This is spot on. My daughters have pretended to have Tourette’s and have self diagnosed themselves with ADHD, autism, and borderline personality disorder. They have also engaged in self harm, eating disorders, and trans identities. All because of social media. If you deny that they actually have autism, for instance, they say the guidance for diagnosis is flawed. They believe they can self diagnose and no one else is right, even a professional.
Yeah, sounds familiar. Also, when you "catch" them on inconsistencies with the guidelines, the guidelines are flawed but when you ask what specific symptoms of xyz they have , they usually pick and choose from the guidelines.
This is so true. My 17 year old daughter is one of these kids. Her freshman year of high school, almost overnight she went from a happy, healthy girl who had friends, a variety of interests, and did well in school and spent little time on computers, and was a little socially awkward and immature, to being trans identified, tumblr obsessed, and self diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dissociative identity disorder, anxiety, and depression. She is barely passing her classes and I’m not sure she’ll graduate. She has no other activities - all her interests are solitary. She now has a few friends but went two years with none (except online). Letting her on social media was the worst mistake I ever made.
I think what motivates these kids is a deep fear of criticism. They’ve grown up in an environment where everything bad that happens has to be blamed on someone. And that someone is never presented in a nuanced way, a person who made mistakes or used poorly chosen words but also has good points and a capacity to learn. If someone is accused of racism, or sexism, or profiting at the expense of others, they are vilified, with no possibility of redemption. This is what happened to my kid. She was bullied and criticized at her high school for being “privileged” - too white, to “cis-het”, too financially well-off. All of this is a shield against criticism. Kids are looking for explanations that place them in a protected category, that say that it’s not their fault that they’re socially awkward or lack confidence or aren’t the best at everything - it’s because they have a condition!
My observation is that sensitivity and a tendency toward self-blame are the core characteristics of kids who’ve fallen into this mess.
We need to fight the urge to find yet someone else to blame for this and promote a mindset of understanding, forgiveness, and accepting alternative opinions and viewpoints.
I agree. The all-or-nothing, un-nuanced, unforgiving dynamics of social media inspire a pathological fear of criticism, which has a particularly warping effect on teens who are developmentally engaged in figuring out who they are and where they belong. I view the steep rise in both mental illness ideation and actual mental illness as being a natural consequence of the obsessive navel-gazing that social media fosters.
No kidding! Respect isn’t a zero-sum game. You can treat minority and poor kids well without choosing another group to treat badly because you think they deserve it for having the nerve to be born without certain disadvantages
I have mixed feelings. My daughter has always embraced “being different”, sometimes to the extreme, and I think that’s part of the problem. She wants so badly to reject negative stereotypes about teenage girls - that they’re shallow, appearance-obsessed, boy-crazy. She’s so busy trying to set herself apart it makes it hard to make friends. I think tumblr was the only place she felt she could fit in, but then it required her to pay a terrible price. Sometimes I wish she’d stop trying so hard to be different and just let herself be a regular teenage girl. Still herself, of course, but not trying so hard to be seen as “different”
I totally agree on forgiving themselves and accepting that everyone makes mistakes.
Have you considered getting her involved in outdoor activities? Rock-climbing, Kayaking, hiking, gardening, anything like that? I went on Outward Bound in High School and was an outdoor adventure guide in WV in undergrad. I met all kinds of really fun people in that world that could never be accused of being superficial. To this day I find my center being out in nature. I notice with my own kids that when we go hiking, snorkeling, fishing, drone flying, paddleboarding or kayaking as a family it recenters them and calms them (all of us really). Especially during Covid insanity, as we got further from the city, we could feel their spirits lift and watch their hearts heal. I don't know if it would work for your family, but for mine I find sometimes we want talk alone to fill the voids that only nature and experiences are capable of healing.
I’ve tried. We did spend a summer vacation outdoors doing a lot of hiking and other outside activities, but she needs so much more help than that can provide. She needs a healthy community of peers that she can belong to and that she believes will accept her and those are in short supply
My daughter has a developmental disability, and even at 30 years old, finds herself caught up in these trends. She has self-diagnosed many neuroatypical conditions based on shared "diagnoses" on such platforms as Spoon, Discord, and others where teens and adults mix. She'll tell me about her aphasia, or synesthasia, or other condition, which she had never exhibited until she joined these forums. They're rife with sharing. She has never self-identified as trans, or non-binary, however she did tell me that she came out as "Pansexual" to her Spoon cohort, and described the following lovebombing. She had identified as bisexual for many years, and I asked her what the difference is. She treated me like I had rained on a very big parade for her.
The social aspects of the gender phenomenon cannot be overstated, which is why it was so disappointing that Abigail Shrier's book <i>Irreversible Damage</i> was dismissed by medical skeptics. ROGD is credible and is observable.
IMO the single most important and feasible and effective thing concerned, tuned-in, responsible parents can do is deny access to smart phones and tablets to their children at least until they reach the age of 18. And carefully monitor computer usage going so far as to implement parental controls.
