
What Do Happy Teens Do? - prostoalex
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-changing-culture/201808/what-do-happy-teens-do
======
raz32dust
I find two problems with these kinds of studies:

(1) How are you defining "happiness"? If you define happiness as social
interaction, obviously the introverts will be "unhappy". Here, this study
seems to define it as "psychological well-being (measured by self-esteem, life
satisfaction, and happiness)". Is being unsatisfied bad? I would argue that it
is not necessarily true. Unsatisfied people tend to bring change to society.
So what are we trying to optimize for? You improve what you measure. Are we
measuring the right metric? If having high levels of dopamine is happiness, is
it ok to inject everyone with dopamine to make them "happy"?

(2) Are these activities symptoms of unhappiness or causes? I think they are
just symptoms. The more I study about this, the more I feel that "unhappiness"
is more of a trait. Mostly genes and internal hormones and chemistry and
biology. This constant push to be "happy" makes life worse for the "sad"
people.

~~~
eiieirurjdndjd
To be satisfied means having one’s own needs or desires met. What we are
optimizing for, in this case, is people’s self-reported evaluation of their
own value function.

That being said, I think there is merit to your second point, although I don’t
believe we have enough evidence to know.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _That being said, I think there is merit to your second point, although I
> don’t believe we have enough evidence to know._

There was a nice research summary posted on LessWrong some long time ago:

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-
be-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZbgCx2ntD5eu8Cno9/how-to-be-happy)

It mentions various "factors that correlate with subjective well-being
(individuals' own assessments of their happiness and life satisfaction)".
Quoting from it: <<<

Factors that don't correlate much with happiness include: age[7], gender[8],
parenthood[9], intelligence[10], physical attractiveness[11], and money[12]
(as long as you're above the poverty line). Factors that correlate moderately
with happiness include: health[13], social activity[14], and religiosity[15].
Factors that correlate strongly with happiness include: genetics[16], love and
relationship satisfaction[17], and work satisfaction[18].

(...)

Genes account for about 50% of the variance in happiness[19]. Even lottery
winners and newly-made quadriplegics do not see as much of a change in
happiness as you would expect[20]. Presumably, genes shape your happiness by
shaping your personality, which is known to be quite heritable[21].

So which personality traits tend to correlate most with happiness?
Extroversion is among the best predictors of happiness[22], as are
conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism[23].

>>>

Numbers I put in square brackets in the quote above are all references to
papers. The article goes on to discuss how those correlates suggest effective
ways of improving your own happiness.

I'm not in the field so I won't judge the quality of the referenced research,
or how much results have changed since 2011, but still, it seems that we do
know quite a lot about this.

(Also note that, despite it being very unpopular fact, genes seem to pop up as
strong - even leading - predictor in very many personal traits, including
intelligence.)

------
aklemm
This is a good and simple thing to focus on. My working theory—-as a parent of
a soon-to-be teenager—was that teens are missing out on any true
responsibility. No one expects them to do anything that actually is crucial to
the family or community. That said, I don’t yet know what that will be for my
kids. Maybe some kind of service thing weekly, or maybe it’s some critical
chores.

~~~
ksdale
I have much younger kids, and we also think this is very important. It seems
like everything in a kid's life is so nerfed. For us it starts with letting
the kids do things on the playground with an actual risk of injury (obviously
we're trying to avoid actual serious injury, but we think the kids need
agency).

It also involves letting them make decisions that can have bad outcomes that
are largely harmless when they're young, like getting a stomach ache from too
much candy, and clearly connecting the act to the consequence. So far it's
worked pretty well, our kids have a good idea of what's healthy and what's
not.

We're also going to do something like set up Etsy stores for the kids so that
they get experience with buying supplies and making a product that's good
enough for a stranger to buy, manipulating the web page (and eventually we'll
move on to them making making their own Shopify or Wordpress sites), and
running social media accounts for the businesses and what not. We're already
getting one store started for our five year old who's really interested in
making money (for now).

