I see it a different way. Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. In fact they might just not be that into you anymore. It’s ok if visits upset their routine and holidays are somewhat irritating. Same for being not overly enthusiastic about taking on care giving roles for grandkids. They’re still individuals and it’s not like old age causes someone to lose their inner world. They’ve seen a lot and not as much is novel likely. They’re facing loss, mortality and decline. If they feel compelled to scroll let em scroll. I’m so glad assistive technologies and a11y will be there when I’m decrepit so I can have something more stimulating than TV. Maybe ask grandma to play some Lethal Enforcers the next time you visit you’d be surprised — mine did.
> That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.<p>Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
Really couldn’t have put it better. When I was a child my grandmother retired and relocated 800 miles to help with my mother with childcare. Why? Because it’s why you do. It’s what all of her family did as far back as anyone could care to remember.<p>This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
My parents moved from Texas to Chicago this year to be near my sister instead of me (their son) because in their very traditional minds they need to be taken care of by a daughter in their old age. I get to send checks. I thought it was a terrible idea, they have friends and family here and Chicago is very cold. That being said they moved into a community of her 11 kids and their spouses and their kids — probably 30+ relatives in their orbit. And they are surrounded by people who love them and help them. It’s really been good for them. Much less scrolling and much more conversation, group meals, board game playing, storytelling.
Your sister has 11 kids? Smart of your parents, then. That’s a good pool of caretakers for them to live around. But I’m surprised they didn’t move sooner to help raising that many kids.<p>I live in Texas now, and think I’d ultimately prefer Chicago too. Don’t have to drive as much to find stimulation, and the cold preserves.
Except that doomscrolling causes aged folks to deteriorate in health faster than being active in some way, just like for everyone else.<p>If it were simply that they weee living their own lives, I don’t think <i>anybody</i> would take issue with that.<p>But they aren’t - they are spending their lives on their phones, doomscrolling, which is much more likely to cause accelerated aging.<p>No, I don’t have a study for this, but it is not a secret that being active and <i>not</i> on your phone improves health outcomes.
I think this misses the point.<p>Excessive scrolling is like excessive eating, smoking, or snorting coke.<p>It is not healthy and not indicative of a full filling life.
> Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too.<p>This is at best extremely cultural. It is certainly not a global norm and not really viewed as desirable, just necessary.<p>Average American doesn't move very far at all from their parents and America is where the idea of time limited parenting is most prevalent.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...</a>
Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.<p>My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: <a href="https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...</a><p>So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: <a href="https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png" rel="nofollow">https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png</a><p>Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
I tried something like that with Chrome Extensions but it doesn't age well. WHen it worked, it surely saved me some time to do more productive things: <a href="https://github.com/oldeucryptoboi/Homer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/oldeucryptoboi/Homer</a>
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.<p>I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
Just add channels you like to your rss feed. It works great with freshrss.<p>Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.
Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.<p>Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.<p>Doesn't take much to find the science.<p>Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.<p>If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.<p>It's your "choice" (tm)<p>Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)<p>Peace to you all.
If you press t key you will get a full width video player.
Screenshot not found.
I've been saying this for a while. For all the talk about kids, seniors are the ones addicted to phones. Doomscrolling on Tiktok, Facebook, even locked into mobile games. Its very depressing.
My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.
It's weird. I was born with the internet being largely a business or academic tool, with normal people barely having a reason to have an email address.<p>When I was in high school, flip phones could let you text friends, as long as you didn't mind your parents later using your soul to pay the phone bill.<p>When I was in college, the most addictive thing the internet could offer was foul bachelor frogs and rage comics.<p>Along the way, I learned how dangerous even those unrefined sugars were. It was like chewing coca leaves or sugarcane. Enough t get you a buzz, but not enough to ruin your life. So I know not to touch the algorithmic fentanyl feeds of TikTok and the like.<p>But good god, nobody younger or older had any protection from this. My parents and spouses parents, and my zoomer cousins both basically got handed giant bags of refined gigasugar without even the vaguest warnings. I'll refrain from likening it to opiates against because they are on a whole different level, but good god it does seem more dangerous than even refined sugar.
