The quality of life of kids has degraded at least in the US and no not primarily from smartphones and social media.
The answer is simple, life is harder for parents.
And also the lack of third places making it a lot harder for both adults and kids to get together with friends in person without having to spend money
Also the move towards car-centric infrastructure. Which is somewhat related to the lack of 3rd places.
A lot of the movies with these parties had the kids showing up by walking or biking, which just is not feasible anymore. I
I also think about all the teen movies that were largely set in shopping malls. Most of the malls around me have shut down, so what’s next? Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Pretending people hang out and socialize in Wal-Marts for the sake of the movie?
Wal-Mart “Did someone say product placement?”
They actually do, or Target. Spend some time in there around 8-9pm and watch the little groups of teens wandering the store.
When the 24 hour Walmart opened in my podunk town it was a popular teen hangout after 10 or so.
This was in the late 90s though. I’m not sure what it’s like now, but that was also when teens got cheap ass cars as soon as they had a license.
Cash for clunkers, the economic busts and the auto industry eliminating affordable small cars (in the US at least), and more recently the insurance industry has changed car prices/expenses to make teens in that area less mobile and more isolated. Now it’s mostly drunks and retail employees after a shift in there after 9pm. And it’s not open 24 hours since the pandemic.
Yeah the effect of that is really insidious and far reaching, I know it hurt me growing up no question.
Smartphones and social media are probably why the kids don’t party like that anymore. They don’t need to gather in one house to all talk when they have their group chats and junk like that. Pretty sad to think about a generation of kids just pissing away their youth looking at a little screen in their hands all day.
Social media has warped many brains into living life as a performance of moments for their feed-posts, and too few exercise their right to Privacy, so everything is tainted with the concept of the Observer that we didn’t have in the past. Yes, we did party like those kids in those movies. It was rad.
Try being more curious about young people and actually listen to them talk when they are willing to be vulnerable to you and come back and tell me this is the problem. That is a lazy, easy narrative there you just spun.
Your assumptions are based on your imagination, since you don’t know that I haven’t done that
Then why do your descriptions of nuanced multifaceted humans portray them as such cartoonishly reductive caricatures dissected from any context outside of their control? Younger people by definition have the least control over their circumstance.
Sounds like you don’t like what I wrote. It’s not a big deal, but it is real. I’ve seen before and after, and what I said is what happened.
I dunno. I moved to Europe and there’s smartphones and social media here. But my colleagues kids are at birthday parties and hanging out with friends and going to events every weekend. This seems like a real US thing.
To my knowledge kids in US have 10x the scheduled activities on weekends compared to the past. Apparently the thought of a kid just lying around all weekend entertaining themselves is gone. They have to have scheduled camps all summer as well.
That sounds hellish to me.
Last weekend there was a big national festival in my area (Nijmeegse vierdaagse). I was late after the friday drinks at work. The trainand the stations were chuck full of teens and early 20 kids. They looked to be havin as much fun and being as stupid as I was at that age. Didn’t seem like much had changed in that regard.
The thing is, all the fun things that adults used to be able to do to blow off steam away from kids, keep getting ruined by going more “family friendly”. When I was a kid, there was a thing at the boulder reservoir with music and events, and people would drink and smoke weed and be mostly left alone. They made it family friendly and it started to die, then they decided it wasn’t eco-friendly so they killed it off.
Ragrbrai in Iowa happened the same way. A weeklong ride across the state that changes stops every year. Used to be drunken debauchery at the stops and now it’s family friendly and no fun anymore. Concerts are the same way. I know kids listen to slipknot, but why the fuck should I watch my mouth now that kids are around, when the singers saying much worse (in context) on stage? I’m sure everyone everywhere in America has a story like this. 4th of July on Apple River, in Wisconsin, back in college it was a blast. Alcohol and titties everywhere. I haven’t been since cops started going and enforcing shit.
I blame 2008 a lot of people didn’t have money to spend individually so they had to combo it into family time. Combine that with the fact that a lot of the places that used to cater to adults started to get increasingly ratty and decrepit without being replaced and ya end up with a rather bad feedback loop. In my area for example there’s only really one thing an adult can do at night in public that being go to a bar, but I know for a fact that when I was a kid a lot of places switched over to adults only past 8 PM so that they could attract folks who didn’t want to deal with kids nearby and I’m not just talking about a mini golf course or some shit there used to be a hobby store near me that did adults only Warhammer games at night which just meant bear and cussing.
It’s feels like America never really learned to maintain things.
