Yes to subscribing to Peter’s substack, all his D digression letters are interesting on teen suicide. Since I don’t fully believe Jon Haidt’s claim of smart phones as a huge cause teen girl poor mental health/ suicide, Peter’s theses about kid play and freedom from adult control strike me as bigger influences.
Jon makes a comment in the D3 note explaining the big temporary drop from 1990 - 2005; the future discussion will be interesting.
Kids need more time to play and more physical work to do.
Re. unemployed teens, in our state I suspect rising minimum wage is an issue, now over $16/hr. On the virtues of unsupervised play, Jonathan Haidt has been on this for nearly a decade. Also Jordan Peterson. My wife's sister has 25 grandkids ages about 3-19. When they gather, along with other cousins, they play energetically with little to no supervision, in continuously fluctuating group combinations. Many of them are homeschooled and look after farm animals. They win competitions at the regional state fair, sell their beautiful beasts at an exaggerated price, and use the money to buy pickup trucks. The oldest of this cohort is going to community college and plans to become a nurse. The oldest boy is looking to become a professional dog trainer. One of their other cousins was recently a starter on a state champion high school football team. I don't worry about any of them.
I am pro-minimum wage. But a $ 16,- for teenagers doesn't make sense, because they are less productive than adults (on average). In the Netherlands, there is a minimum youth wage. For 15-years olds, it is €3,84 (before taxes), for 16-year olds €4,22 etc. until at 21 one is entitled to a minimum wage of € 12,79. 13- and 14 year olds are allowed to work, but there is no minimumwage for them.
Half‐baked theory: one underrated contributor to this problem is high real estate costs. In areas where such costs are higher, young people are likely to live at home longer and delay establishing independence from their parents.
That was my observation, at least, when I was a young'un. I grew up in Pennsylvania coal country, where real estate is pretty cheap because most of the mines are long gone and the ones that are still around employ a fraction of the number of people they once did. It was common for people in my neck of the woods to move out as soon as they turned 18, regardless of whether they were in college or working. After I finished college, I took a job on the east coast, and I remember being somewhat weirded out by the fact that some of my coworkers who grew up in the area had lived at home all through college, and some of them still did, despite now earning a mid five figure income. One guy I knew told me he still slept in the same bunkbed with his younger brother that they had had since they were 10. He was 23.
You might be on a right track, but probably only for Anglo cultures where kids are expected to leave home at adulthood and in which it is common for only the members of the immediate nuclear family to live together, not just apart from grandparents and other relatives, but often quite far away.
In that particular kind of culture, a sudden increase in the rent-to-wage ratio could indeed retard or delay the timing of development along the culturally usual life script.
But in other times and places, extended families not only live close to each other, they often literally live on top of each other on separate floors of the same complex or residence. In the not too distant past, despite being much, much poorer than us in terms of what kind of quarters they could rent with their incomes, our predecessors didn't stop having lots of kids, and those kids matured into mini-adults much sooner.
Relate? I suppose that's the origin of the data set for the analysis, but I'd guess the researchers would not be so bold as to claim similar things wouldn't be observed in other places. In fact, there are similar observations about slower teen development and maturation into full adulthood all over the world, and that suggests the role of real estate prices isn't the main driver of the phenomenon. It's more likely to be technologically determined as a cultural adjustment to the changing incentive structures and social and economic equilibria in contemporary modernity.
This makes me wonder if some of the differences in sex based rates of anxiety and depression are related to the differences in play. While much of these differences are self directed, it also seems generally true that parents more closely monitor and restrict daughter's play.
Yes to subscribing to Peter’s substack, all his D digression letters are interesting on teen suicide. Since I don’t fully believe Jon Haidt’s claim of smart phones as a huge cause teen girl poor mental health/ suicide, Peter’s theses about kid play and freedom from adult control strike me as bigger influences.
Jon makes a comment in the D3 note explaining the big temporary drop from 1990 - 2005; the future discussion will be interesting.
Kids need more time to play and more physical work to do.
Re. unemployed teens, in our state I suspect rising minimum wage is an issue, now over $16/hr. On the virtues of unsupervised play, Jonathan Haidt has been on this for nearly a decade. Also Jordan Peterson. My wife's sister has 25 grandkids ages about 3-19. When they gather, along with other cousins, they play energetically with little to no supervision, in continuously fluctuating group combinations. Many of them are homeschooled and look after farm animals. They win competitions at the regional state fair, sell their beautiful beasts at an exaggerated price, and use the money to buy pickup trucks. The oldest of this cohort is going to community college and plans to become a nurse. The oldest boy is looking to become a professional dog trainer. One of their other cousins was recently a starter on a state champion high school football team. I don't worry about any of them.
I am pro-minimum wage. But a $ 16,- for teenagers doesn't make sense, because they are less productive than adults (on average). In the Netherlands, there is a minimum youth wage. For 15-years olds, it is €3,84 (before taxes), for 16-year olds €4,22 etc. until at 21 one is entitled to a minimum wage of € 12,79. 13- and 14 year olds are allowed to work, but there is no minimumwage for them.
Of the markers of maturity, the easiest to fix would be for selective colleges or selection for financial aid to give points for remunerative work.
Half‐baked theory: one underrated contributor to this problem is high real estate costs. In areas where such costs are higher, young people are likely to live at home longer and delay establishing independence from their parents.
That was my observation, at least, when I was a young'un. I grew up in Pennsylvania coal country, where real estate is pretty cheap because most of the mines are long gone and the ones that are still around employ a fraction of the number of people they once did. It was common for people in my neck of the woods to move out as soon as they turned 18, regardless of whether they were in college or working. After I finished college, I took a job on the east coast, and I remember being somewhat weirded out by the fact that some of my coworkers who grew up in the area had lived at home all through college, and some of them still did, despite now earning a mid five figure income. One guy I knew told me he still slept in the same bunkbed with his younger brother that they had had since they were 10. He was 23.
You might be on a right track, but probably only for Anglo cultures where kids are expected to leave home at adulthood and in which it is common for only the members of the immediate nuclear family to live together, not just apart from grandparents and other relatives, but often quite far away.
In that particular kind of culture, a sudden increase in the rent-to-wage ratio could indeed retard or delay the timing of development along the culturally usual life script.
But in other times and places, extended families not only live close to each other, they often literally live on top of each other on separate floors of the same complex or residence. In the not too distant past, despite being much, much poorer than us in terms of what kind of quarters they could rent with their incomes, our predecessors didn't stop having lots of kids, and those kids matured into mini-adults much sooner.
Didn't the OP relate to the anglosphere?
Relate? I suppose that's the origin of the data set for the analysis, but I'd guess the researchers would not be so bold as to claim similar things wouldn't be observed in other places. In fact, there are similar observations about slower teen development and maturation into full adulthood all over the world, and that suggests the role of real estate prices isn't the main driver of the phenomenon. It's more likely to be technologically determined as a cultural adjustment to the changing incentive structures and social and economic equilibria in contemporary modernity.
Oh, if this is a worldwide phenomenon, that would be news to me. Interesting.
This makes me wonder if some of the differences in sex based rates of anxiety and depression are related to the differences in play. While much of these differences are self directed, it also seems generally true that parents more closely monitor and restrict daughter's play.