We're doing a lot of it now, but we're planning on having them take on more
and more responsibility as they get older. Instead of doing chores (or in
addition), they'll be actually interacting with the world in a way that's
analagous to adulthood. Who knows how it will play out, but we're excited to
see what happens.

~~~
crooked-v
Another 'real world' skill your kids will really thank you for eventually is
cooking a full meal from scratch, including knowledge of meat temperatures,
spices to use, timing different dishes, and being able to calmly handle the
inevitable 'the kitchen is filled with smoke and all the fire alarms in the
house are going off' cooking mistakes.

Another (and related) field would be basic first aid, and more importantly
being able to handle injuries more-or-less calmly even when you've cut your
hand open or dumped a bunch of very hot water on yourself.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I had to cook dinner once a week from when I was about 13 years old, so by the
time I left home at 18 I was pretty confident in cooking.

I was shocked at how may people at university were completely incapable of
cooking. Boiling water was about the most complex cooking skill they had. I
have a colleague who's a fresh graduate and still lives at home, she admitted
to me that she has literally no idea how to cook. Like even something as
simple as spaghetti Bolognese (i.e. the stuff from a jar, just add ground meat
and pasta) would be beyond her.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I find it even more troubling that people like this apparently cannot read
instructions and follow them.

There's a simple stepwise list of instructions on the box/can/jar. They're
making it as easy as humanly possible, short of actually providing a person to
cook for you, and yet some people still can't do it.

~~~
amp108
I resent the smug tone of this post. I have ADHD; I am neither lazy nor
stupid, but cooking is an ordeal for me. I cannot follow cooking instructions,
at least not reliably. I'll look at the list of ingredients and get the
amounts wrong (mix up one line for the line below/above it), or do the steps
out of order. I've forgotten to put the flavor packet in the pot when making
Hamburger Helper. I've put chocolate chips into a cookie dough mix too early,
meticulously picked them out, then _dumped them right back in again_.

Congratulations for you that cooking is simple and easy. It isn't for
everybody.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I understand that it may be difficult for you, but the people we're talking
about don't have ADHD, they're just lacking in basic life skills.

A lot of people spend their first 18 years with no responsibilities, they
always had a parent or someone else to do things for them. They are then
rudely awakened when they leave home and have to fend for themselves.

A lot of the skills that they were missing were things that I had been doing
for years, because I was fortunate enough to have parents who taught me how to
do things rather than just doing it for me. I disliked it at the time, having
to do my own work, but it was important to learn.

Often the skills that my friends were lacking were just basic life skills,
such as being able to sew on a button or a patch, how to operate a washing
machine properly, how to change a car tyre or their oil (or at least check
their oil), how to iron a shirt, etc. etc.

They were also lacking in more important life skills, like being able to
budget properly and look after their money. I knew a group of girls in one
house who ended up spending hundreds of dollars a month for electricity in
winter, because they were running heaters in every room 24/7 to try and keep
their uninsulated house warm, they just didn't even think of what their power
bill would be and were shocked when they received it. I can't remember exactly
what it was, but it was more than double what me and my housemates were
paying.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I think part of the problem is that a lot of people refuse to even try, maybe
because something is not immediately obvious to them, or because they're
afraid to fail.

They're simply lacking in basic curiosity and cannot accept that sometimes you
have to fail, in order to learn.

------
gumby
For some reason it jumped out at me that they considered time in religious
services as a measurable component of how an ordinary person might spend their
time. I can see how it might be relevant to the topic at hand but it's quite
uncommon for me to encounter a normative discussion of religious activity as
an unremarkable thing.

Is it common (i.e. do I live in a bubble) or is it a marker of something about
this article that I am missing? I pretty much only encounter mention of
religion in the news headlines and am not sure I even know anyone who attends
any kind of religious service more than two or three times a year.

It may be quite common and I might live in a bubble, but then is it mentioned
routinely?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I think it depends on where you are.

I lived in Indiana the first 35 years of life, generally in towns with
3000-70,000 people. It was quite common for folks to go to church. Single?
Want friends? and so on? You needed church. It was really, really common. To
the point that folks weren't as willing to be openly athiest or customers at a
retail place to assume that since employees were nice, they must all be good
Christians. It was definitely mentioned, and wasn't uncommon for folks to ask
where others went to church.

I always got the impression that larger cities or different areas were more
free with this sort of thing.

I now live in Norway, and I know very few folks that spend a lot of time at
church. There definitely aren't nearly as many of them here in town, and I
think half the churches are as much of a tourist attraction as they are places
for congregation. There is also more activities that aren't connected with any
sort of religion here as well - organized volunteer work, for example, with no
affiliation with religion.

~~~
gumby
> I always got the impression that larger cities or different areas were more
> free with this sort of thing.

Historically that's been one of the points of cities: if you don't like the
rules where you live you go to a city where there are too many people for that
sort of conformism. Of course some cities become large enough that they can
have self-selected pockets similar to smaller conurbations. Interesting that
the 70K town you lived in (not much bigger than Palo Alto) also exhibited this
culture, though presumably less intensely.

------
b0rsuk
My hypothesis for which I have only anecdotal evidence is that us evolved
monkeys still thrive with face to face social activity. We need body language,
voice, faces, and even touch. A sense of community. If you look at the chart,
pretty much all activities correlated with happines are social. I'm an atheist
and I interpret positive effects of religion on wellbeing is that churches
gathering places, and prayer is close to meditation. And social media so down
on the list... it's a SUBSTITUTE of normal interaction.

