As the mother of a 10-year-old, I frequently feel the threat of social media creeping its way into his life. So far my husband and I have avoided giving him a phone. His only laptop is a school-issued ChromeBook with prison-tight safety elements and no access to adult or inappropriate sites.
But after producing the film "The Coddling of the American Mind," I started to realize that I was putting far too much attention on the enemy outside. Inside of our young people’s heads, there is a battleground as well. The book, brilliantly written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, examines those battles and offers strategies and tactics to survive them.
In making this film we interviewed an array of Gen Z-ers, some of whom were still in college at the time. While it’s normal for anyone to feel a certain level of insecurity when entering college, it seems like today’s college campus creates its own battleground in some of the most personal areas: Who will be my friends? What activities should I participate in? What classes should I take?
These common questions now seemed to be loaded with a sense of peril: "Choose the correct peer groups and causes, and you’ll be fine. Otherwise, get ready to be ostracized."
SOCIAL MEDIA WARNINGS WON'T PROTECT KIDS, BUT SOMETHING ELSE WILL
These sharp students devote so much energy to not getting canceled and proving they have the "correct" world view. That makes them less focused on more important things – such as embracing discomfort and hearing different points of view – that will help them in the "real world."
And in the midst of this battleground, there is the strange presence of "over protection" – administrators and professors go out of their way to help students avoid the very things that will make them stronger. It’s like watching a military weakening its soldiers.
At a screening of our film at Duke University, I was saddened to hear from a professor there that most kids these days scrub or erase most of their social media posts and pictures upon graduation on the off chance they’ll be dug up and hurt them when it’s time to find employment.
But I also completely understood – your past is not just captured in Polaroids and yearbooks anymore. A past version of you that was just being a silly kid or experimenting, could assassinate your future self’s reputation. But by engaging in self-censorship, they are putting crucial parts of their lives on the cutting room floor before they’ve really lived life.
So making this film forced me to shift my focus from the impending social media threat looming over our child and his friends to paying closer attention to how he thinks, what bothers him and how he handles disagreement.
It also forced me to examine how my own mind works. After all, we largely teach our kids by example and if I’m vulnerable to common cognitive distortions, I have to practice how I handle them. Anxiety, paranoia, catastrophizing – these are not age-specific maladies, but challenges we all face at some point. And they typically don’t just go away for most people.
We must put our negative thoughts on trial. The prosecuting attorney has to prove everything is as bad as your mind tells itself it is. Where is the evidence that I am a loser overall because I didn’t get one gig? Or that this friend hates me now because she was slow to respond to my last text (welcome to my personal mind reading and catastrophizing!).
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Social media is an ever-evolving threat and I see little value in it for young kids. But it’s unavoidable. Even if our son doesn’t get a phone until he’s 15, he is surrounded by kids who have them. He’s surrounded by older siblings to those friends who will inevitably show him something disturbing. He is living in a culture that pushes political agendas in materials, such as children’s books and cartoons, that should remain innocent.
My maternal instinct to protect him from everything is not only completely unrealistic, it will hurt him in the long run. My time as a mother is much better spent equipping him with the skill of crossing a busy road by himself rather than hovering my hand over his until we get to the other side.
