A couple of weeks ago, I attended a panel discussion put on by the Board of Ed that was vaguely about social, emotional, and gender issues in teenagers. It wasn’t entirely clear what the panel was supposed to discuss, and the questions put out by the moderator weren’t much help. The panel was composed of two middle-aged school guidance counselors from nearby towns, a twenty-something girl who wrote a book about being bullied, and another twenty something girl who was starting a business as a teen mentor.
I looked at my watch. I thought I would sneak out after thirty minutes.
But after a lot of rambling and a certain amount of self-promotion, the panel went off in a tangent that surprised everyone. They started telling stories about teenagers who had lost their ability to interact with real people, because they had become immersed in online relationships.
One counselor said that one day a girl came into his office sobbing. Between the tears, she gulped out that her boyfriend had broken up with her. The counselor asked what his name was. She said Michael. He asked what he last name was. She said she didn’t know between the sobs. The counselor was confused. He asked her if he was a fellow student at their school. She said she didn’t know. The girl was in a full fledge meltdown over a relationship with someone she never met in real life. It was all online.
The rest of the panel shared their own stories of kids who spent most of their time interacting with people on social media, but had no tangible real life experiences with other people.
The girl-mentor said that she was talking with a teenager about her friends. The teenager said that her best friend was horrible in real life, but great online, so she didn’t know if she should still be friends with her.
By the end of the panel, there was a consensus that kids were damaged by the enormous quantity of time that they spent on their phones. It was actually quite gripping. We staggered out of the assembly room two hours later freaked out and afraid, because even those of us who feel quite at home in the online world cannot possibly understand its impact on our kids.
Apt. 11d 
YIKES!!! That’s really freaky and I most certainly don’t give a good example with my kids having all these relationships with other bloggers (many of whom I have actually met IRL, mind you)… Wow… my kids don’t interact with any strangers online, and I hope I can steer them clear of that! But they do text classmates a lot (my oldest). Sigh… thanks for sharing this.
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Teenagers unable to relate to their peers romantically except through a phone is probably going to cause fewer problems than the old unable-to-relate-while-sober system.
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“Teenagers unable to relate to their peers romantically except through a phone is probably going to cause fewer problems than the old unable-to-relate-while-sober system.”
Yes, but it’s weirder!
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I worry about this a lot, more than I probably should, but, I find irrational worry to be an unavoidable feature of motherhood. Honestly, I didn’t use to worry much, until those children entered my life, and, I can’t even remember what i used to worry about (maybe falling off cliffs, but that was easy to avoid by just avoiding the cliffs).
In an effort to remain rational, I try to remember that human nature is pretty robust, and that technology doesn’t change it (cite: XKCD). Then, I remind myself of the good that can come from online communication (this blog, for me, skype calls with a friend who moved to another country for my kiddo, . . .). And, Danah Boyd’s pontification. I don’t completely agree with her, but I think she has useful evidence on how kids deal with their access to the human network. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/dmb/
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This strikes me as a bit of a scare story, that is being driven by general fears of technology. The story about the friend who is mean irl and great online doesn’t seem fundamentally different from a story about a teen friend who is nice in private and mean around a group.
I knew of a girl during the first gulf war (lived on my dorm floor) who started writing to a deployed soldier and when he blew her off, had a melt down. I remember not getting what the big deal was because they had never met. That doesn’t seem very different from the online boyfriend.
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Also, these are guidance counselors, a mentor and someone who wrote a book about bullies. They seem more likely to interact with kids having issues. Those issues may be temporary as well.
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Clifford Nass, the Stanford researcher, speaks in this video about the harm done to kids’ development by a lack of face-to-face interaction, the sort which was normal, pre-internet.
What’s the difference between corresponding with a fellow student in your high school online, and corresponding with a student from a high school 1,000 miles away?
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Well, I have a 24-year old and a 28-year old, both of whom have friends all over the world online, and have had since they were teens. It doesn’t seem to have prevented the older one from getting married and having kids. The younger one has lots of local meatspace friends that he sees at least once a week, and has just joined a new gaming group at the local game store.
I mean, didn’t your kids get a lot of facetime within the family, and at school? Aren’t they still in physical classrooms with other students and teacher-persons part or most of the day? I might be worried if these teens stayed in their rooms all the time and only had online friends, with no other meatspace social contact; in fact in Japan they have a diagnosis that applies to that, I think it’s called hikikomori.
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