It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.<p>It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.<p>The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
For about 2-3 years now youtube itself is flooded with countless channels producing generated content. Whoever are the people behind this they know what they're doing and what kind of stuff will give them views and attention from vulnerable audience.<p>There's fueling political and social rage with "news", casting doubts on family relations with "true life stories" (daughter-in-law threw me out of my house), religious "coaching" (dead since end of 60s Padre Pio gives you life lessons and "secret" prophecies), worthless tips and tricks (don't eat this nut if you're 50yo woman or your hair will fell off), lewd promotion with twist on history (sexual violence in every thumbnail) or tourism (women in country of x are "ready" all the time). So on and so on.<p>So I'd say it's not that much strange if you look closely what kind of the content older people can walk onto. And this is just youtube.
I shouldnt be surprised that my mom is obsessed with her smartphone. As a kid, I remember her talking with friends on the landline phone for what seemed like HOURS
My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
old folks and children both face the same problem with the internet— their initial exposure is to the <i>current</i> internet that has been ab tested into a hyper-addictive hellscape and they are cognitively unprepared. Jumping straight into the deep end before you know how to swim.<p>Whereas genX and Xennials had the privilege of wading into a pre-social media internet during their formative years which served as a vaccine of sorts. We are by no means immune to tech addiction and disinformation, but we seem much better equipped for spotting trolls/ragebait and giving the side-eye to addictive dark patterns in apps
Over 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down.<p>Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.<p>I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd.<p>Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
Someone bedridden is not the focus of the article or conversation; once you are no longer capable of being active, it is obviously true that you’ll partake in more sedentary activities.
The concern is what you're doing when you're getting older but still able.<p>The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
The article in question:<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-parents-have-screen-time-problem/685424/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...</a>
Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
> No amount of platforming will fix this.<p>The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
Sunday, passable weather but still sunny, wonderful river view, restaurant at 50% capacity, outside tables full. In comes grandma and grandpa with granddaughter on a stroller. They sit, he starts smoking, gives a tablet to the granddaughter who goes through the entire meal with that in front, and grandma spends every pause scrolling whatever on her phone. Grandpa switches smoking and feeding himself through the whole time they were there. Not a word spoken at that table. Unreal.
I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
This is something ive started to notice, the older generation becoming victims to doomscrolling, my dad being one of them. What makes it worst is that unlike kids who group in the social media world, and therefore have some ability of discerning between whats real and fake, the older gen are so gullible when it comes to fake news, propaganda, and ai generated content.<p>Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
Older generations have an implicit trust for what is on screen because they grew up in an era where getting something on screen was not easy, and thus had an implied credibility.<p>Take advertising as an example. Before Google Ads and the so-called democratization of advertising, it was <i>expensive</i>, and you didn't get an ad on a TV program or a national publication without some level of quality and/or trust behind your product.<p>Similarly, content was not easy to produce and certainly not cheap to get in front of eyeballs in the limited medium that was television. People were selective in what they watched so in order to <i>be</i> watched it needed to meet a minimum threshold for quality.<p>These days however, the barrier to entry for advertising and content are so low that any implicit trust should be ridiculous. Unfortunately for our parents and grandparents however, that is what they know - and old habits die hard.
Before smartphones they sat at home and watched game shows and TV evangelists, and listened to Rush on the radio. Which is worse?
Before smartphones and TikTok it was casino TV at 3AM, TV infomercial shopping, and the like.
I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
That makes sense, they haven't "built immunity".
Can you share some things you were reading?
