Kids on Social Media

April 6th, 2022

Julie: Today we’re diving into the world of social media, a topic so contentious that it came under fire in the March 1st State of the Union address. To help me get a better handle on this topic, I’m talking to Shelley Delayne, Chief Mom at Pinwheel and Actual Mom to a 9-year-old daughter. 

Then I’ll chat with Dr. Mike Brooks, a licensed psychologist and dad of three boys. 

Before we move into those conversations, let’s take a broad look at kids and social media. I’m referring to any platform that lets users make and share content with others online. For example, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat, to name just a handful.

The Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab outlines the top risks, benefits, and best practices when it comes to kids using social media. If you’re not familiar with our partners at the Digital Wellness Lab, we highly recommend their research. 

We need to tell our kids about the primary risks found on social media: their privacy, digital footprint, exposure to sexual predators, trolls and cyberbullies, and identity theft. 

It’s important that your kids are aware of these risks before they sign up for any social media account. 

Let’s break this down. Tell them that their privacy is non-existent, even if their account is set to private, and could become a part of their identity online, or digital footprint. Tell them that sexual predators leverage social media sites to communicate with children. Remind them not to feed the trolls—it’s a frustrating waste of time—and have an in-depth conversation on cyberbullying, humbly recognizing that your kid might potentially act as the cyberbully one day. 

Listed out like that, social media seems like an intimidating area to parent, but keep in mind that there are obvious reasons that social sites are so popular. They can deliver positive experiences, improved family relationships, community engagement, connections with peers, and even creativity. 

A Common Sense Media study showed that some teens on social media reported feeling less shy, more outgoing, more confident, more popular, more sympathetic, and felt better about themselves. Social platforms give kids an added opportunity to connect with their family, their immediate community and peers around the world—allowing kids to experience broad types of diversity first-hand. Also, social media might boost a child’s creativity as they create and share artwork and stories.

If you think your child is ready for a social account, first check the terms of service to make sure they’re old enough—many sites require a minimum age of 13. 

Then research the platform your child is interested in, and talk to them about the specific risks they’ll be exposed to. Set up their account together, and let them know you will keep an eye on their account by logging in with the credentials you just created. Connect with them from your social account. And last, make sure they know how and when to block other users and to always come to you for advice if something seems even slightly off. r

Let’s chat with Shelley Delayne now. I invited Shelley to share her research and first-hand experiences with parenting in the age of social media. I appreciate her perspective because she understands this world personally and professionally. Shelley is a single mom to a nine-year-old daughter. She’s presented for South by Southwest and TedX.

She’s the Chief Mom at Pinwheel, collaborating with organizations like the Digital Wellness Lab. A major part of her job is researching the effects of technology on children, and then applying that research to positively impact the real world. Shelley, when did you first think about social media’s impact on your own family? 

Shelley: So, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a thought when I went to share like an early like sonogram image. I almost want to share that on Facebook and I had this sudden thought of "How much of my child do I want to share on social media? What is her social media relationship going to be like over the course of her life?"

And I had this dream (because pregnancy does that). I had this dream that night that I posted a picture of her on Facebook in diapers. And years later when she had her own child, Facebook fed her an image along with an ad saying, "Choose Pampers. Your mom chose them for you." And I was horrified and didn't want to feed that data into the machine. So that dream like totally shifted my view on what do I want her social media presence to be like from day one. So social media and kids is something I've been thinking about since then.

And when my daughter was about a year old or so, we had moved into a house in a subdivision that was on a street corner. It happened to be the street corner where the local middle school bus picked up, and my daughter was fascinated with school buses. So every morning, our ritual was wake up and run to the window and watch the middle school kids wait for the bus. I watch these kids and I noticed one day that one kid had a brand-new pair of tennis shoes. Brand-new white pair of tennis shoes. The next day, the kid he usually stood closest to also had white tennis shoes. 

By the end of like two weeks later, every kid in that group had white tennis shoes and then the kid who wore them first? Stopped wearing them. And everybody went back to having different shoes. And just that observation along with like hundreds of other little like interaction that those kids had while waiting for the bus, led me to this whole just deep dive into, "How does middle school work? And how does social comparison work? And how do these kids decide what's cool and what's not cool and what's in style and what's not in style? And how does that affect social dynamics?"