Yes, but ours were usually much much more casual and in much smaller houses. TV makes everyone look rich. Broke people have parties too, but they’re chips/dip and BYOB. Also, without the jocks vs. nerds.
My husband was just telling a story this weekend about when he was “ninth grade cool”. Right before a party a cute girl asked if he had the new Prince album. He said yes and then begged his mom to take him to Sound Warehouse to buy it. Unwrapped it, shoved it in his pocket, and got dropped at the party. “Cool! What’s your favorite song?” “Uhh, the first one.”
Sad that kids now don’t have that experience.
Do kids still go parking?
Do kids still go parking?
So many kids today don’t want to drive or learn to drive 🤷♂️ And based on my partners’ kids, they’re much less sexually driven than we were. We did a bunch of stupid shit if there was a hint of a chance of getting laid.
That’s sad. The hours we spent talking, laughing, and making out in cars were the best part of high school. I wonder if some of the disinterest is from anti depressants.
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Yeah, absolutely no existential dread from the Cold War. And we all just instantly stopped believing that the world would end in a nuclear holocaust just because the Soviet Union collapsed. Then there was the Gulf war, then 9/11, then another Gulf war. And we’ve known about climate change and how capitalism is killing our planet for practically the entire time, that’s not new. Oil crisis? That’s been a slowly building crescendo of apocalypse since like the 70s.
I’ll buy existential dread as an excuse for not wanting to breed, not as an explanation for teenagers being less horny.
Give us y2k and we’ll party like it’s 1999!
Wait there aren’t parties anymore? What
Apparently kids are socializing in general less. Like it’s a real trend.
My neighbors gen z kids for the last 3 years had parties like this all the freaking time… so yeah they still happens. Maybe its just less common.
I’m aware parties like this happened when I was a kid, I was just too much of a square to get invited (I’m a millennial)
Home security cameras probably don’t help for house parties. Parents can see everything now.
Gen X. Grew up on an acreage and went to highschool in a small town a few kilometres away.
There was always some kind of party on the weekend. Either at someone’s house, or a bush party/pit party. This was the early nineties. So no phones/cameras.
I’m amazed we survived.
What’s a pit party?
Basically a bush party, but we had an old abandoned gravel pit just or of town that you could park your cars along the rim with headlights shining down to where we would light a bug bonfire.
I went to one in the early teens. I imagine it’s harder for teenagers to have a secret party when their psrente are out of town these days
What is this “out of town” of which you speak?
Back in the day you could afford kids and vacations. And so when you decided to have a little couple’s getaway or you and your friends decided to go on an adult trip or even if your cousin got married out of town and the 16 year old said fuck that shit, the kid got several days home alone and you got several days without their shitty music, hormonally grumpified attitude, and all around general teensge buĺlshit.
And so during that time the teenager might buy booze and throw a party
Its hard to through a secret part when your parents are out of town when the ring camera will let them know.
Yeah I never had this as a kid. Maybe I just wasn’t invited though lol
I’m older than 40 I didn’t go to these parties in high school because I was a nerd. I definitely went to and hosted parties like this in my college years. It was basically, invite everyone you know and then those people would bring their friends. Bring booze and snacks.Great way to meet new people.
Very common. The vibes and people varied based on the people throwing the party. Maybe it was a house party when someone’s parents were out of town. Maybe it was a kegger at the lake kinda outta the way in the dark. And everything in between.
Also, Hollywood wouldn’t have been making films in the 90s and 2000s to make you feel bad if this wasn’t the case. They’d be making the contemporary teens of the day feel bad, which they certainly didn’t because they could identify with the scene.
I mean, I’m a millennial in mid-thirties and I’d never heard of anyone actually doing a party like this either, so even in the 90s/00s these were things that seemed like ‘stuff they used to do before’
I’m almost forty and regularly hosted parties like this all through high school. So mileage must vary.
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early thirties and we had plenty of these during post-secondary
late high school parties were more of a field party than indoors
same and my experience was that parties existed but there used to be more wild parties with alcohol involved
Me neither. But I grew up in the city. There was no space in apartments for 100 people. Maybe 10 people stacked on top of each other.
In the 90s teenage me was way too uncool for these and never got invited once either.
Yeah, I was going to say. Then existing, and never having been to one, are not mutually exclusive.
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Believe it or not, even adults had home parties. It wasn’t just a kids or teens thing. So maybe you missed out as a teen but you can make up for it as an adult. Potluck dinners or game nights are a good way to start. We went to a potluck dinner for 8 people in a studio apartment a couple times when I was at uni.