~~~
mrmrcoleman
Your hypothesis is supported to some extent by this:
[https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-
Infan...](https://stpauls.vxcommunity.com/Issue/Us-Experiment-On-Infants-
Withholding-Affection/13213)

TL;DR if you feed new born babies but don't give them any human affection they
die.

(I heard about this a long time ago but have never found the actual research
so there's a chance this isn't true.)

~~~
baq
Not exactly this but close enough IMHO: Romanian orphanages during
dictatorship [https://amp.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-
kids-...](https://amp.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-
brains.html)

------
norswap
The basic thesis _might_ be true in general, but the bias in treatment is so
apparent:

> Instead, [listening to music] often means a teen who has shut himself in his
> room or used her earbuds as an armor against social interaction.

And that's what garbage journalism looks like, kids.

~~~
nv-vn
The fact that TV news is so highly correlated with happiness basically reveals
that something significant is wrong with the data.

------
caiocaiocaio
I think the screen time-happiness causation might be backwards. When I was a
miserable, angsty teen, messing around on the computer was the only time I
could focus on something and distract myself from being extremely emotional.
Being around my friends generally made me anxious and depressed. I was drawn
to the computer because I consciously knew it was relief from unhappiness.

------
mirimir
Based on my (arguably hazy, at this point) childhood memories, maybe what's
making teens unhappy isn't so much smartphone use, but better networking with
other teens.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Based on my own memories, smartphone use would have been a bonus. I went
through times with literally zero friends. It upped to a small group of 3-5,
and after we moved I only really had 1 friend for a few years.

That time with no friends: For a few preteen years, I didn't do my homework,
which meant I got lunch detention. I had loose friendships with some kids I
knew in elementary school, but we didn't speak in school. Then we moved when I
was 13. I got labeled lesbian and people ignored me for the rest of the year.
(I'm bisexual, but didn't really realize I was looking at the time) I made a
few friends from other middle schools the first year of high school, hence the
small group of friends.

I remember getting AOL my last year of high school - for a short time, anyway,
until I ran up the bill due to the hourly billing. It was wonderful to simply
talk to other folks my age, one of which also got snail mail for a while. I
felt less lonely.

It makes it really hard for me to understand the internet making folks lonely
or unhappy - it has always enhanced my life to this day when I've had regular
accesss (I'm 40 now). I even met my spouse playing a text-based MMORPG, so I
wouldn't even have my life without it.

Maybe this is different for kids that are more "normal" than I ever was.

------
koala_man
I first read this as a condemnation of phone use, but that may just have been
a bias. On a second reading, I found that it was very careful in specifying
that all observations were correlations:

>Because this analysis is correlational, we can’t tell if these activities
cause happiness, happiness causes teens to engage in these activities more, or
if the same type of teens do both.

I'd be very interested in seeing a randomized trial to find causations, but
the ethical implications get in the way one again.

------
jklein11
Is psychologytoday considered an authority in the psychology space?

This isn't specifically about this article but I have read a number of
psychologytoday articles recently and they feel like their are opinion pieces
loosely backed by studies. This article seems like pretty sound advice, but
sometimes I worry that some articles get presented as cold hard scientific
facts when they are really just one model or theory.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
The replication crisis in psychology started by selecting high impact papers
published in reputable psychological journals. Cold hard scientific facts and
psychology simply do not go together. And that's not necessarily a
condemnation of the field, but rather just a statement that it should be
viewed as observations with proposed explanations rather than 'cold hard
scientific fact.' For instance I think this little article does a good job of
making clear to the reader that what they're discussing is entirely a
correlation. There might be reasons for this, or it could just be entirely
spurious.

~~~
BayesStreet
No one should really be considered an authority in the field of psychology.
Sure they can get things right sometimes but it's not rigorous enough
fundamentally to add much validity. It's their bread and butter to spam NHST
at the data until something sticks.

------
trukterious
They _sing_ while they're playing and/or working at the computer.

~~~
stephengillie
"But mom, I'm trying to show my Minecraft castle to my uncle!"