And then as social media has started to take more of a presence in kids lives. It just amps it up to such a degree. It's so fascinating but like, I don't know, watching the spread of the white tennis shoes as inflow was also a pivotal moment. 

Julie: How are you saying that relates to social media, watching the single kid with the white tennis shoes spread into the rest of the group?

Shelley: The same bit like when there's you know, when you've got kids that are on TikTok and there's a TikTok challenge. And so this thing is issued and then other people start to do it. And the ripples start to happen because somehow this person said it, and these people took up on it. Just the degree to which kids follow along with things without even being aware. Because if you were to ask any of those kids, most of them would probably have said, I just felt like getting a new pair of white shoes. They're not consciously following, they just do it and with social media, you see it. You see it happens so much like, especially with the TikTok challenges.

When they did the whole story not long ago about The TikTok tics; the girls who are having like literal facial tics. And they say that shouldn't be able to be caused by just witnessing it on social media. But there you have it. 

That's just the way kids are wired, especially in middle school. It's when they start to shift from, "What is my identity as a member of my family?" to "What is my identity as part of the wider world?" And in that they look to their peers and their friends and the people around them and they start to mimic and then they reject, then they try on and social media just gives them such an infinite world of people---who are not even in their presence---but other people to imitate them. 

I'm currently reading Brene Brown’s most recent book The Atlas of the Heart. In one of the chapters, she's talking about social comparison. And she's not even speaking about it specifically in terms of children or specifically in terms of social media, but when we see another person there's part of our brain that instinctively and subconsciously compares how we relate to them. There's this whole part of the human brain that does that subconsciously and it can be made more conscious. She was talking in this chapter about how excessive social comparison, almost inevitably, leads to anxiety and depression, and negative emotional spirals.

When you're not solid in your own identity and relationship with yourself, and if there's anything we know about kids, is they're still learning who they are in the real world. They're still learning their own identities and they engage in an environment where it's entirely focused on social comparison with people who are presenting the best part of themselves. So, it's not even real.

Julie: Tell me more about how social comparison presents itself and social media. 

Shelley: Oh, gosh, there's a whole world of how social comparison presents itself as social media and it's probably different between each platform too. Well, it's different between each platform, but it's also different between ages and stages. Lisa D'Amour talks about it a good bit in Untangled, her book on adolescent, female development. Kids encode messages to their friends. A girl might post a picture of herself wearing a college sweatshirt. And to anyone else, it's just a picture of a girl wearing a college sweatshirt, but to her closest friends that might telegraph, "I got the acceptance letter." 

I don't want my concerns about social media to come across as being anti-social media because I also am in awe of some of the things that young people do now because of social media. Like the empathy they have for people in other parts of the world, and the ability they have to organize things or to connect with people in their small town. They might never have found anyone else who had an interest in 14th century, French poetry, but because of the power of social media and the web, they can connect with people that they have common interests with and not feel alone in the world. There really are some beautiful and powerful things about that for the new generation.

Julie: It’s important to acknowledge that social media does provide benefits. Because just like any type of news, the sweet stories don’t typically make the first page. It’s great that our kids can do things like share updates with extended family and strengthen relationships with teammates and kids from school. 

But there is a rollout process that’s crucial to kids staying safe and healthy. If parents are disengaged, their kid might face some awful experiences. Do you know what I mean?   

Shelley: Parental involvement and awareness is important on all of the things. Because with Discord, there's a lot of kids who use Discord as a platform that's convenient or talking on when they're playing games. And it does have some functionality that no other platform really does. Like it does actually handle voice calls and texting at the same time better than almost anything else out there which drives me a little crazy because things happen on that platform that should not be part of any kids upbringing.

There was a an incident recently. There's a kid who's on Discord and the agreement with their parents is that she only stay on the private server where she's only talking to known friends, and talking about games that they're currently playing. That's the agreement. That's what her parents believe was happening. And because she plays games that also have the gamers play on YouTube, she saw one of her favorite YouTubers had a promotional thing where they said, "Come to our Discord server and you might get invited to our live session." And so she went and joined that public server because there's no parental control preventing her. I don't want to give any personally identifying information here, but she's under 10, I will put it that way. So this girl goes and joins this public server and almost immediately like within her first session of being on that server, some guy sends a direct message that says, "If you send me a picture of your body, I can get you on the play server."