I know most parents I just described won't do that, especially not after their children are in high school, for fear of severe backlash. But I contend that worry may be over-exaggerated. Children raised with that kind of parenting probably won't resort to unreasoned backlash. Certainly, some will, but many won't because they haven't been constantly exposed to the worst that social media has to offer, and they feel safe and secure in their parent's care.
We ban our kids from social media, limit screen time, have YouTube and Wikipedia blocked, use parental controls regularly, and don’t allow devices to be used in bedrooms (except a dictionary app we paid for so no ads). Our kids are popular, well adjusted, straight-A students with non-academic activities they also excel at. It is probably easier that we banned them from the start, but I am surprised more parents don’t simply scale the time back with app specific time limits if their kids are falling down these rabbit holes.
It’s not always easy to be a parent, but it’s the most important job that exists. Its the most rewarding and amazing. If I don’t think I can justify my decisions as a parent to my kids when they are adults, I’m not making the right one, regardless of how they feel about it as kids. My husband and I are the adults. It’s our job to act like it and model good behavior.
You are a paragon of what parents should do and how they should view their roles in parenting.
Being a parent truly is the most important job that exists, and not to be taken lightly, as just another job to do or as so many do, a part time job. Your results are proof that excellent parenting pays off in a multitude of goodness: for you, your children and society.
Thank you for the kind compliment, but in my mind we are just doing what regular parents have done for thousands of years - raising children in the hopes they one day become functioning, kind, contributing adults.
How did you pull this off? My daughter is ten and one of only a few kids without a cell phone. The backlash we are getting from her is relentless. We're considering getting her a phone without internet. A compromise. But my fear of social media consuming her sensitive soul in the future is massive.
I recently joined LinkedIn, my first social media account. I know that is tame compared to other platforms, but the dopamine hits are real. I have no idea how to handle the inevitable battles to come. I would love to keep her from social media till she's 18, as you did.
I think she was about 10 when we started with a Verizon Gizmo - which is complete crap but gave her a very safe introduction to being responsible with a phone (it's what our son has now). Kids can only call and text up to 10 numbers you pre-program on there. Only those numbers can call or text the Gizmo. No internet. It does have GPS, a few cute little games, and a step counter. We only have family and the summer nanny programmed. It introduces them to a phone in the least addictive way humanly possible. Our son figured out he could get it to make fart noises and that obsession lasted an agonizing 3 weeks, but that's as bad as it gets. That was actually a good strategy for us. At that age she was allowed to have group chats on her iPad via text but had limited access to her iPad.
I had Facebook for around 6 or 7 years. Part of the reason I am so firmly against it came after I deleted it. It was only then I realized I was being manipulated by it far more than I wanted to admit to myself. If it could get me in my early 30's, then kids don't stand a chance. My husband has always thought social media is stupid. He does have linked in, but its heavily managed by his company/ contractors to avoid FINRA issues, so he barely looks at it himself and never posts personally. He never wanted either of us to have social media, much less our kids.
With your daughter you are at hell age for wanting on this stuff. In retrospect I wish we had invested in ear plugs for that year. It was like 3, but not as cute.
We let our daughter spend her 10th year going through the stages of grief about her lack of a cell phone. We also watched A Social Contagion with her, talked a lot about social contagions and why tween girl brains, even smart awesome ones like hers, were at risk. We reminded her more times than we could count we were way less concerned if she hated us at 10 than how she'll feel about us at 25 and 35.
Once we had researched parental control options and spoke with friends who work with kids about iPhones, we opened the door a little bit to the rules that would come with any smartphone - which included lots of parental controls, approval by us for ALL apps and purchases, zero social media, blocked websites, it would not be spending time in her room at night, and that our rules at any given time would last as long as we paid her bills. Period. When we got her a phone in middle school, she was so excited she more than happy to accept all of our rules and oversight in exchange.
She has been through a few annoying short phases of begging for social media (lasting maybe 2 weeks at most each). She went down the BeReal road several times. We found standing firm, and being very up front about why we are putting these rules into place, helps minimize the conflicts.
Recently she has started to see for herself, or notice for herself, the mood swings and issues her social media obsessed friends have. She has even been borderline grateful we saved her from her whims. When I ask to see her phone, she happily hands it over. She is included in dozens of group chats, and we are really proud of the maturity she has shown in not getting pulled into the drama (though she is happy to giggle at it explaining it to us). We talk about dating and how we won't listen in on her conversations with boys, but we will look at the text messages the same as the others - this is also to encourage her to have verbal conversations with people she cares about.
She asks if she can send pictures to her friends, and the rare occasions we say no its usually because she wants to be braggy. Making her hold off and having these conversations has made her more mature about understanding the permanence of electronic communications than many adults I know. She shows more restraint than her club soccer coach for sure.
Impressive. Either you and your husband had very good parenting from your parents, or it was awful and you were committed and dedicated enough to prevent yourselves from parroting and passing on that behavior to your children. I sincerely hope there are more parents like you out there than one is led to believe.
