I remember the good old days, when each of the three or four giant social media platforms offered a somewhat unique experience. Snapchat was good for quick and erasable goofs. Instagram actually showed you cute photos of your friends, instead of just ads. Facebook carved out a niche for the being the only platform that allowed for both Minion memes and the vast extraction of private user data. Now, the differences between them seem to narrow by the day, a trend that the livestreaming platform Twitch appears to be continuing with a newly announced stories feature.
Social Media Is Just One Online Habit Hurting Teens
27.09.2023 - 01:31 / tech.hindustantimes.com
Last spring, my tween was begging for more independence, starting with being allowed to walk home from school alone. The mile-plus walk involves crossing a few busy streets. I was hesitant; she doesn't have a phone, so she had no way to contact me if something went wrong. But we practiced a few times (with me trailing her a block behind) to be sure she was confident of the route and talked about what she would do in various scenarios.
Then, we allowed her to do something that some parents in our uber-connected era might find truly wild: roam free.
The chance of something happening to her is vanishingly low, but it still took a few days to shed my anxiety. I reminded myself that building her independence requires mutual trust — and that comes with accepting some risk.
And failing to give kids sufficient independence carries risks, too. That's a recurring theme of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, a new book by Devorah Heitner. There are downsides to constantly tracking our kids, whether that's using Find My Phone to keep tabs on their locations or following their performance at school through apps like ClassDojo or PowerSchool. Even monitoring teens' texts and perusing their social media accounts — as often suggested by parenting experts — can backfire.
“The culture of surveillance is shaping our children's sense of identity and independence — and impacting our mental health, our family's connectedness, and our ability to self-define in adulthood,” Heitner writes. “This impact starts as early as kindergarten.” This teaches our kids that it's normal to be constantly surveilled, she argues. Living in this digital panopticon can increase their anxiety.
And hard though it may be to admit, parental vigilance can't always keep kids safe. Constant supervision just gives us the illusion of control — it doesn't prevent questionable decisions or bad grades. What's needed is, as Heitner puts it, a shift from “monitoring” to “mentoring” so that teens learn to make their own wise choices. One of parenting's challenges is walking that line.
Heitner's perspective adds dimension to the conversation about the current teen mental health crisis. Whenever I've written about the alarming decline in the mental health of tweens and teens, I inevitably get a flurry of emails telling me that the source of the problem is clear: It's all that TikTok and texting. The solution, therefore, is simple: Parents just need to be more on top of what's going on in their teens' digital lives — less social media, more boundaries, more monitoring.
But that instinct to keep kids safe through constant oversight might not always be the right one. At times, it could even do more harm than good.
Let me be clear: I'm a proponent of
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