Without even hesitating. She sent him a picture of her butt, because it didn't occur to her that that was going to be a problem, and she wanted to get on the server.

As a mom, I find it heartbreaking and terrifying. Once a kid complies with a request for naked images of themselves, that can escalate real quick. And get really traumatizing really fast. And so you've got a kid who's not even old enough to walk to the store by herself that's complying with the request from a stranger to send a naked picture.

One of the statistics that literally made me nauseous the first time I read it, and that when I went looking into it, I had to read about it in small bits over the course of a few days because I couldn't digest it all at once--that something like 33 percent of the child pornography online is created by the children in their home, with one or more parents in the other room. 

Sex trafficking can be entirely virtual now. Kids get paid by Venmo and gift cards. They literally get paid for sexually exploiting themselves on camera. And the majority of that is 11- to 14-year old girls. 

Julie: When it comes to social media and the dangers that exist out there, how how are we supposed to handle this as parents? Because it's overwhelming.  

Shelley: What you want is a kid, who if they get anything unexpected on a device that they'll come to you and tell you about it. It's your best defense against anything because software won't catch everything. The platforms aren't set up for visibility. Like the tech is not designed to help a parent do this job. 

Julie: I want to make sure that I'm talking to my kids in a way that makes them feel comfortable talking to me again and again, and again in the future. So what is the proper response when when they come to us? Gratitude first? 

Shelley: Yeah, gratitude first, like always like no matter what it is, don't even let yourself process what it is. Thank you for telling me, and I usually hug her. And I'm like, okay, let's deal with it. Whatever it is, and always come from the assumption, that whatever it is. They didn't go looking for it on purpose, like, they're not trying to horrify you. They clicked on something accidentally. They got curious about something. There's all kinds of reasons, but I think assuming good intent is also a really helpful thing in that arena.

Julie: And I think just the word curiosity is a really strong point when it comes to kids, not intending to go down, certain YouTube rabbit holes, for example, they they're Just curious little humans. They're growing, they're learning. And so they're going to Google things and that turns into more things. 

Shelley: That's how kids learn is by experimenting and learning. That's how that goes, and they end up in some dark places. So, yeah, my guiding principles have always been gratitude when she comes to me, and then assuming good intent that she didn't mean for that thing to come up, and understanding that she's just exploring. It's not, it's not on purpose. 

 I treat the device like a doorway to the whole world. I my daughter is on that device, she's leaving the house and she's going out into the world. Does she know how to navigate safely there? And what time is she going to be back and like all of the things that I do to prepare before she goes over for a play date or going to somebody's house. We talk about those things before she gets on, whatever device she's going to be using. And then when she gets back, we have a conversation about it. 

Julie: That makes sense. I think I’ll adopt the gratitude and innocence approach when my kids come to me with issues. But what if they don’t come to me? What if I’m the one that comes across something off-limits? 

Shelley says that it’s key to have that line of communication already open, and for us as parents to tell our kids what we saw and ask them about it. When we find something upsetting, get your feelings out before approaching your child. Talk to a friend or therapist, write it down, scream into a pillow—whatever gets you centered. When you’re ready to talk, start with empathy and truly listen to what they have to say, making a point to understand their situation before addressing it. Staying calm and non-reactive during this conversation will open doors for uncomfortable conversations in the future. Taking long, slow breaths can help you through this conversation. 

Once you understand where they’re coming from, it’s ok to put the conversation on pause to consider everything. Set a day and time that you’ll revisit the conversation. 

You can take away their device as an act of protection or to simply reduce distraction while you both process what happened. You might consult a professional if you’re overwhelmed, but don’t leave your kid in silence during the interim period. Remind them that you love them and that you want their brains and hearts to not hold onto this trauma. 

When you’re ready to revisit the conversation, let your kid know exactly what boundaries they crossed. Decide on an approach that solves for the actual problem, and makes expectations more clear going forward. Keep in mind though, if it was a matter of technology baiting or luring or working against them, don’t punish them for that unfairly.

Changing gears now. Shelley, how could social media define a young person?   