I can say with some degree of pride that my only son and his wife have so far done a great job with my 8 and 11 year old Grandson and Granddaughter. My granddaughter is the 11 year old, and may very soon succumb to the peer pressure and need to fit in that comes at that age. I pray for her and my son and d-i-l daily for wisdom and guidance and strength.
I think there are more of us out there than gets noticed. It’s no easy task with the insanity, but keep the faith in your son and his wife and most importantly your grandkids. My husband and I had great loving parents with no clue what they were doing because they all had horrendous often abusive parents. All 4 grandparents were on their own young. They all fought not to repeat the abuse. The least we can do is be decent parents to honor them. They sure do enjoy their grand babies!!!
I did not mean to ignore your comment (article). I have neglected Substack lately. I'm embarrassed. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience. It served as a great conversation starter with my daughter's mother.
I agree in principle. If only. If only the perceived need for peer acceptance during adolescence wasn’t so much greater than the need for parental love and care. Being the lone kid who is unable to participate in social life in a ‘normal’ way would be the ultimate disability for most kids. What is needed is a movement in that direction, perhaps starting with limits that kids can learn to accept, not total banning, gradually increasing the numbers in order to change the norm. Parents need to lead, yes, but with an understanding of the competing principles involved.
Yes, you are correct - peer pressure is a formidable foe against responsible parenting. The next best step, but less feasible for many, is homeschooling, and short of isolating kids from their peers, that still won't provide total protection. But, realistically, providing total protection isn't the answer either. I guess in the real world, parents like I described could have open and ongoing conversations with their children as to the reasoning behind curtailing the use of social media. Many, many variables involved for any one solution to the problem.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. Everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to be at least a little special. While exacerbated by social media, this is an extension of behaviors we see in a variety of people including adults. For instance, my father got a lot of attention for being an enthusiastic hypochondriac. Many middle-aged adults (of both sexes) wax prolific about every ailment they have, or think they have. Complaining — and finding others who share your complaints — is an easy way for an adolescent to find an identity. It’s much easier to be “sick” than actually accomplish something for which you might gain attention and notoriety. As a Biological Psychologist, I agree with you that research will be helpful. However, it will take a broad cultural shift to eliminate this problem. Quite frankly, until adults stop complaining all the time and talking about how bad things are, there will be little incentive for our children to do otherwise. Thanks again for the essay, Frederick
Being a parent is always a challenge - particularly in today’s insane age of nutty ideas going viral on TikTok, promoted on the news, and apps like BeReal putting silly spins on the same harmful algorithms to try to placate parents into letting kids on it even though it induces addiction via algorithm like all the rest. It’s rare to look in the mirror and think “yes, I got this right,” as a parent, but on our adamant ban of big social media we can actually say that. I even deleted my own social media a few years ago when my daughter started begging for TikTok and that is a firm no for us - I find do as I do easier to enforce as a parent than do as I say. It helps our kids go to a top ranked conservative private Christian school. Even though it’s large at 1,250 kids, we aren’t alone in blocking them from social media and they aren’t punished socially for it.
I do take issue with “while some social media algorithms act to facilitate the spread of good ideas and accurate information, others can fuel the spread of harmful misinformation and seed dangerous social contagions.”......... it’s never good for algorithms to manipulate human understanding of the world in mass. The Twitter files have shown big tech spread a lot of false narratives at the behest of the woke mobs, self-proclaimed credentialed by incurious “expert” class, and permanent DC. And they did this suppressing demonstrably true information. I have yet to see examples of big tech ensuring vitality of “good” things via algorithmic spread. Computer techies aren’t very good at being arbiters of truth or goodness and AI doesn’t learn human emotions or morality. We should really stop pretending flawed humans can code computer programs to be better than actual humans. So far, all evidence proves the contrary.
The bureaucracy. The puppet masters that don’t face elections but they do write the laws via regulations. They frequently override the aims of elected officials, in both parties, via an obedient press all to happy to mold public opinion to the whims of the various industrial complexes effectively run by permanent bureaucrats. From WMDs, to Russia, Russia, Russia to Covid authoritarianism via lies to insisting everything stay secret forever with false insistence of the necessity to protect 60+ year old “sources and methods” or being too lazy to move some cameras around in capital hill today.
This isn't just a phenomenon with children, particularly as it relates to autism. Claiming to have autism adds another intersectional Brownie point to your victimhood resume and is particularly convenient because you can act completely normally but still claim those points because Autism doesn't actually exist in the way that people thing it does.
My six-year-old son has been diagnosed with Autism but what that actually means is that he didn't breath properly for the first seven minutes of his life and spent his first five days in the NICU and suffered a hypoxic brain injury as a result.
His Autism diagnosis is a legal and bureaucratic diagnosis that means insurance has to pay for the therapy he needs, but it has no medical application. The fact you are reading this and now know this about my son tells you nothing. He may have never spoken in his life and never showed any emotion. He might also just be a little awkward in social conditions or particularly shy. He could bang his head against a wall when his daily routine is interrupted. He may know how to code at six. You don't know.
