conclusions about what's going on.
We can also ask students questions like those on UCLA's HERI project such as, "Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all I have to do" on a scale of agreement and observe how the number of students who agree at the highest level has markedly increased over time.
I think you just don't have a great appreciation how this kind of research works.
Robyn Dawes wrote in "House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth" about people like Levine who had high confidence in their expertise built up via spending many hours talking to and observing their patients... but had none of the actual predictive ability they believed they had, nor demonstrably better effect on their patients than college students trying to act out the same role. Dawes was about to make that evaluation of his peers & colleagues (revealing that many examples of failure to adhere to Bayesian rationality in "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" had come from them) by actually looking at data rather than assuming he could rely on their own statements.
I am aware of Dawes' work and his particular empirical lens. It is a mistake to take one lens as "the" lens and is a failure to think critically.
There are many things we can "know" independent of quantitative data. For example, How do you know your dog loves you?
We are humans, complex and contradictory, not reducible to quantification, or at least, I hope not.
No, anecdotes are not data. Data is systematically collected, not just what's salient enough for you to subjectively consider it significant and include it in a book. And if we're talking about change over time, then we need to have data we can compare from one time period to another. Haidt's charts do allow a comparison between time periods, and it's on that basis that he says we don't see it prior to 2012.
Again, you just don't seem to understand how to think deeply about different varieties of data in a critical thinking/analysis situation. Different questions require different types of data. I am not making a claim about what's happened over time. I am interrogating Haidt's claim that there was "no sign of a mental health crisis." Clearly there were signs and the investigations of these various books are clear data of those signs.
I don't know where you learned this about "data" but it's wrong.
A "crisis" does not consist of anecdotes. There have always been some people who were least happy, but a "crisis" is something acute rather than permanent.
I agree that "crisis" is probably the wrong word to describe these phenomena. I wrote a piece about this a while back about how we shouldn't use that language to describe something that appears more chronic, and rooted more deeply in the culture.
I recall reading somewhere that relentless parenting started among the well-educated affluent but has since become the norm across socioeconomic classes. If so, it would generate something resembling the data set you've assembled: Initially, it wouldn't show in the statistics very well because the well-educated affluent aren't a large fraction of society ... but they're a large fraction of the book market and so you'd see books about the troubles in that class. Later, as the pattern spreads, you would see it more in the statistics.
Yes, this is where my thinking tends to land. I think it not only spreads, but it's the upper socioeconomic classes that shape the institutions everyone must interact with, very much including school.
For example, the meritocratic attitude around the benefits of getting into an elite school has resulted in shaping where resources go in order to help less fortunate students. Years ago I wrote about a plan from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to provide free access to SAT tutoring through Khan Academy and how limited this help would be in providing opportunities to poorer students given that the slots in highly selective schools are extremely limited and the vast majority of colleges are not highly selective. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/chan-zuckerberg-initiatives-skewed-values
Giving students a small leg up in order to better compete with other students who have greater advantages isn't much of a help. It would be far better to help more students access some form of post-secondary education/training, and then make sure those institutions are as well resourced as those elite institutions. (That's the thesis of my book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education.
I once read a book about the culture of "moderately wealthy" people, IIRC, $1 to $10 million in non-housing assets. One chapter was about education. Its assessment of their attitude was "The college your child attends is a verdict on your life." Until that changes, driving children crazy in order to get them into the highest-ranked colleges will continue.
Do you think there's any connection to the recent-ish questioning of the value of higher education? Could that be a (possibly even healthy) response to these overbearing pressures?
I do think that's a healthy response because it's an indicator of students practicing "agency" over their own lives. The idea that college is necessary for a good life isn't true or helpful when it comes to helping young people figure these things out.
Did you also consider the changed role of women in society since the 70's? What I think is a significant factor in the stress we see today. Clearly the change of the public role of women was quite dramatic? However, as a 64 year old living through this revolution I've also seen a change in private roles: father and mothers.
Although women generally held the reins in the household in the past, especially with children, the role of the father was often to mitigate the higher levels of caring traits like anxiety and neuroticism in women with his higher levels in stoicism and pragmatism. I think roughhousing, cajoling, and conditional love provided a balance against the `devouring mother`. As the mother did against the uncaring father. In a good family the feminine and masculine are in balance. However, I noticed over the past 60 years how many women become more leading in the home and started to override the father's role. As exhibited in a word like 'mansplaining' and the female monologue of #metoo. Men were stifled and their stoicism meant they did not care that much.
In primary schools and primary care I also saw the male authority disappear. Masculine aspects like competition, 'sticks and stones', 'in love and war everything is allowed', and 'you never snitch' were replaced by adult females interfering profoundly with the group dynamics. Bullying, losing, and hurting yourself are natural mechanisms to increase resilience. What seems to be happening today is imho explained quite well with Taleb's book Anti-Fragile. When you don't exercise the defense mechanisms, you lose them.