Shelley: Because the way identity forms in kids is by seeing how mom reacts, how their classmates react, how their teachers react, how real people in real space react. That's what helps kids form their identity and who they choose, and how they choose to show up in the world. But when they're going through that process in the invisible space of social media, what they're getting is: If I do this, I got a lot of likes. That must mean this is a socially valid thing to do. 

Once a kid gets to be a teenager, some time on social media can be entertaining and it can connect them with the wider world, and like, there can be all these benefits to it. But what you want to make sure is 1.) that you're aware of it, so they're not putting on an identity, that's totally counter to anything you're aware of and 2.) you want to know that they have a sense of who they are before going into that realm.

Julie:

Thank you, Shelley. That’s powerful to recognize that our kids might create an identity based on the responses they get from people online who only see a curated fraction of their lives. I’m so thankful for your insight on this, and I know it’ll help ease my parenting challenges. 

Next we’re chatting with Dr. Mike Brooks, a licensed psychologist and licensed specialist in school psychology. He’s worked in a variety of settings, including schools, community, mental health agencies, hospitals, residential treatment centers, mostly with kids and up. He lives in Austin with his wife and 3 boys, ages 10 to 18. Dr. Brooks, how did you get into this niche in the medical field? 

Mike: I got interested in screens and how they affect us from the very beginning. Like my generation ushered in video games, so they had me at hello playing Space Invaders and Asteroids, and Centipede, and Donkey Kong, and all the arcade classics. I spent a large part of my youth at arcades and played their home games too (although they pale in comparison to today's games).

I did my dissertation research on the effect of video game violence on kids, and as I got into the private practice realm, I was presenting at schools on this. But then the hot topic became tech addiction, so one thing led to another and I ended up writing a book that was released by Oxford University press, it's called Tech Generation, Raising Balanced Kids in a Hyper-Connected World. That came out just a couple years ago.

And so I'm presenting even more about technology and its effects on people, but more broadly, interested in well-being. And so within that larger umbrella, I find, you know, how our screens affect our well-being. But a, you know, I present a lot about well-being in a more general sense, like how to live a more balanced life. Life satisfaction dealing with anxiety, stress, depression, relationship issues, and sorts of things.

Julie: Yep, nothing wrong with a bowl of ice cream after a balanced dinner. But some kids are more prone to spooning it straight from the container in the middle of the night than others. 

Brooks: So when when people say well, you know, social media or TikTok or whatever, they're bad for kids, and it's like well, I think it might be more than that. Snapchat isn't necessarily bad for kids, but Snapchatting at 1 a.m. on a school night, that's what's the problem. Social media isn't always bad, but it's so easy to slip into responding too much and getting caught up in checking. And then they're not working as productively on their homework and stuff like that.

And it's a little bit like death by a thousand cuts. It's not like most teens are doing egregious things on social media, but kind of the overconsumption. Just like Americans--we can eat too many calories and even too much of a good thing. So even when social media is generally positive, but then they're, you know, not interacting with their family. They're not going to see their friends in person because they're Snapchatting, or they're staying up too late on Snapchat. Those are the kind of things that I think add to it being a problem in a more pervasive, insidious way. 

Julie: So keeping a balance means that our kids shouldn’t displace healthy activities with social media.

Brooks: That's called the displacement hypothesis. It's not what they’re doing with their screens, it’s what we're not doing by being on screens. It's the greater problem. So sleeping, getting exercise, going outdoors, seeing friends in person. You know, that sort of thing.

Every generation has a moral panic about what the younger generation is doing. Like reading books; when literacy first came on the scene, there were many educated people who thought it was a horrible idea that the average person would be able to read the Bible or other books. It's a challenge and it's also not to say that some kids don't really suffer from screens because they do, you know, they get into stuff and they get bullied and stuff. But if you aggregate all the data, and you say is the average teenager suffering a lot because of their screen use? The answer's no. Now if we say do some? Yes, so I would say there's a subset of a vulnerable population that we need to be more concerned. So it's not either/or. It's a both.

Julie: That’s an interesting parallel that books caused panic and so does social media. I agree, but I think it’s also important to recognize that social media is designed to suck kids in, which is why books collect dust and smartphones don’t. 