The other day I watched a video on Youtube that had a few people all claiming to have "Autism" and the point was that one of them did not and they were all supposed to guess which one didn't. One of the people claiming to have Autism who did not end up being the plant had absolutely no outward sign at all of any cognitive disorder. All of the others displayed obvious differences. They were intelligent and articulate, but behaved in ways that reminded me of my son, but this one did not at all. She also claimed that the only people who currently knew about her recent diagnosis of Autism were her "wife" and one friend. I submit that the others wouldn't need to tell you they had some sort of disorder, but she apparently went all the way into her twenties with no one the wiser including her family. I call BS.
As the father of a child with real struggles this really bothers me. It's a kind of "stolen valor." She's probably the first person to complain about cultural appropriation but here she is appropriating the struggles people like my son and all those people in the video with her so that when she expresses an opinion it matters just that much more because of the extra points she now can claim. Hanna Gadsby does the same thing. Here she is on stage in front of thousands of people and knowingly being broadcast to millions with no apparent cognitive disability at all claiming the trophy of Autism.
While social media without a doubt greatly facilitated glamorization of mental illness, social media did not create it. The glamorization of mental illness and certain sicknesses among the young has been around for a long long time. It may have come from its association with being artistic (many famous writers, artists and creative people had mental illnesses). It separates one from the ordinary and boring. (A rosy-cheeked happy girl? What could possibly be more ordinary and boring! . If you don't have "crazy" thoughts, you probably have boring and ordinary thoughts, right? If you look happy and healthy, you are probably not a very deep thinker and feeler. ). Social media also had a huge help from the modern focus on individual . Thinking constantly about oneself cannot be good.
Of course that’s what they are doing. But as the parent of one of these kids I try to frame it in a little more forgiving way - they are looking for an explanation for why they feel everyone else is better at things than they are, why they don’t fit in, why they lack confidence. These kids are suffering, and are blaming themselves, and they are looking for a reason to stop blaming themselves, an explanation that doesn’t translate in their minds to “this is all your fault”.
It’s criminally professionally negligenct that the medical/psychotherapeutic world is as ignorant about social media and its impact as they are. It’s a large part of why we are where we are with the gender nonsense. If clinicians spent 10 minutes on any of the relevant platforms they’d see the enormous influence, and the ridiculous and dangerous legitimacy given to every kid claiming to be some gender flavor or other would be shut down.
The hard truth is that "normative" standards exist to maintain the sanity of the majority of people. Normalizing mental illness only makes everybody crazy, and does nothing to help those who are struggling to find sanity. "Affirming" mental illness pours gasoline on a fire.
Thank you to the authors. Quite a few years ago while attempting to seek help for my daughter, this article's message is what I tried to express to various therapists, psychiatrists and even a neuropsychologist, all of them seasoned professionals who stared at me blankly and dismissed my concerns because they had no clue this was happening. At least three of them stated they had never heard of Tumblr and didn't know what it was. They thought my observation of online influence was way off base. Of course, this was several years ago when the phenomenon was not yet known in the mainstream. Also, I didn't voice my concerns in such a clear and eloquent way as the authors of this piece have. Additionally, I do not have the training or expertise the authors do, nor were there any sources to cite at that point in time. I was just a mom who could see Tumblr was incfluencing my child to believe that being mentally ill and transgender were some sort of badges of honor or hard-won trophies to be proud of, and this is why my daughter was suddenly claiming all sorts of mental health problems, as well as suddenly claiming to be a boy.
Thank to you the authors for spreading awareness of this dangerous online trend.
Sadly we see the ordinary bullying-driven unhappiness gay boys and girls suffer medicalized into “dysphoria”. Then these children and families are gaslit online into a diagnosis of a problem of self-perception. Internet charlatans say a scalpel is a treatment that will miraculously driving tormentors to flee. As many parents have found, 1:1 loving personal support, physical maturity and an “off” switch is the real cure.
This article speaks to a way children and adults self-medicalize a need for attention, what used to be called hypochondria and “Munchausen’s” syndrome. Soulless, Internet-distributed video is the accurate root-cause diagnosis, and the “off” switch is the actual cure.
No problem. According to the Democrat platform today you can self identify as anything. If you identify as sane when you are insane, no problem. Likewise, if you appear as a white middle-aged male, you can still identify as a gender-fluid, Latinx-black-Asian teenage girl with ADHD, OCD and an eating disorder. It is good to do this because victims of maladies and minority identity get more victims points... get more positive attention... get more LIKES!.
My problem is the myriad of identity choices causing me anxiety. It is so hard to chose!
This is spot on. My daughters have pretended to have Tourette’s and have self diagnosed themselves with ADHD, autism, and borderline personality disorder. They have also engaged in self harm, eating disorders, and trans identities. All because of social media. If you deny that they actually have autism, for instance, they say the guidance for diagnosis is flawed. They believe they can self diagnose and no one else is right, even a professional.