However, there was in my observations also a secondary effect. Feminism always refused to accept that there are actually large group differences between the sexes. Since feminism was manned by women that were well educated and more masculine than average they did no fight for femininity, they just wanted access to the same jobs males in their social economic class had. And I leave you to ponder about the difference between a university processor or a sewer cleaner in this context.
They therefore actively removed systems in place to protect feminine choices. Today in the middle & lower class it is almost impossible to have a family on one salary. Tax advantages and special protections have been removed. Since many of the feminist women found a career in media, girls have been relentlessly pushed to compete with males on exactly the traits where they have a group disadvantage while at the same time the traditional feminine role of mother and carer, has been blackballed. Modern feminism somehow made the masculine the norm.
What I see around me is that this made the pressure on girls is relentless. The number of times I've seen companies I work for as a consultant push free events for girls to do STEM is embarrassing, look how many more scholarships there are for girls than boys. When we lived in Sweden, my wife was often looked down upon for not working while she often had more kids at home than her friend who worked in child care. Society is stunningly anti-feminine. My daughter in law picked physics although she really preferred English.
World wide surveys show about roughly 1/5th of women want a full time career, 1/5th want take care of children, and the remaining 3/5th want a combination. Only about 1% of men want to take full time care of children. This is not the impression an alien would get when they observe the TV, movies, press, internet, academia, and politics of our world.
The result is that the environment of young girls expects them to choose a flashing career. Since girls on average are more agreeable & have higher levels of conscientiousness than boys they really want to oblige. It is stunning how hard I see girls work sometimes while most boys tend to goof off until they find their thing (if ever). When you see the enormous pressure we put on girls you can only feel sorry and wonder why the mental health problems are not worse. Women are on average more anxious and higher in neuroticism. I expect that many also feel how bad their fit is for the career woman model that is so harshly pushed on them. Despite the enormous pressure to have a career, women on average work significantly fewer hours (for a full time job, men on average tend to work 42 mins more per day, almost 2 days per month), they still tend to take years off for raising kids, retire earlier, and are very rarely as encompassed by their work as some men. For one male dentist you need to train 3 females. Susan Pinker's 'The Sexual Paradox' is very enlightening.
Evolution made men and women different in some important traits. What is all important is that everybody can pursue happiness in their own ways, regardless of sex; those are human values we learned in the enlightenment; values that I'd be willing to die for.
However, feminism did not 'emancipate' (a term from slavery) married women, it actively worked to remove the choice for women to pursue the feminine. I think we are paying the price. Well, our girls are paying the price. At least I think.
Books:
Steven Pinker, the Blank Slate
Charles Murray, Human Diversity
Lynn, Sex Differences in Intelligence
Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox
You left out Joyce F. Benenson, Warriors and Worriers :)
I personally think 90% of this is overstated nonsense rooted in a kind of fear of societal change and doesn't really help us do anything to untangle present issues in a way that emphasizes freedom and agency and equality, but I very much appreciate it as a different perspective.
I do think we need to think about structures that provide opportunities for everyone to pursue the path that most calls to them, whatever that my be. Blaming problems on feminism or what have you doesn't really makes sense to me as an analysis of the present, but it's particularly unhelpful as a tool of moving forward, unless your solution is to attempt to wind back the clock to the time when there were far more structural barriers to women exploring certain paths, which I don't think is your point.
This stuff about perusing the feminine vs. pursuing the masculine is essentialist nonsense and again, not particularly useful when thinking about the structures and culture that helps us move forward, but I think I get where you're coming from, which is helpful.
Rather strange reply to a message that I tried to craft carefully and with the clear indication I do not want to touch anybody's freedom, agency, and/or equality in any way. The point is, as Mary Harrington writes about, is that maybe we're pushing them hard into a direction that they do not really want but find the heavy push hard to resist? Take an honest look around you and tell me that you do not see how hard girls are pushed in a single direction.
The change in roles in our societies over the past 60 years has been revolutionary, and even that is an understatement. But from your reaction (and many others) it does seem looking at the effect of those many changes is a giant taboo when it touches feminism.
I agree that we are pushing young people in general too hard, (or perhaps more accurately in too narrow a way) particularly when it comes to school/college/career as a pre-requisite for a good and happy life with that good and happy life being equated to making lots of money. That's what I mean by "toxic meritocracy" in the post itself.
So to that end, yes, girls are pushed in a particular direction, but so is everyone. This is important because the solution to these problems isn't to roll back what many see as the progress of the last 60 years for women in terms of creating opportunities to pursue the lives they wish for themselves, but to create systems that allow everyone a chance to identify and pursue their passions. This is not gender dependent, and none of it is caused by feminism, nor does feminism stand in the way of finding solutions. You seem to find that problematic because some of them want to be moms instead, but where is our concern for the men who primarily want to be dads but can't because of the same system?
The whole system of toxic meritocracy needs to come down so if there are women or men who want to primarily be parents they can be parents, those that don't want children don't have to have children, those that want to be teachers and nurses (regardless of gender) can actually afford to live reasonably comfortable lives of dignity
I don't enforce any taboos about discussing feminism. It's just that I'm more interested in interesting discussions about feminism, not recycled essentialist nonsense.