If I think my kid is ready for a social account, is there a “right way” to introduce it?

Brooks: 

You know, there's a lot of different ways to do this, but I think there's some better ways, and one is, you know, it doesn't have to be all or none and that you need to have conversations with your kid on the front end about what does responsible use look like. What are the do's and don'ts and I'm a nerd and I'll take this from Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility and smartphone is a very powerful thing. So I don't think yeah, it’s foolish just to say hey you just turned 13. I say that's not the way to do it.

What I tell parents though is, I think one of the problems that happens is parents focus more on the phone, not the relationship. Rules without relationship equals rebellion. So the first thing and this is in my model in the tech generation. It would call the tech-happy life model. It's like a pyramid with four stages, four parts in the foundation of it is the relationship. So before you get to the rules, and even the discussion is you have to work on the relationship, with your, your kid, the stronger, the relationship, you Have the more leverage you'll have, as a parent, you know, to talk about the rules have open discussions to set limits consequences, all those things. If you don't have a relationship or it's very conflictual, the smartphone is going to reflect that dysfunctional relationship appearance. I find want they want to do, is they focus on the phone and social media. They don't look at the underlying issues with their relationship, you know in certainly it can throw a big curveball with the smartphone and social media, but I think relationship first and then having the others role modeling, you know, his parents they're looking to us. So we can't like be eating a bag of cheesy poof's and tell them to eat the carrot sticks. So there's almost as many teens viewing their parents as addicted to their phones, as parents view the teens. So they're watching us. If we can't put down our own devices. We can't expect them to be able to put them down and respect boundaries. 

It doesn't have to be all or none, you know, it could be that they have a staggered approach that they only get one first. They get a smartphone then a little later down the line, they get social media. Maybe it's only one social media and if they're using it responsibly, then we give them more access, you know, we increase what we allow, they gain more privileges, but then if they're using irresponsibly we can step in and kind of, you know, restrict them or something until they show that they're being able to use it responsibly. 

Julie: So you’re saying I sometimes need to put down the cheesy poofs if I don’t want my kids to see me as a hypocrite. Wrapping up here, help me decide, on a scale of one to crying in my closet, how worried should I feel about my kids getting their first social media account? 

Brooks: What I would say is, especially as they get older, is teens want to do well in life. They want to succeed. They want good grades. They want to be well liked, you know, want to go to college or whatever to be successful. There's a difference between ideal and optimal and harmful. So oftentimes as parents, we look at our kids on their phone, on their phones or playing Minecraft and like Fortnite. You're like, ‘Why don't you go build a fort outside with your friends instead of playing Fortnight on the screen all the time?’ What we're often saying is we wish our kids would be doing something better with their time. Now that may be true and I look back to growing up watching, Happy Days and Gilligan's Island and Brady Bunch, and a lot of other mindless TV. It was probably a colossal waste of neurons in my brain. I could be playing classical guitar right now or fluent in three other languages, but that doesn't mean that screen time of my youth harmed me. I missed out on some things, which is different. So, ask ‘What do you want with grades? What are your goals?’ We shouldn't preempt our kids own goals for themselves by telling them what they should be doing. Talk to them. ‘What would, what does success look like for you? What grades would you be happy with?

So now we're having a conversation and they call this collaborative problem-solving. So instead of this power differential of a top-down, we are trying to get it from our kids what they want and what their goals are for them. If we form a top-down perspective, are regulating it all for them, they don't learn that skill of self-regulation, self-monitoring when our kids go off to college. We're not going to be there, you know, over their shoulder and if they played Fortnite or Counter-Strike the whole time or are on Instagram, the whole time in their lectures, you know, we want them to learn that while they're under our roof. And if we do it all for them, they're not going to learn that important life skill.

Julie: It’s actually comforting to interact with my kids from the stance that they want to succeed. Of course they do. I want to remember that when they do make a mistake, I need to bring gratitude and curiosity to the conversation. No different than the way I want to be treated after I make a mistake. 

Thank you, Dr. Brooks for helping us find a healthy grasp on parenting in the age of social media. And thanks to Shelley Delayne for providing her personal and professional views. 

Let me know what challenge with technology your family is facing by emailing me at julie@pinwheel.com.