Yeah, sounds familiar. Also, when you "catch" them on inconsistencies with the guidelines, the guidelines are flawed but when you ask what specific symptoms of xyz they have , they usually pick and choose from the guidelines.
This is so true. My 17 year old daughter is one of these kids. Her freshman year of high school, almost overnight she went from a happy, healthy girl who had friends, a variety of interests, and did well in school and spent little time on computers, and was a little socially awkward and immature, to being trans identified, tumblr obsessed, and self diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dissociative identity disorder, anxiety, and depression. She is barely passing her classes and I’m not sure she’ll graduate. She has no other activities - all her interests are solitary. She now has a few friends but went two years with none (except online). Letting her on social media was the worst mistake I ever made.
I think what motivates these kids is a deep fear of criticism. They’ve grown up in an environment where everything bad that happens has to be blamed on someone. And that someone is never presented in a nuanced way, a person who made mistakes or used poorly chosen words but also has good points and a capacity to learn. If someone is accused of racism, or sexism, or profiting at the expense of others, they are vilified, with no possibility of redemption. This is what happened to my kid. She was bullied and criticized at her high school for being “privileged” - too white, to “cis-het”, too financially well-off. All of this is a shield against criticism. Kids are looking for explanations that place them in a protected category, that say that it’s not their fault that they’re socially awkward or lack confidence or aren’t the best at everything - it’s because they have a condition!
My observation is that sensitivity and a tendency toward self-blame are the core characteristics of kids who’ve fallen into this mess.
We need to fight the urge to find yet someone else to blame for this and promote a mindset of understanding, forgiveness, and accepting alternative opinions and viewpoints.
I agree. The all-or-nothing, un-nuanced, unforgiving dynamics of social media inspire a pathological fear of criticism, which has a particularly warping effect on teens who are developmentally engaged in figuring out who they are and where they belong. I view the steep rise in both mental illness ideation and actual mental illness as being a natural consequence of the obsessive navel-gazing that social media fosters.
The first problem here is accepting that "you're white and well-off" is a criticism.
No kidding! Respect isn’t a zero-sum game. You can treat minority and poor kids well without choosing another group to treat badly because you think they deserve it for having the nerve to be born without certain disadvantages
I have mixed feelings. My daughter has always embraced “being different”, sometimes to the extreme, and I think that’s part of the problem. She wants so badly to reject negative stereotypes about teenage girls - that they’re shallow, appearance-obsessed, boy-crazy. She’s so busy trying to set herself apart it makes it hard to make friends. I think tumblr was the only place she felt she could fit in, but then it required her to pay a terrible price. Sometimes I wish she’d stop trying so hard to be different and just let herself be a regular teenage girl. Still herself, of course, but not trying so hard to be seen as “different”
I totally agree on forgiving themselves and accepting that everyone makes mistakes.
Have you considered getting her involved in outdoor activities? Rock-climbing, Kayaking, hiking, gardening, anything like that? I went on Outward Bound in High School and was an outdoor adventure guide in WV in undergrad. I met all kinds of really fun people in that world that could never be accused of being superficial. To this day I find my center being out in nature. I notice with my own kids that when we go hiking, snorkeling, fishing, drone flying, paddleboarding or kayaking as a family it recenters them and calms them (all of us really). Especially during Covid insanity, as we got further from the city, we could feel their spirits lift and watch their hearts heal. I don't know if it would work for your family, but for mine I find sometimes we want talk alone to fill the voids that only nature and experiences are capable of healing.
I’ve tried. We did spend a summer vacation outdoors doing a lot of hiking and other outside activities, but she needs so much more help than that can provide. She needs a healthy community of peers that she can belong to and that she believes will accept her and those are in short supply
My daughter has a developmental disability, and even at 30 years old, finds herself caught up in these trends. She has self-diagnosed many neuroatypical conditions based on shared "diagnoses" on such platforms as Spoon, Discord, and others where teens and adults mix. She'll tell me about her aphasia, or synesthasia, or other condition, which she had never exhibited until she joined these forums. They're rife with sharing. She has never self-identified as trans, or non-binary, however she did tell me that she came out as "Pansexual" to her Spoon cohort, and described the following lovebombing. She had identified as bisexual for many years, and I asked her what the difference is. She treated me like I had rained on a very big parade for her.
The social aspects of the gender phenomenon cannot be overstated, which is why it was so disappointing that Abigail Shrier's book <i>Irreversible Damage</i> was dismissed by medical skeptics. ROGD is credible and is observable.
IMO the single most important and feasible and effective thing concerned, tuned-in, responsible parents can do is deny access to smart phones and tablets to their children at least until they reach the age of 18. And carefully monitor computer usage going so far as to implement parental controls.
I know most parents I just described won't do that, especially not after their children are in high school, for fear of severe backlash. But I contend that worry may be over-exaggerated. Children raised with that kind of parenting probably won't resort to unreasoned backlash. Certainly, some will, but many won't because they haven't been constantly exposed to the worst that social media has to offer, and they feel safe and secure in their parent's care.
