<story><title>U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person</title><url>https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever-113240</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zak</author><text>Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.&lt;p&gt;As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses. Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zenst</author><text>So true, in essence driving them into online friend interactions.&lt;p&gt;Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today.&lt;p&gt;After there was a time when making explosives was a childhood right of passage along with chemistry sets, making fires, even having a pocket knife.   Today, such common activities would not end well at all, however innocent the intention.  These are activities people still alive today will recall.&lt;p&gt;With that, online is still in part a wild-west and new playfield, open, less restrictions compared to real life and  with that, perhaps the logical outlet for teenage freedom.&lt;p&gt;But even that is slowly being eroded away with the same mentalities that drove children into 1984 style parenting.&lt;p&gt;With that, todays children may very well in their 50&amp;#x27;s look at the children of the time and feel how restricted and curtailed they are compared to the freedoms they enjoyed in their time.   That would not surprise me, but equally, when do laws, rules, restrictions reach a zenith when no more need be added or changed!  Until then, the lamentations of life march on.</text></comment>
<story><title>U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person</title><url>https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever-113240</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zak</author><text>Part of the issue, I think is that teenagers are more restricted by parents, laws, and business owners than they used to be.&lt;p&gt;As with younger children, parents are less likely now than in past decades to allow their teenage children to travel alone or hang out in groups without adults present. Legal restrictions compound the issue, with curfew laws being increasingly common, as well as increased driving ages and graduated licenses. Finally, businesses that used to be popular hangouts for teenagers, such as shopping malls have become less welcoming, often having limits on when teenagers are allowed on the premises without a parent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skywhopper</author><text>Yes, more and more super-suburban living, combined with increasingly restrictive teen driving regulations, curfews, and fear-based media stories about abductions have ratcheted down the ability of teens to hang out together. So when technology came along to enable improved interpersonal contact, it was embraced far more rapidly than it would have been if teen freedom were as high as it was in the 70s.&lt;p&gt;The graphs they show don&amp;#x27;t perfectly correlate to the trends in hanging out in person. While smartphones have definitely contributed to changes in the culture (for everyone, not just teens), it&amp;#x27;s false to pretend that they are entirely responsible for changes in loneliness. It just as well may correlate to being bombarded by reactionary hatred from adults over things teens have grown up thinking about more openly, like more open ideas about gender and sexuality. Or perhaps from finding themselves in a culture of fear about mass shootings while again faced with an adult political establishment who does nothing about it. Or maybe just facing the reality that the grown-ups are making things worse, day by day, and that they&amp;#x27;re going to have to clean this all up after us.&lt;p&gt;Smartphones have nothing to do with that.</text></comment>