Teen life: somehow worse
Tacking “cyber” onto age-old trends as they manifest in the digital age is an easy way to make them sound scarier, but when it comes to what adolescents put each other through, the rise of the Internet and smartphone has had startling consequences. If it was bad when I was in middle school; it must be almost unbearable now.
Remember that one party you weren’t cool enough to go to? The feeling of sitting at home and knowing, just knowing, everyone was having the best time? Well, imagine watching that party actually happen in real-time: your crush posting Instagram pics with someone else, seeing Snaps of all the fun you missed.
It’s everything that made being a teenage girl awful, but on a hyperloop that doesn’t end when you close your bedroom door.
No wonder mental health crises are exploding among Canadian youth. A survey this week from KidsHelpPhone found one in five teens had thought about committing suicide last year, 46 per cent suffer from body-image issues and another one in 10 face bullying. As old as these issues are, they take on a new incessant form in the digital age.
A poignant piece in the Washington Post this week details the downfall of a Grade 7 girl who sent a “sext” to a boy who’d been pestering her for months. She was wearing her bra and underwear and her face was obscured. But by the end of the day “everyone” knew and her social media streams were filled with calls of “slut” and “kill yourself.”
Turns out, the boy in question was a collector. He’d gathered photos of many other girls and later shared them.
It’s naive — the same kind of head-in-the sand attitude that fuelled sex-ed opposition last year in Ontario — for adults to ignore the fact middle schoolers don’t see themselves as children. They’re teeming with hormones that make them feel older than their cognitive abilities.
Yes, better sex education that teaches the dangers of online sexual activity alongside the pitfalls of STDs and teen pregnancy is important. But so too is digging deeper — examining why girls as young as 11 and 12 are willing to sexualize themselves and why boys think its ok to collect them like, well, Pokemon.
As we figure out how to build fully formed digital citizens, a generation is caught suffering a lot more than any of us ever did. Being a teen girl was never easy; being one in the digital age must be unbearable.