We ban our kids from social media, limit screen time, have YouTube and Wikipedia blocked, use parental controls regularly, and don’t allow devices to be used in bedrooms (except a dictionary app we paid for so no ads). Our kids are popular, well adjusted, straight-A students with non-academic activities they also excel at. It is probably easier that we banned them from the start, but I am surprised more parents don’t simply scale the time back with app specific time limits if their kids are falling down these rabbit holes.
It’s not always easy to be a parent, but it’s the most important job that exists. Its the most rewarding and amazing. If I don’t think I can justify my decisions as a parent to my kids when they are adults, I’m not making the right one, regardless of how they feel about it as kids. My husband and I are the adults. It’s our job to act like it and model good behavior.
You are a paragon of what parents should do and how they should view their roles in parenting.
Being a parent truly is the most important job that exists, and not to be taken lightly, as just another job to do or as so many do, a part time job. Your results are proof that excellent parenting pays off in a multitude of goodness: for you, your children and society.
Thank you for the kind compliment, but in my mind we are just doing what regular parents have done for thousands of years - raising children in the hopes they one day become functioning, kind, contributing adults.
How did you pull this off? My daughter is ten and one of only a few kids without a cell phone. The backlash we are getting from her is relentless. We're considering getting her a phone without internet. A compromise. But my fear of social media consuming her sensitive soul in the future is massive.
I recently joined LinkedIn, my first social media account. I know that is tame compared to other platforms, but the dopamine hits are real. I have no idea how to handle the inevitable battles to come. I would love to keep her from social media till she's 18, as you did.
I think she was about 10 when we started with a Verizon Gizmo - which is complete crap but gave her a very safe introduction to being responsible with a phone (it's what our son has now). Kids can only call and text up to 10 numbers you pre-program on there. Only those numbers can call or text the Gizmo. No internet. It does have GPS, a few cute little games, and a step counter. We only have family and the summer nanny programmed. It introduces them to a phone in the least addictive way humanly possible. Our son figured out he could get it to make fart noises and that obsession lasted an agonizing 3 weeks, but that's as bad as it gets. That was actually a good strategy for us. At that age she was allowed to have group chats on her iPad via text but had limited access to her iPad.
I had Facebook for around 6 or 7 years. Part of the reason I am so firmly against it came after I deleted it. It was only then I realized I was being manipulated by it far more than I wanted to admit to myself. If it could get me in my early 30's, then kids don't stand a chance. My husband has always thought social media is stupid. He does have linked in, but its heavily managed by his company/ contractors to avoid FINRA issues, so he barely looks at it himself and never posts personally. He never wanted either of us to have social media, much less our kids.
With your daughter you are at hell age for wanting on this stuff. In retrospect I wish we had invested in ear plugs for that year. It was like 3, but not as cute.
We let our daughter spend her 10th year going through the stages of grief about her lack of a cell phone. We also watched A Social Contagion with her, talked a lot about social contagions and why tween girl brains, even smart awesome ones like hers, were at risk. We reminded her more times than we could count we were way less concerned if she hated us at 10 than how she'll feel about us at 25 and 35.
Once we had researched parental control options and spoke with friends who work with kids about iPhones, we opened the door a little bit to the rules that would come with any smartphone - which included lots of parental controls, approval by us for ALL apps and purchases, zero social media, blocked websites, it would not be spending time in her room at night, and that our rules at any given time would last as long as we paid her bills. Period. When we got her a phone in middle school, she was so excited she more than happy to accept all of our rules and oversight in exchange.
She has been through a few annoying short phases of begging for social media (lasting maybe 2 weeks at most each). She went down the BeReal road several times. We found standing firm, and being very up front about why we are putting these rules into place, helps minimize the conflicts.
Recently she has started to see for herself, or notice for herself, the mood swings and issues her social media obsessed friends have. She has even been borderline grateful we saved her from her whims. When I ask to see her phone, she happily hands it over. She is included in dozens of group chats, and we are really proud of the maturity she has shown in not getting pulled into the drama (though she is happy to giggle at it explaining it to us). We talk about dating and how we won't listen in on her conversations with boys, but we will look at the text messages the same as the others - this is also to encourage her to have verbal conversations with people she cares about.
She asks if she can send pictures to her friends, and the rare occasions we say no its usually because she wants to be braggy. Making her hold off and having these conversations has made her more mature about understanding the permanence of electronic communications than many adults I know. She shows more restraint than her club soccer coach for sure.
Impressive. Either you and your husband had very good parenting from your parents, or it was awful and you were committed and dedicated enough to prevent yourselves from parroting and passing on that behavior to your children. I sincerely hope there are more parents like you out there than one is led to believe.
I can say with some degree of pride that my only son and his wife have so far done a great job with my 8 and 11 year old Grandson and Granddaughter. My granddaughter is the 11 year old, and may very soon succumb to the peer pressure and need to fit in that comes at that age. I pray for her and my son and d-i-l daily for wisdom and guidance and strength.
