【文章标题】：如今的孩子们
【文章正文】： Kids these days have it great. 如今的孩子们过得非常幸福。
Compared with decades ago, young children benefit from more time with their parents and much more time with their fathers. 与几十年前相比，年幼的孩子们能享受更多与父母相处的时间，尤其是与父亲共处的时光显著增加。
Teenagers drink less, smoke less, and are less likely to die in car accidents. 青少年饮酒、吸烟的比例下降，车祸死亡率也大幅降低。
Life is much better for racial and sexual minorities—when I was in high school, someone rumored to be gay would be bullied savagely. 少数族裔和性少数群体的处境明显改善——我读高中时，传闻是同性恋的学生会遭受残酷欺凌。
Children and adolescents are less likely to experience physical and sexual violence, and less likely to be murdered. 儿童和青少年遭受身体暴力、性暴力及谋杀的概率显著降低。
They have access to cheap travel, better food, more information of all sorts, and limitless entertainment. 他们能享受廉价旅行、更优质的食物、海量信息和无限娱乐。
And the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decades. 互联网为现实世界的失意者提供了避风港，让怪胎、书呆子和极度害羞的人能以几十年前同龄人无法想象的方式建立社交联系。
There is no better time to be young. 这是有史以来最好的青少年时代。
For many readers, this is a ridiculous claim. 但对许多读者来说，这种说法荒谬可笑。
There are good reasons to conclude that this is a terrible time to be young. 我们有充分理由认为当下是青少年最糟糕的时代。
Compared to their counterparts in previous decades, children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; 与过去几十年的同龄人相比，现在的儿童青少年更常独处；
they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; 他们每天花数小时盯着手机；
they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure. 游戏时间更少，睡眠不足，为乐趣而阅读的时间锐减。
They have listless and coddled lives. 他们过着无精打采又娇生惯养的生活。
High school students today are more likely to be anxious and depressed (that is particularly true for girls), and are more likely to kill themselves. 当今高中生更容易焦虑抑郁（尤其女生），自杀率也更高。
Our children are living in a time of crisis. 我们的孩子正身处危机时代。
So who’s right? 那么谁是对的？
I’ve been reading about these topics for an academic chapter that I’m writing—which might, who knows, turn into a book proposal—and have some ideas that I’d love to get feedback on. 我正为撰写的学术章节（说不定会扩展成书）研读这些议题，有些想法渴望获得反馈。
The question of whether there has been improvement or decline since, say, the 1980s, is an important one. 自1980年代以来社会究竟是进步还是退步，这是个关键问题。
Suppose things really have gotten worse. 假设情况确实恶化。
If so, then it’s an argument for radical change. 那就需要彻底变革。
The point is nicely made in No Country for Old Men, where Anton Chigurh says this to a man he is about to kill. 《老无所依》中安东·奇古尔对将死之人说的话精妙诠释了这一点。
What sort of radical change? 怎样的彻底变革？
Well, perhaps we should restore the values, practices, and policies of the earlier period before things fell apart. 或许该重建体系崩溃前的价值观、行为规范和政策。
We might want to dismantle capitalism, cut back on the welfare state, restore religious values, crush movements like feminism and anti-racism … or double down on them. 可能需瓦解资本主义、削减福利制度、复兴宗教价值观、镇压女权主义和反种族主义运动…或强化这些运动。
(Everything depends on one’s preferred theory of why we are in this pickle.) （选择取决于个人对现状成因的理论偏好。）
Alternatively, if things are going better, we should just stick with the plan, confident that, in the long run, the state of the world will continue to improve. 若情况在好转，就该坚持现有路线，相信世界终将持续进步。
(For a good defense of this view, see Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.) （该观点的有力辩护参见史蒂芬·平克《当下的启蒙》。）
Now this sort of optimism is currently unpopular, but it’s always been unpopular—particularly when it comes to children and adolescents. 这种乐观主义如今不受欢迎，历来如此——尤其在青少年议题上。
The Kids Are Never All Right. “孩子们永远不对劲”。
Some might look back fondly on the lives of teens in the 1980s, before TikTok and smartphones, when kids hung out in shopping malls, listened to mixtapes, and waited in arcades to play Pac-Man. 有人怀念1980年代没有TikTok和智能手机的青少年生活——那时孩子在商场闲逛、听混音带、在街机厅排队玩《吃豆人》。
Maybe they are right to do so, but in the 80s, people were complaining that things had gone to hell. 这种怀旧或许有理，但80年代人们同样哀叹世风日下。
Here’s a popular list (the facts are totally fabricated, by the way) distributed at the time (from the Eibach and Libby chapter in this book). 当时流传的流行清单（顺便说，内容纯属虚构，引自本书艾巴赫和利比章节）就是明证。
My bet is that in the 1940s, adults really missed those great teens in the 1890s, who knew the value of work (only half of them went to school) and weren’t yet coddled by indoor toilets. 我敢打赌1940年代的大人也会怀念1890年代”优秀”青少年——他们懂得劳动价值（仅半数人上学）且没被室内马桶宠坏。
None of this means that the worriers are mistaken or that we are in the grip of a moral panic (though I might make this argument in another post). 这并非说忧虑者错了或我们陷入道德恐慌（虽然我可能在另文讨论）。
But it does suggest that the popularity of despair can’t be taken as good evidence that this despair is warranted. 但确实表明，普遍的绝望情绪不能证明这种绝望合理。
But still, things really are rough for kids today. 但当今孩子的处境确实艰难。
I opened this post with a graph from Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation. Here’s another, looking at American children ages 10-14. 开篇引用了乔纳森·海特《焦虑的一代》的图表，再展示10-14岁美国儿童数据：
And another: 还有：
Haidt blames the screens, and particularly social media. 海特归咎于电子屏幕，尤其是社交媒体。
He calls the period between 2010 and 2015 “The Great Rewiring”, where we moved from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood”. 他称2010-2015年为”大重构期”，童年从”游戏主导”转为”手机主导”。
Blaming the screens has caught on. “屏幕祸害论”已成共识。
Besides hatred of data centers, what holds Americans together is the view that you should keep social media away from the kids. 除了憎恶数据中心，让美国人团结的共识是：该让孩子远离社交媒体。
It’s hardly a crazy view. 这观点并不疯狂。
The timing of increases in anxiety, depression, and suicide does seem to implicate smartphones and social media. 焦虑、抑郁和自杀率上升的时间点确实指向智能手机和社交媒体。
And the argument by Haidt and others for how they are bad for teenagers makes a lot of sense, at least to me. 海特等人关于其危害青少年的论述很有说服力，至少对我而言。
But then you get to the research. 但深入研究后：
There are many, many studies now that look at the relationship between social media use and declines in mental health. 现有大量研究探讨社交媒体使用与心理健康恶化的关联。
Now, as everyone who does this research acknowledges, findings from correlational research are hard to interpret. 研究者都承认：相关性研究结果难以解读。
Suppose you find a large association. 假设发现强关联性：
This could mean that exposure to social media makes teenage girls depressed, just as Haidt and others claim. 可能如海特所说，社交媒体导致少女抑郁；
But it could also mean that depressed girls are more likely to go on social media. 也可能抑郁少女更倾向使用社交媒体。
Or maybe certain personali 或是某些人格特…（原文截断）