When I was in high school, I dealt with my peers from 8 to 3, five days a week. I took weekends, evenings, and summers off with only a few exceptions for close friends. I knew other kids from my school were whooping it up on Saturday night, but I had no evidence of it, no idea what I was missing, and I was happy to hunker down at home, grab a bowl of Cheerios, and watch an episode of Moonlighting (in real time, with commercials). Today there is no unplugging. Teenagers today are connected 24/7. Even if their parents mandate time away from social media, the young minds are still churning, churning away, wondering what they're missing, worrying that life is happening without them.
I knew a little bit about this before I read American Girls. Times have changed, things are hard, yeah, yeah. But really, I knew nothing. My teenagers and their friends aren't a real accurate picture of the bigger world. And let's face it; I'm old and out of touch. A curtain has always existed between the generations. Sometimes we can peek through it or around it, but it's there, and it's not budging. In some ways it's a healthy and necessary curtain. We parents want our kids to grow up, to take ownership of their lives, to organize their own schedules and be responsible for their own commitments. I like a nice, breezy, sheer curtain. With this generation, in particular, however, the curtain seems to have become an impenetrable drape. Technology, in large part, has been the seamstress. Parents, non-natives in this new world, stand on one side of the technological curtain, and teenagers, with their ever-changing apps, stand on the other. This is why I am thankful for Nancy Jo Sales's book. It pulled back the curtain. Here, boiled down, are some things it revealed to me:
- Social media addiction starts early, and the younger it starts, the more controlling it is.
- Teen girls, and likely teen boys, have a love-hate relationship with social media. It makes them anxious, untrusting, and obsessive, but they can't imagine their lives without it. As one girl put it, better to let it ruin your life than to have no life at all.
- Teens are spending less time in person with one another, and when they are together, they're spending less time talking. One 16-year-old girl said: "I find most of the time I'm with my friends, I feel so disconnected because of the technology. They're always on their phones to play a game or see what someone else is doing somewhere else." What effect will this have on their ability to interact as adults?
- No one on teenage social media can escape being bullied, and nearly everyone will display their own bullying behavior, whether they recognize it or not. Everyone will be ridiculed. Everyone will ridicule.
- Because life on social media is perceived as "not real," teens can make more impulsive decisions on it. "The younger you get a phone, the more impulsive your decision are," said one 14-year-old.
- Sex is prolific on social media. It is "normal" for 14-year-old girls and boys to have dozens of nude pictures on their phones.
- The author contends that nearly every school has "slut pages," a site for boys to rank girls according to who's loose, who's hot, and who's not. Sometimes mothers are listed.
- Porn is one click away at all times. Follow an innocent hashtag for a couple clicks, and you're going to see hard-core porn the likes of which Hugh Hefner never imagined.
- The porn industry has hijacked social media, especially the kind designed for young people, and we cannot underestimate its power or prevalence in our kids' lives. Do not believe that your kid is the exception.
- With porn as their model, boys have come to expect "porny" encounters with girls, and girls have learned to provide it. What will the future ramifications be on marriage, intimacy, and fidelity?
- "There is no trust in our generation. Love is just a word; it has no meaning." --14-year-old girl
- Parents don't usually get involved in their teens' online lives until there's a crisis, and crisis is likely: cutting, eating disorders, attempted suicide, or criminal activity. Child porn is still a crime, even if it's a couple of 15-year-olds sending nude pictures of themselves back and forth. Lawmakers are puzzling over what to do about this.
- The author laments that we've taken huge steps back from the progress made in gender equality in the past 30 years. There are plenty of girls still going to college, but there are also plenty who just want to be "hot and famous." Their role models are the Kardashians and beauty vloggers like Jenna Marbles, who instructs viewers to "bleach the absolute **** out of their hair," go tanning, wear contacts, and cake on makeup. She has well over 15 million subscribers, most of them teen girls.
I hope that by sharing the "highlights" of this book, I've given you a peek behind the curtain. I am no expert, and I don't presume to think I have all the solutions to the disturbing information presented in the book. The author proposed renewed feminism as a solution. That seems like a hollow answer to me. My answer, if I have one, is for parents to delay, delay, delay. Hold off on bringing new technology into our kids' lives. Choose "dumb" phones, which very well may be a smarter phone for a young teenager. For those whose kids have social media, we need to stay in our kids' business. Have family meals. Don't go our separate ways after dinner. Do homework in a community space. Know our kids' friends. Know what's on our kids' phones. Know what they're posting and viewing online. Know that they will cover things up, and they're smarter and slicker at this than we can imagine. Think hard about how much personal privacy they want versus how much they need. A violation of their personal privacy is better than a middle-of-the-night trip to the ER because they've tried to hurt themselves.
We can't check out. I know how easy it is. They drive, they have their own lives, they don't appear to need us as much. It's tempting to take our new-found time and launch ourselves into work or house projects or volunteering or our own social media worlds. But I so strongly believe that a 16-year-old needs a parent every bit as much as a 3-year-old, and possibly even more. This is not the time to check out. This is the time to put on our big-girl (and boy) parenting panties and do the hard, sometimes uncomfortable work of teaching and guiding teenagers. And while we're at it, let's watch what we're modeling. Am I texting while driving? Do I put my gadgets away when my kids enter the room and give them my full attention? Am I berating myself over a new pimple or a couple added pounds? How quick am I to criticize and ridicule others? They. Are. Watching. Us.
And as I said a month ago, we've got to pray. Even intentional, engaged parents are not going to catch everything. I know I'm not aware of everything going on under my roof. We have limited our kids' technology as much as just about anyone. But we can't limit what their friends are doing. We have no say in what's being passed around on the phone in the cafeteria. We've tried to teach them well, but they're going to make bad choices and stumble into bad situations. They're going to stay silent when they should speak up, and they're going to hide something when they know it's wrong. This is why I pray. I ask God to bring the things of darkness into the light. I ask Him to make my kids get caught, and for their friends to get caught. I pray that they will learn from their mistakes the first time, the easy way. And I pray that He'll give me the discipline and wisdom to stay at it, to not check out, to not be deceived when everything feels fine but it's not. I pray for the kids who don't live in my house, for those who will be my kids' roommates and spouses and coworkers and neighbors. For those who will be my dentist and maybe even my caregiver some day. God, be real to them. Show them that you alone are life and truth, joy and fulfillment, hope and peace. Pursue them relentlessly. Let them know that love is not just a word. It's a Person. Amen.