I think there are more of us out there than gets noticed. It’s no easy task with the insanity, but keep the faith in your son and his wife and most importantly your grandkids. My husband and I had great loving parents with no clue what they were doing because they all had horrendous often abusive parents. All 4 grandparents were on their own young. They all fought not to repeat the abuse. The least we can do is be decent parents to honor them. They sure do enjoy their grand babies!!!
I did not mean to ignore your comment (article). I have neglected Substack lately. I'm embarrassed. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience. It served as a great conversation starter with my daughter's mother.
Again, thank you.
🙏 and 💓. You recognize the concern which is huge in finding strategies to do the right thing by your daughter and the future woman she will become.
I agree in principle. If only. If only the perceived need for peer acceptance during adolescence wasn’t so much greater than the need for parental love and care. Being the lone kid who is unable to participate in social life in a ‘normal’ way would be the ultimate disability for most kids. What is needed is a movement in that direction, perhaps starting with limits that kids can learn to accept, not total banning, gradually increasing the numbers in order to change the norm. Parents need to lead, yes, but with an understanding of the competing principles involved.
Yes, you are correct - peer pressure is a formidable foe against responsible parenting. The next best step, but less feasible for many, is homeschooling, and short of isolating kids from their peers, that still won't provide total protection. But, realistically, providing total protection isn't the answer either. I guess in the real world, parents like I described could have open and ongoing conversations with their children as to the reasoning behind curtailing the use of social media. Many, many variables involved for any one solution to the problem.
Thank you for your thoughtful essay. Everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to be at least a little special. While exacerbated by social media, this is an extension of behaviors we see in a variety of people including adults. For instance, my father got a lot of attention for being an enthusiastic hypochondriac. Many middle-aged adults (of both sexes) wax prolific about every ailment they have, or think they have. Complaining — and finding others who share your complaints — is an easy way for an adolescent to find an identity. It’s much easier to be “sick” than actually accomplish something for which you might gain attention and notoriety. As a Biological Psychologist, I agree with you that research will be helpful. However, it will take a broad cultural shift to eliminate this problem. Quite frankly, until adults stop complaining all the time and talking about how bad things are, there will be little incentive for our children to do otherwise. Thanks again for the essay, Frederick
Great point.
Being a parent is always a challenge - particularly in today’s insane age of nutty ideas going viral on TikTok, promoted on the news, and apps like BeReal putting silly spins on the same harmful algorithms to try to placate parents into letting kids on it even though it induces addiction via algorithm like all the rest. It’s rare to look in the mirror and think “yes, I got this right,” as a parent, but on our adamant ban of big social media we can actually say that. I even deleted my own social media a few years ago when my daughter started begging for TikTok and that is a firm no for us - I find do as I do easier to enforce as a parent than do as I say. It helps our kids go to a top ranked conservative private Christian school. Even though it’s large at 1,250 kids, we aren’t alone in blocking them from social media and they aren’t punished socially for it.
I do take issue with “while some social media algorithms act to facilitate the spread of good ideas and accurate information, others can fuel the spread of harmful misinformation and seed dangerous social contagions.”......... it’s never good for algorithms to manipulate human understanding of the world in mass. The Twitter files have shown big tech spread a lot of false narratives at the behest of the woke mobs, self-proclaimed credentialed by incurious “expert” class, and permanent DC. And they did this suppressing demonstrably true information. I have yet to see examples of big tech ensuring vitality of “good” things via algorithmic spread. Computer techies aren’t very good at being arbiters of truth or goodness and AI doesn’t learn human emotions or morality. We should really stop pretending flawed humans can code computer programs to be better than actual humans. So far, all evidence proves the contrary.
What is "permanent DC"?
The bureaucracy. The puppet masters that don’t face elections but they do write the laws via regulations. They frequently override the aims of elected officials, in both parties, via an obedient press all to happy to mold public opinion to the whims of the various industrial complexes effectively run by permanent bureaucrats. From WMDs, to Russia, Russia, Russia to Covid authoritarianism via lies to insisting everything stay secret forever with false insistence of the necessity to protect 60+ year old “sources and methods” or being too lazy to move some cameras around in capital hill today.
This isn't just a phenomenon with children, particularly as it relates to autism. Claiming to have autism adds another intersectional Brownie point to your victimhood resume and is particularly convenient because you can act completely normally but still claim those points because Autism doesn't actually exist in the way that people thing it does.
My six-year-old son has been diagnosed with Autism but what that actually means is that he didn't breath properly for the first seven minutes of his life and spent his first five days in the NICU and suffered a hypoxic brain injury as a result.
His Autism diagnosis is a legal and bureaucratic diagnosis that means insurance has to pay for the therapy he needs, but it has no medical application. The fact you are reading this and now know this about my son tells you nothing. He may have never spoken in his life and never showed any emotion. He might also just be a little awkward in social conditions or particularly shy. He could bang his head against a wall when his daily routine is interrupted. He may know how to code at six. You don't know.