To try to be charitable to Peter Kriens, perhaps he is saying that pushing "school/college/career as a pre-requisite for a good and happy life with that good and happy life being equated to making lots of money" hurts women more than men because women are more likely to want something different. They are more likely to want to do things that are traditionally "feminine" or "woman's place". E.g., more women would like to be stay at home moms than men want to be stay at home dads. (And it is possible to be a stay at home dad; I did it for almost 20 years--though the latter five or so included a part time job.)
"Essentialist nonsense" says all women are one way and all men are another. It is indeed nonsense. But saying women are "more likely" than men to feel a certain way, to want to do certain things, to have certain feelings is not essentialist and is probably more true than conventional wisdom says. Everyone agrees that women are "more likely" to be short, or to put it a different way, are "on average" shorter.
Essentialist nonsense is not just about "all" of one category being one way or another, but assigning a likelihood of traits to a category based on them belonging to that category.
That essentialist nonsense is not particularly helpful or responsive to the questions of how we help people have good lives. It doesn't matter if more women want something different or more men want something different. It's why we should have things like paid family leave or tuition-free public higher ed that protect the choices of everyone regardless of status and identity.
You make a category leap error in that last paragraph. Height is overwhelmingly coded in our genes (with some additional factors like nutrition, etc...) while attitudes and beliefs like what we want out of life is almost certainly not part of our genetic coding and to treat it as such is indeed, essentialist nonsense.
Predispositions and predilections to think certain ways and desire certain things are indeed part of our genetic coding. There are things that humans find easy to think and feel, things that humans find difficult to think and feel, and things that are impossible--and there is some variance between people. Recognizing that is indeed helpful.
One of our predispositions is to like sugar and fat and salt. Recognizing that warns you not to take an "if it feels good, do it" attitude toward eating. Be careful what you feed your kids. Else you set them up for metabolic syndrome and diabetes and all the rest. When you lose weight, you will want, not just want but crave, to eat enough to put that weight back on. Thus, the truth that keeping weight off is a lot harder than taking it off. And the great untruth, "Losing weight is simple; just take in fewer calories than you use." You can't just flip a switch in your brain, "I will not desire to eat more than 1800 calories."
The brain is not some empty general purpose computer that can be programmed any way one wants. Some ways are easier, some are harder, and some are impossible. By the time one is born, there is a limited amount of plasticity. Try turning a gay person straight.
What? They used this algorithm to force people to take certain classes or not take others? It's one thing to tell a kid, "this is what we recommend because this is how we think you will do 'based on comparative data from other students who had taken a course.'" It's quite another to force the student to go along.
I believe if push came to shove a student could petition to override the recommendation, but the overwhelming message was that they should stick to the path that the AI believed was best. The concept of "guided pathways" toward graduation is pretty widespread, but I think it's fundamentally anti-student because it channels students towards paths that have nothing to do with them as individuals, and more about general characteristics. I just see it as a kind of violation of the core values of education.
But aren't their "general characteristics" also part of what make them who they are, what make them the individuals they are? You seem to be saying that only what's not in the algorithm is individual. If an algorithm said that, given the data it was fed, you would probably become a writer, would that take away your individuality? Would you have to not become a writer to reclaim your individuality? (shades of the underground man's "I am not a ciphering machine.")
General characteristics like one's gender and race are not ones we should use to determine the fates of individuals, not if we privilege freedom of choice over aggregate outcomes.
The occupational fit test I took in high school said I was suited to be a librarian or a CIA analyst, as I recall. Information that helps someone exercise their agency is fine, but the problems arrive when we substitute AI for human judgment and agency.
Do you deny the tendency of boys to engage in more boisterous, competitive play than girls, of girls to engage in more "nurturant" play than boys? Or is that just something their empty heads picked up from society?
I know that these phenomenon are accurate in aggregate, but I also know that we don't have a genetic or biological determinant for these things that declares these are nature over nurture. Reeves' argument that boys hit developmental milestones later than girls is interesting and suggests we should look at something like starting boys in school later, but in terms of play styles and behaviors there's no genetic link, so it does seem like something that is shaped by culture.
Why do you say there is no genetic link? Has that particular negative been proved? As far as I know, it has not. We do know that males and females are genetically different, males being XY and females being XX, and we certainly know those genetic differences cause physical differences. Tissue that becomes the clitoris in females becomes the penis in males; females get a uterus and fallopian tubes, males get testicles and vas deferens. Sexual behavior differs between men and women.
You're describing biological things, not sociological things, and the burden of proof is not in proving the negative, but providing proof of the positive, of which there is little to none. There is, in fact, far more evidence of the influence on nurture over nature when it comes to these specific attitudes you're talking about.
Even for less mutable characteristics like "intelligence," which can be measured by a common instrument, twin studies show that nurture has a huge influence in terms of variation.
You're making a leap from biological feature of women to sociological features of women and that leap is not supported by evidence.
Not me and not you. I think we agree.