Not OP, and I’ve been looking at more meta-analyses than RCTs, but:<p>* Lei et al 2024 metaanalysis, generally positive associations but no causal evidence for psychosocial effects, especially when the social media use is family-directed - <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-psychogeriatrics/article/relationship-between-social-media-use-and-psychosocial-outcomes-in-older-adults-a-systematic-review/489FE4D4C9D8E0A482D58B5EA0F48BFA" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-psycho...</a><p>* Balki et al 2022, metaanalysis, same thing: good for reinforcing existing real-human social connections, overcoming barriers to/increasing regularity and frequency of contact, acquiring access to resources; isolating to use outside that context; regular and frequent contact much more effective than occasional or episodic: <a href="https://aging.jmir.org/2022/4/e40125/" rel="nofollow">https://aging.jmir.org/2022/4/e40125/</a><p>My overall impression seems to be what common sense tells us: to the extent it lets you overcome aging-related obstacles to interacting with real people, great; to the extent it’s brain rot, it’s isolating.
This is the one I read: <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000714" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032...</a> which says how older participants benefit more from restricting social media use.
Time to sign off HN, I guess :-)<p>On a serious note YT shorts are on my radar for "things I spend too much time on that deliver minimal value."
"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"<p>False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
Reminds me of Chade and The Skill from the Robin Hobb books
I must admit. My parents we're right the whole time. Staring at the screen for a whole day is truly unhealthy and they should go to play outside instead.<p>This whole thing is beyond ironic.
Amazing opportunity! One more demographic to save via age verification laws, with a side dish of reliable personalized advertisement profiles.
Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media. They're often retired, having entire days at their disposal, wasting them on forwarding sh*t back and forth.
Wait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.
Seniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.
Here in Germany they also ignored the demographics, so our social insurance systems (retirement but also health) are heading towards a catastrophe, because there is no capital backing them. They are fundamentally relying on the next generation being bigger or at least equal. This has turned them essentially into Ponzi schemes. The taxpayer has to jump in, making the state less and less able to do anything at all. Of course they now collectively avoid responsibility and slowly milk the young - their own children - dry.<p>It is truly the most egoistic generation ever.
It's going to be interesting when the Millenials retire - IIRC, that generation was almost as large as the boomers. Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha that are going to be supporting them are a LOT smaller.
You are describing every pension system in the world.
Well, he explains all deferred spend.<p>Deferred spending is quite unnatural. That I can work 1 hour today and buy youghurt in 2 years is an artifact of our system.<p>But this also relies on someone making that youghurt in 2 years from now.<p>It is that key dogma that will likely be under pressure for future pensioners.
ChatGPT thinks, that in the US social security makes up about 30-40% of the retirement income of a typical American, while the German system makes up about 80-85% of a retired German. Home ownership rate in Germany is also way lower.<p>Germany is an outlier in that there is no capital backing for that generation whatsover. The problem has been known for 30 years, they just chose to ignore it.
<i>> the most likely to vote</i><p>Well... who's fault is that.
And also the most likely to fall victims to scams. An elderly family friend lost millions to a pig butchering scam.
Maybe a solution is to spend more time with grandparents, so that they have something more than just technology to keep them company.
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
Sure, but I've seen since the 70s old folks just staring at TV all day, so it's not just a mobile phenomenon either.
I know a lot of old bored retired people.<p>They need something physical and social. Like softball or something. But compatible with their decripitude.<p>I hook them up with each other. There are parties.<p>Still working on the softball part.<p>Ideas are welcome
Doesn't always help. My mother (of grandparent age but coincidentally had 5 kids who didn't want to procreate) stares at her phone 95% of the time when I visit. I'll be telling a story and she's on Facebook, doesn't even look up. She's even been called out in it by my sibling who lives with them, to no avail.<p>Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.
Yes, but no. From personal experience, even around grandchildren, TikTok/FB have precedence. It’s getting sickening and we need to educate our parents about the harm that "the algorithm" causes. I just ask myself whether we are even in the position to do so.<p>edit: typo
I'd love to. The issue is grandparents are in a town with no jobs ruled by a corrupt government that only steals and embezzles money and provides no benefits to local taxpayers.<p>There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.
If someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ.<p>Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
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I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"\<p>He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time\<p>You see my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu\<p>But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad\<p>It's been sure nice talking to you"\<p>And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me\<p>He'd grown up just like me\<p>My boy was just like me
Taking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!