child. I cannot think of many circumstances under which this is a bad idea.
Okay, back to social media.
On the whole, I find that social media is too often a primary source of conflict between parents and children. And I get it—it is maddening to see your child, face down, constantly illuminated by the glow of their phone screen. But we need to keep in mind the meaning held in that screen for them.
And we need to present them with options. This is among the most important tasks parents need to face. I am often asked to provide a number: how much time per day is acceptable on social media?
It’s a fair question, but it’s the wrong question. More on this later.
Now, to be fair, many young people have offered me a very reasoned counterpoint to the scourge of screens and social media, a marked upside.
I was musing recently with a teenage client, Thomas, playing with the idea often spouted by my generation and the generation preceding me that kids today, through the shorthand of texting, emojis, memes, and flat-out stupid communication through Snapchat, are bastardizing and ruining the language. “Kids can’t write, or read, anymore,” “The art of intelligent discourse is dead,” I hear frequently. My wise young client Thomas pushed back hard on this notion, suggesting that quite the opposite is true. He pointed out, accurately, that his generation is actually very well-read and well-informed. Along with many of his contemporaries, he noted that his generation reads all the time, and is learning to be far more discerning and critical of what they ingest through all the internet has to offer.
“On our phones, we read way more than you guys did when you were our age, no doubt.”
Fair enough, Thomas.
He cited, in particular, Reddit, an online clearinghouse of news digests, memes, jokes, and debates. Picture a Huffington Post for young people. It can be vulgar and offensive at times (that’s part of the point), but it can be thought-provoking and highly informative as well. Twitter is another of his “news” sources, though with both sites, he does feel the need to dig in and verify information before developing an opinion.
So, Thomas would argue that his generation reads an incalculable number of pages of information per day, and is discerning truth and developing points of view nearly constantly, in real time. Unlike our generation, he would argue, they think in sophisticated ways all the time, every day. That discernment of thought may not be measured by exams in an English class, but Thomas does argue that it is a life skill his generation is the first to master at an early age, and which, in the internet age, will prove to be even more critical as time goes on.
Thomas would agree, by the way, that he and his friends communicate frequently via text shorthand, meme, or emoji. But he would further argue that older generations are missing the point. There is an understanding between young people that these methods are foolish and inane at times, but that is part of the humor in communicating that way. He adds that, “Well, at the very least, we are communicating, way, way more than your generation. We are in nearly constant touch with each other. So, if you guys are worried that we are socially out of touch, I think you’re 100 percent wrong.”
With smartphones, and the social and other media that accompany them, our kids discern more and think more than we ever did at their ages. We would do well to recognize, and find new ways to value, this fresh set of skills our kids are developing.
I also think we need to integrate some of them into our middle school and high school curriculum, by the way. I worked with Nathan, a bright, out-of-the-box-thinking nineteen-year-old, as he reflected on his high school years. Between sessions of taping a podcast with him, he offered the following wisdom:
“I can’t believe we are still working with this outdated method of teaching, with textbooks and lectures, man! And the exams and papers, all the ways we measure what we’ve learned, it all needs to change. I mean, the reality is we do have the internet, and we do have brains. And these are the things we are going to use every day for the rest of our lives to distill information. But school systems work the same way they did fifty years ago, when none of this even existed. They’ve got to change with the times. Because I know a lot of brilliant kids. But that genius isn’t gonna show up on a report card anymore.”
You may not agree, but he’s got both a point, and a point of view, right?
I have noted some other interesting forms of backlash to the onslaught among a select few young people. I have worked with several teenagers who, for various behavioral or emotional health-based reasons, have been sent by their families to therapeutic wilderness camps. I am quite fond of these settings, not only for the intensive individual and group therapy they provide, but also for taking troubled kids entirely out of their unhealthy context, providing them an immediate, far healthier geographic setting in which to heal. Set in beautiful outdoor locations, these camps are fully outdoors, and campers are, often for the first time in the lives, responsible for themselves and each other for food, shelter, warmth, and travel on foot from one site to the next for approximately two full months, sometimes longer.
And at camp, technology is strictly off limits.
The transition tends to be trying at first, as most kids are angry at their families for sending them, worried they will be left behind socially, and reset, hard, from all of their vices, including their iPhones (and vapes, Juuls, computers, iPads, weed, alcohol, processed foods, and so on). After that period of adjustment, though, there tends to follow several weeks of profound healing and change. Imagine how liberating it must feel to truly be away from all the tech that clouds our minds. Kids tell me they are firmly set in the present moment, focused on the hike, or the river, or the sky, or their own breath. It’s a feeling most kids have likely never felt, and I suspect this condition will only worsen with each passing year. Honestly, I wish every kid could spare a couple of months out of their adolescence to be a part of a camp atmosphere like this. How cleansing for the body, mind, and spirit.
So, after the two months expire, kids return home. One boy told me about a moment, just hours after leaving his camp, in which he was in the front of a line at a McDonald’s in the airport nearby, heading home. He was looking at the menu when the kid behind the counter yelled at him, “Come on already! What do you want?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m just looking.”
Disgusted, the boy at the cash register yelled, “Next!”
“I just wasn’t thinking at that pace anymore,” my client told me. “And I didn’t want to.”
He had learned a lot about himself while away. And one of the first things he did was get rid of his smartphone, in favor of a retro flip phone. He knew he would want the ability to text his friends once he fully reintegrated into his life back home, but he also knew the smartphone was inherently toxic to his well-being, and he felt he was fully addicted to it before camp.
He is far happier now, and feels more emotionally in-balance than ever before. He never knew the type of peace of mind he experienced at camp was possible. It had never occurred to him, as he had never known a world without fairly constant access to a “soul-sucking” screen. A couple other clients of mine have followed suit, returning from a therapeutic wilderness camp and forgoing the smartphone, at least for a time. A couple of others, who have kept their phones, take breaks from social media, removing the apps from their phones in order to clear their minds. One girl in particular replaces Snapchat with Headspace, a simple and elegant meditation app, for a week or so every couple of months. She finds emotional self-regulation and balance that way.
My hope for our children is that we are quickly reaching critical mass, and a backlash is imminent. I suspect
