Pretty insightful article, it resonates with what I remember of my experience as a kid.

But while I believe the general trends outlined here, it's important to remember that "the world" != "the West" != "the US", and even within a single country, the situation can be vastly different from one place to another, one socio-economic stratum to another, or even one family to another.

I also think kids escaping to digital places is not a very recent phenomenon, and has been happening for at least a generation. It's just that the platforms have changed. Back in my days, that place was Facebook, and we had entire digital lives there that our parents knew little about. And it's no coincidence that we started migrating elsewhere at the time when the adults started joining as well (though the general enshitification of the platform certainly didn't help either).