The other day I watched a video on Youtube that had a few people all claiming to have "Autism" and the point was that one of them did not and they were all supposed to guess which one didn't. One of the people claiming to have Autism who did not end up being the plant had absolutely no outward sign at all of any cognitive disorder. All of the others displayed obvious differences. They were intelligent and articulate, but behaved in ways that reminded me of my son, but this one did not at all. She also claimed that the only people who currently knew about her recent diagnosis of Autism were her "wife" and one friend. I submit that the others wouldn't need to tell you they had some sort of disorder, but she apparently went all the way into her twenties with no one the wiser including her family. I call BS.
As the father of a child with real struggles this really bothers me. It's a kind of "stolen valor." She's probably the first person to complain about cultural appropriation but here she is appropriating the struggles people like my son and all those people in the video with her so that when she expresses an opinion it matters just that much more because of the extra points she now can claim. Hanna Gadsby does the same thing. Here she is on stage in front of thousands of people and knowingly being broadcast to millions with no apparent cognitive disability at all claiming the trophy of Autism.
It's disgusting.
Why, only a bigot would suggest a special susceptibility to the negative effects of social media in (checks notes) the Tide Pods generation
LOL, and probably a sexist bigot at that to dare suggest that females are more susceptible.
While social media without a doubt greatly facilitated glamorization of mental illness, social media did not create it. The glamorization of mental illness and certain sicknesses among the young has been around for a long long time. It may have come from its association with being artistic (many famous writers, artists and creative people had mental illnesses). It separates one from the ordinary and boring. (A rosy-cheeked happy girl? What could possibly be more ordinary and boring! . If you don't have "crazy" thoughts, you probably have boring and ordinary thoughts, right? If you look happy and healthy, you are probably not a very deep thinker and feeler. ). Social media also had a huge help from the modern focus on individual . Thinking constantly about oneself cannot be good.
Makes me wonder if some kids seek out or exaggerate a disorder to have an excuse to not take responsibility.
Of course that’s what they are doing. But as the parent of one of these kids I try to frame it in a little more forgiving way - they are looking for an explanation for why they feel everyone else is better at things than they are, why they don’t fit in, why they lack confidence. These kids are suffering, and are blaming themselves, and they are looking for a reason to stop blaming themselves, an explanation that doesn’t translate in their minds to “this is all your fault”.
Agreed. Great point.
It’s criminally professionally negligenct that the medical/psychotherapeutic world is as ignorant about social media and its impact as they are. It’s a large part of why we are where we are with the gender nonsense. If clinicians spent 10 minutes on any of the relevant platforms they’d see the enormous influence, and the ridiculous and dangerous legitimacy given to every kid claiming to be some gender flavor or other would be shut down.
The hard truth is that "normative" standards exist to maintain the sanity of the majority of people. Normalizing mental illness only makes everybody crazy, and does nothing to help those who are struggling to find sanity. "Affirming" mental illness pours gasoline on a fire.
Yes. A little stigma is a good thing. Otherwise we have the inmates running the asylum, which is the case right now.
Thank you to the authors. Quite a few years ago while attempting to seek help for my daughter, this article's message is what I tried to express to various therapists, psychiatrists and even a neuropsychologist, all of them seasoned professionals who stared at me blankly and dismissed my concerns because they had no clue this was happening. At least three of them stated they had never heard of Tumblr and didn't know what it was. They thought my observation of online influence was way off base. Of course, this was several years ago when the phenomenon was not yet known in the mainstream. Also, I didn't voice my concerns in such a clear and eloquent way as the authors of this piece have. Additionally, I do not have the training or expertise the authors do, nor were there any sources to cite at that point in time. I was just a mom who could see Tumblr was incfluencing my child to believe that being mentally ill and transgender were some sort of badges of honor or hard-won trophies to be proud of, and this is why my daughter was suddenly claiming all sorts of mental health problems, as well as suddenly claiming to be a boy.
Thank to you the authors for spreading awareness of this dangerous online trend.
Nice note.
Sadly we see the ordinary bullying-driven unhappiness gay boys and girls suffer medicalized into “dysphoria”. Then these children and families are gaslit online into a diagnosis of a problem of self-perception. Internet charlatans say a scalpel is a treatment that will miraculously driving tormentors to flee. As many parents have found, 1:1 loving personal support, physical maturity and an “off” switch is the real cure.
This article speaks to a way children and adults self-medicalize a need for attention, what used to be called hypochondria and “Munchausen’s” syndrome. Soulless, Internet-distributed video is the accurate root-cause diagnosis, and the “off” switch is the actual cure.
No problem. According to the Democrat platform today you can self identify as anything. If you identify as sane when you are insane, no problem. Likewise, if you appear as a white middle-aged male, you can still identify as a gender-fluid, Latinx-black-Asian teenage girl with ADHD, OCD and an eating disorder. It is good to do this because victims of maladies and minority identity get more victims points... get more positive attention... get more LIKES!.
My problem is the myriad of identity choices causing me anxiety. It is so hard to chose!
I backed away from the online autism communities years ago because of stuff like this.