Less social media for kids may be good for all
Jean Twenge’s new, expertly researched book “Igen” confirms what most thinking people already sensed about the children and teens who’ve grown up with smartphones: these kids are more depressed and anxious than any previous generation on record, and they have a critical lack of social skills and resilience.
A lot of parents seem uneasy and frustrated with the amount of time their kids spend on their phones, but they go along with it because they believe that their children need a phone in order to survive socially.
But what if that’s wrong? What if it’s actually a good thing to limit kids’ social connections?
A friend of mine has had an agonizing year; her son — by all appearances a gifted, charismatic child — was bullied viciously and relentlessly at his public school. Naturally, none of the usual strategies worked: fighting back, ignoring it, informing the teacher and principal, meeting with the bullies’ parents …. My friend consulted a child psychologist who said that the only effective response was for the victim to show the bully that they genuinely don’t care.
This is a mighty tall order. When I was bullied in elementary school, I never managed to pull it off: my face would go red, my voice would shake, and I jumped at any chance, no matter how small or pathetic, to be back in the good graces of the popular kids. I would dwell on any social interactions, replaying them in my mind and wondering what I could have done differently, or how I might make up for what I’d done wrong … if I could figure out what I’d done wrong.
My elementary school classmates were my world: I spent 185 days a year with them for nine years. What they thought about me determined my fortunes in a very immediate, daily way.
Now, with smartphones, there’s no break from that world: classmates are there on evenings and weekends too, and through the summer.
Could anything matter more to a kid than what their classmates think? Is there anything that has more impact on a kid’s life in terms of the sheer number of contact hours?
Some have asked me how my kids, all of them home-schooled, will be prepared for the “real world.” I think there’s a suspicion that they’ll be soft and unable to navigate the harshness of everyday life.
But as they get older, I’m becoming more and more convinced that when you protect kids from this harshness — when you keep them out of the kind of sink-or-swim urgency of the schoolyard and classroom pecking order — they’re actually better prepared for the real world. I realize this sounds counterintuitive, but bear with me.
Attempts to bully my two oldest kids have fallen flat, never to be attempted again, because neither seems to care. My middle child is stunningly impervious to what others might think, particularly when it comes to putting together outfits that look nothing like what the other kids are wearing. My 6-year-old son carries around a doll who’s had such a rough go of things she’d look right at home in a horror film, but he shrugs off other children’s comments or stares.
When they’re in large groups of other kids — even kids they’ve never met — they blend and make connections easily. I find this shocking as hell; they certainly didn’t get their early social equilibrium from me or their father, who was also bullied. The decision we made, in part, out of fear and loathing (“We don’t want our kids to be bullied the way we were”) has, ironically, shaped children remarkably free of fear and loathing.
What I’ve come to believe is that children develop a greater sense of confidence and independence when they don’t rely on uninformed, subjective, and capricious external markers of success — markers like classroom popularity, and, yes, grades. Instead, they learn to rely on internal cues — thoughts, feelings and independent interests — and spend more time developing a stronger, lifelong foundation with parents and siblings.
The majority of us have to send our kids to school because we need to work. There’s no getting around this. But perhaps we should rethink our assumption that kids can’t thrive unless they have a smartphone, and constant connectedness to the vagaries of classmates.
Kids need frequent, caring and informed adult involvement if they’re going to grow up to think critically about their behaviour and others’ behaviour, and to understand who they are, what makes them happy, and how to rely on themselves.