A 12-year-old who loves woodworking hoped to use his skills to earn enough money to buy a mountain bike. With his parents’ support, he set up an Instagram account to share his love of woodworking and peddle his wares. But he was discouraged when the accout failed to attract many followers.
His father, a film and television director with a robust social media presence, modeled positive social media use by asking his Twitter followers for a “wee favour” — follow his son on Instagram to give the kid a boost and make his day. Throngs of strangers flocked to encourage and support this industrious 12-year-old by following his Instagram account and placing orders for bowls.
Overwhelmed with orders, the boy (with guidance from his parents) decided to use his newfound “fame” to raise money for children in Ukraine by raffling off a bowl. More strangers showed encouragement, support, and kindness, donating over £250,000.
This is why I love social media. It connects us in the ways that make this kind of collective action possible. It allows us to do so much more together than we could do alone — when we choose to use it this way.
The dominant story our society tells about social media is how bad it is for us. The negative lens is most apparent in stories about social media and kids. We hear a lot about how social media negatively impacts youth mental health, self-image, sleep cycles, and countless other things. We hear about predators and traffickers and big bad wolves lurking in the digital depths.
The stories are cautionary fairy tales for the digital age.
It’s not that the stories are untrue — there are scary and dangerous things throughout the digital realm — but that’s only part of the picture. There are nourishing, beautiful, and good things there, too. As well as things created by kids for kids that are informative and empowering.
“In the world of print adults determined what children could and could not access — after all, adults operated the printing presses, purchased the books, and controlled the libraries,” says media and culture professor Kate Eichhorn in The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media. “Now, children are free to build their own worlds and, more importantly, to populate these worlds with their own content…. Today, young people create images and put them into circulation without the interference of adults.”
The things kids create for other kids are vastly different than the things adults think kids like, need, or should be accessing.
“What I love most about the most successful channels on YouTube is how unappealing they are to most adults,” says psychology professor William Von Hippel in The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy. “None of the most successful YouTubers would ever get past the security guy at a talent agency, much less an actual talent agent, but they clearly resonate with their target audience.”
For grown-ups used to controlling which ideas children and youth are able to access, digital media is indeed a scary thing. It gives kids the ability to explore ideas and activities outside those their parents and teachers dictate or approve. Yes, some ideas and activities kids choose on their own are harmful. Many, however, are simply different from those adults choose for them; expressions of the child’s independent interests and personality.
“The screen-averse attitude is about values, principles, and cultural customs,” says digital-age parenting researcher Jordan Shapiro in The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World. “It’s grounded in beliefs about proper and improper ways of living a good life. It may be framed as if it were objective, as if it were about physical or mental health; but the real problem is that grown-ups are resistant to change.”
Rather than celebrate the creative, socally conscious, enterprising young people that populate (and dominate) many social media subcultures and praise the legions of youth who emulate them by exploring new ways of expression, seeking out information and dialogue, and trying their hands at building businesses and making the world a better place — the predominant stories we tell about youth and social media belittle their positive experiences with it and warn them away from it. The stories are designed to scare grown-ups into restricting kids’ acces, rather than teach children and young people to wisely navigate and harness its power.
In a much-shared (at least among my networks) April 11, 2022 anti-social media The Atlantic article entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid social psychologist Jonanthan Haidt takes aim at harms to youth, focusing on increases in anxiety and depression along with what he perceives as the decline of unsupervised free play children need to prepare them for being productive citizens in American democracy.
Haidt’s solution is to delay entry to social media until children have passed through puberty and encourage “free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision … just as more kids used to do.”
Like kids used to do.
It’s nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, romanticizing the positives of that world while ignoring or downplaying its negatives — and lamenting the negatives of the current world while overlooking its positives.
In The New Childhood, Shapiro takes a more present- and future-world view of youth and digital connection. He points out that kids are engaging in the unsupervised free play Haidt says is vital to democracy — they’re just doing it in digital spaces:
Immersed in Minecraft’s block world and connected to their friends on Skype, my kids go on grand adventures. They build schoolhouses and courtrooms, dungeons, labyrinths, and pirate ships. Then they act out fantastic all-consuming scenarios in these networked virtual realities. They participate in everyday rites of passage similar to the ones dramatized in classic movies like Stand by Me and books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Their Minecraft sociodramatic play looks just like a digital version of mine.
Furthermore, Shapiro says that it’s crucial that free play occur in digital spaces if we want children to be productive citizens in our networked world.
Cultivating our children’s ability to contribute to society, and developing their capacity to collaborate with diverse groups of people, requires the kind of learning that can only happen in a globally networked digital sandbox. It’s actually a matter of civic responsibility. Parents need to let their kids play online.
As for the oft-cited research correlating anxity and depression in youth to social media usage, Shapiro says:
No wonder kids don’t know how to be happy in digital world. We’ve let them loose, without guidance, in uncharted territory. We haven’t taught them how to make sense of their online lives … they have little sense of etiquette, ethics, or expectations for existing in a virtual space … until we integrate the digital humanities into the school curriculum, our kids will never be able to lead fulfilled lives in a connected world.
Rather than call on legislators to restrict access, Shapiro calls on parents and grown-ups to mentor children regarding social media use and model positive online behavior — much like the father who helped his son share his woodworking passion and connect with enthusiasts and supporters via social media.
Both my children (now 16 and 13) thrive in online environments in completely different ways. My son explores history and weird facts while my daughter teaches herself art techniques and how to bake. She’s tapped those skills to start building her own art and cookie businesses. (Check out her artwork here!)
They’re self-informed about current events, tracking down information and multiple perspectives on the ones that interest them most. Social media expands their understanding of the world and its complexity — but social media isn’t the cause of that complexity. Navigating the social and emotional challenges that arise from exposure to the many ideas, people, and cultures via worldwide digital connection is an inescapble part of what Shaprio calls our “networked existence.”
I don’t fear what my children encounter online because I’m right there with them, guiding and facilitating their social media use to explore our complex world with curiosity and humility. As Shapiro says, I’m showing them what it means to me to be a grown-up in a connected world.
There isn’t “one right way” to do this. We all navigate digital spaces in different ways. What’s important is recognizing we live in a networked world, accepting that it provides opportunies as well as challenges, and playing an active role in helping children and youth lead safe and productive online lives.