------
sargun
This seems obvious...as the author says, face-to-face interaction leads to
happier (people) teens (bar sleep). People with friends seem to spend more
time face-to-face with other people.

This seems like a no-brainer.

~~~
VLM
The simple and traditional "introversion = evil extroversion = good" meme is
tempting, but alternative explanations are possible.

For the majority, which are introverted, possibly "everything must be social
on smartphones" combined with non-face-to-face interaction means phone-time
means they never get that alone time to recharge and feel better, can never
quite get away from the dreaded notification pull-down drawer.

Imagine a world where cultural pressure combined with advanced social media
technology makes meditation and introspection and privacy and serenity
impossible; for some people that would be heaven, others, hell, regardless
which, its certainly what we have now.

Another interesting theory, possibly even accurate: kid-only interaction is
inherently bad, in the "Lord of the Flies" sense. Adult interaction might be
good, Cross-age tribal interaction might be good. Possibly all kid-only
interaction is bad and has always been bad; its certainly very artificial and
non-evolutionary and pre-social media there have been critiques of the culture
produced by kids interacting solely with other kids. If that theory is
correct, then a hand-held device that pumps more of something that can only be
poisonous would likely make most kids more unhappy on average. If a culture of
"Lord of the Flies" sucked, then "Lord of the Flies, now as a social phone
app" is merely going to suck more.

~~~
mirimir
When I was a kid, I generally avoided other kids. With a few exceptions.
Because, as you say, "Lord of the Flies" bullshit. And damn, I like that:
social media = "Lord of the Flies" :)

------
jchw
I did and still do a lot of the 'unhappy' activities and few of the 'happy'
activities. I seem fine. What gives?

------
konraditurbe
I'm very happy developing mobile solutions....

------
eseehausen
Obviously it's beyond the purview of the study, but I have to imagine the
correlations aren't too far off for adults either.

------
xellisx
I'll take the down votes, but when I saw the title in my RSS feed, my initial
answer was "Eachother.

------
stephengillie
Hang out with friends, goto the mall or other hangouts, play Minecraft, watch
Youtube and Twitch and Vine and try to make their own videos, ride bicycles,
and argue with their parents.

A few things have changed, but teen-age is largely the same as it was for us.

~~~
bsheir74
No its not. Read the authors book, igen. Crucial difference - kids are more
depressed and lonely

~~~
stephengillie
These are what my happy nieces do.

What is the author's source? A paywalled summarizing study that analyzed data
from other studies:
[http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Femo0000403](http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Femo0000403)

\- Was any primary research conducted? You'll have to pay $12 to find out.

~~~
mirimir
Damn :(

    
    
        sci-hub
        •• Search for a proxy to download an article ••
        
        Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American
        Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During
        the Rise of Smartphone Technology.
        
        Twenge 2018
        
        10.1037 / emo0000403
        no suitable proxies found

------
onli
How come that video arcades are in that list? I know that in some countries
they still exist, but as relevant part of teenage culture? Hard to believe.

------
AtlasBarfed
Sleep and exercise are king?

------
tormeh
Is there anything more stereotypical for a depressed teenager to do than
listen to music? That's a mystery that solves itself. Sitting alone, staring
into a wall while listening to music is not a thing most healthy people do.
For most, music is a secondary activity.

Anyway, I don't think the screen matters much per se. Being social in person
is good. Not being so is bad.

~~~
ken
> For most, music is a secondary activity.

This is strange to me. It seems like a modern change -- is it? Mostly today I
see people listening to music while doing something else, or hearing it as
background for movies/TV/games/commercials/stores.

In the past, we didn't think it was strange to just listen to a record. That
was how we heard music. It wasn't a sign of depression. (Before 2005, the most
I ever did to music was drive a car.) Music used to be a more social activity
due to technological limitations, but one consequence is that it was more
often a primary activity.

I suspect that I have some condition (hidden hearing loss, perhaps), as I _can
't_ just listen to music while doing something else. If there's music playing,
my brain can't ignore it, or background it. Maybe these people who listen to
music in private simply aren't physically able to appreciate it the way most
others are. The constant noise of modern life causes anxiety for me, too.

Concerts may be more social but they're also a _lot_ more expensive.
Bumbershoot was $10 in 1997, $35 in 2007, and $130 this year. You can't blame
teens for choosing to listen to music in private. I don't know how any teens
could afford to go to concerts today.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Ticket prices for bigger bands have definitely gone way up.

I'm very happy that the genres I listen to are still rather niche and out of
the mainstream. The most expensive concert tickets I've ever bought were less
than $100, and that was an arena show with two fairly big local bands.

