Children in England growing up 'sedentary, scrolling and alone', say experts

Isn’t it basically all of them? I mean is there a culture as you say, which I interpret to mean a civilization or country, where iPhones* are affordable and isn’t facing this issue?

All of them?

Entertainment is an effect, not the main cause.

It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.

So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?

I’m reminded of the intentional usage of whisky, rum, and other alcoholic spirits as an intentional policy of genocide against Native Americans. Also interesting is that during this same period of history, payment of taxes in whisky was common in some states in the western US, and these were federal taxes for debts left over from the Revolutionary War. These adjacent topics are reminiscent of modern national cryptocurrency stockpiles and stablecoin interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Forty-Three_G...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

It's been going on forever. "Stop looking at the cave art and take the garbage out."

> As an elder millennial I can remember everyone being absolutely glued to MSN Messenger in secondary school. This was back in the dialup days so it was stopping your parents making phone calls!

Computers were nowhere near as accessible (physically or UX wise) in the 1990s or 2000s compared to smartphones today.

A $70 Android smartphone today would have been the equivalent of buying a top-of-the-line workstation in the 2000s for $40, so it is much easier to access a computer device at a much earlier age.

On top of that, UX research has enhanced massively since the 2000s with an enhanced understanding into user reward mechanisms and psychology, and this kind of reward mechanism is being added in every kind of application (from enterprise B2B to social media)

We shouldn't be Luddites, but limiting access to high sensitivity media (be it TV or smartphones) for those who are pre-adolescence should be an important part of parenting.

I don't follow. How does claiming socializing is good effectively claiming bullying is good?

Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is leisure time, and it was just as possible to spend that sedentary and alone 30 years ago.

Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.

Getting beaten by a gang of classmates daily is genuinely awful & would leave some deep scars, I'm very sorry to hear that and wish you the best.

The public school system is absurd and the biggest culprit in the vast majority of our modern problems. The idea that we would take children and put them in an environment that is essentially the same as a prison for 18 years, is ABSURD.

When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?

Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.

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I think we are romanticising what teens used to do (much more at least) to pass their boredom. Articles like this make it sound like pre smartphone everyone was doing endless sport, drama and other artistic and social endeavours. At least what I remember was a lot of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour.

I can remember in the early 2000s children being made out as feral animals roaming the streets in the UK. Now they're being demonized for scrolling their phones.

There are plenty of things I did outside when growing up that kids could still do: invent sports (we had one involving a hockey net and a koosh ball), bike around the neighborhood, have a water fight, go to the pool, play capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, jump on a trampoline, go to the ride scooters, play basketball, play with sidewalk chalk, etc

I remember hanging out and loitering in malls and food courts because none of us wanted to be at home and there weren't other free options. Back then we just shuffled off to another location, like nomads. I'm not surprises teens now just hang out online instead.

I think it's because parenting is hard (always has been, some aspects like having to be a helicopter parent to not have CPS called on you in the US maybe make it harder).

And screens are easy.

It's the anxiety generation. Parents are now terrified of paedophiles and traumas. My generation needed TV commercials reminding our parents we exist.

Do you have any theories about those “systemic reasons”? Curious what they might be.

Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?

> this situation could only have arose in the first place because there is some kind of systemic reason for parents to not really care about the wellbeing of their offspring.

Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.

But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.

In traffic, no, but on the streets, why not? Things like street hockey and basketball are real. Kids ought to be able to be able to play in a field and fetch their ball from the street without ending up as roadkill.

Of course, there are far too many drivers who view anything that impedes high speed travel as a nuisance, or worse. I regularly see drivers who run stop signs in front of a school, drivers passing unloading school busses with their stop signs extended, and impatient drivers try to push through crossing guards as children are crossing. I have also known crossing guards who were struck by motorists. Things like traffic calming measures don't work, since it typically ends up with drivers being more reckless. Very little seems to be done about it, aside from periodic campaigns (typically at the start of school years). And, of course, punishing children by limiting the spaces they can use and independence.

People often claim that the cycling culture of the Netherlands was a product of trying to protect children from traffic. Most of the rest of the world, including England with it's "no ball game" signs took the opposite approach: rather than addressing the problem, they punished the victims.

That's definitely true, and it's a bad thing, but I don't think it's the core problem. If it was, you'd see massive differences between cities and the research would read like this: "City A is too car-centric, and all the kids are sedentary and obese. City B has great public transportation, lots of parks, and the kids are doing great."

Instead, we see the same problem everywhere, including places in Europe and Japan where the outside is just fine.

American comments on UK news. No such issue here, sure a lot of areas are more built up, but children under 10 walk to school, it's not America.

I would be willing to bet that 80% of urban kids in the UK live within a 10-minute bike ride of a park.

People used to do a whole lot of nothing. EDIT: But daily life provided enough social micronutrients to get by. Less so with the phones.

Cars have existed for multiple generations. Kids are glued to their screens, which is why parks are empty.

> There is no outside.

And if there were, whatever they might dream up to do with outside would be rapidly banned.

It's not radically different from, say 20 years ago, when there weren't all these phones.

Wasn't that only in the schoolyard? Against the wall.

How pointless, biased and inflammatory. Generally, citizens commit crimes at rates higher than immigrants. Please keep that in mind while you read the Daily Mail or whatever tabloid you get your information from.

What is PK?

Also, obesity is apparently the new norm, and I guess we got used to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have huge negative impacts.