Introduction: What Are We Missing? Why Does It Matter?

Oleg Shupliak, Double portrait of Van Gogh, 2011.

At first glance, the image above just looks like a bearded man. You may even recognize the man as the artist Vincent Van Gogh. But if you shift your perspective a bit, you’ll see that Vincent’s nose is also a person sitting in a field and his ear is the wide-brimmed hat of a girl in a flowing dress. His eyebrows are the rooftops of buildings in the distance.

What does this have to do with teens and social media? In short: there’s more than at first meets the eye.

Over the last decade, we—Emily and Carrie—have studied teens’ digital lives. Our team at Harvard Project Zero has had incredible access to the ins and outs that are often hidden from adults’ view. Time and again, our research has shown there is more than meets the eye about teens and social media. Our latest research reveals surprising, important gaps between adults’ common assumptions and teens’ realities. Just a few examples:

There are good reasons for the misses. Adults (ourselves included) are often balancing instincts to protect young people’s present well-being and future lives in a world that is starkly different from the one in which we grew up.2

From the Mouths of Babes

As social scientists who study teens and social media, we’ve spent the last decade chasing answers to the following questions: What is it like for today’s young people to grow up with social media and smartphones? How do these technologies affect their social, emotional, moral, and civic development? What are teens actually doing on their smartphones and how do they make sense of what they see on their screens?

We pose these as true questions and strive to be open to all kinds of answers—the good, the bad, and the messy and complicated. Sometimes, what emerges is predictable. Other times, our findings are truly new and surprising to the world and to us. This book is about the new and the unexpected. The pages ahead are filled with the data and stories that stopped us in our tracks and forced us both to rethink our own tacit assumptions about teens and tech.

Across the chapters, we draw primarily on our recent Digital Dilemmas Project which took several years and as many unplanned turns. By early 2021, we had a treasure trove of data collected through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations—all of which brought young people’s perspectives to the fore.

Some quick context: The project began in 2017, when we had an opportunity to work with our longtime collaborators at Common Sense Media (a nonprofit leader in media advice for families and schools). Our collaborative team was gearing up to update their digital citizenship curriculum with new and refreshed classroom lessons. We wanted to be sure we were tapping into the most pressing and relevant issues for teachers and, crucially, for teens.

A large survey was the kickoff. We surveyed both educators and students about timely digital topics, such as enduring online posts, pressures to stay connected, and civic tensions. We were astonished by the response. Just a few months in, we had data from almost 1,000 educators and more than 3,500 middle and high schoolers. The youth sample was fairly diverse, comprising students from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds and schools across ten U.S. states. Their ages spanned nine to nineteen, though most were between twelve and eighteen years old. (See more details about our survey participants in the appendix.)

Responses to one question stood out: What worries you most about today’s digital world? We didn’t ask the question because we see digital life as inherently worrisome or problematic. Rather, we wanted to identify youths’ authentic worries so that we could design relevant educational resources.

We first asked respondents to this question to choose their answer from a list of ten options that spanned issues from screen time, cyberbullying, and drama to being asked for inappropriate pictures—or to write in their own reply.3 Then, we asked them to share an open-ended explanation describing their biggest worry. It was these explanations that captured our attention. They were relatively short, typically just one to two sentences each; some were just a few words. But the explanations were compelling and their sheer volume lent a kind of power: thousands of raw, direct worries “from the mouths of babes.”

We studied worries like these—3,529 in total—systematically, one by one. We reviewed the full dataset several times and with multiple analytic strategies as we worked to organize important insights. Our hope was to achieve what we sensed was missing: a more textured, authentic understanding of teens’ worries and experiences. This, we believe, lays necessary groundwork for new or reimagined interventions, policies, and supports.

We’d be remiss not to acknowledge the imperfections of this question from a survey design perspective. Giving people set options to choose from can narrow the realm of what they consider. Permitting selection of just one worry (“what worries you most . . .”) means that these survey responses only capture perspectives from those who are most concerned about a given topic. These are important qualifications. They mean, for example, that it wouldn’t be appropriate to make claims like “x% of teens are worried about this topic.” Nor would it be right to say that a certain percentage of teens are not worried about a topic just because it wasn’t their top concern. Because our work was largely situated in the United States, the research and examples in this book also tend to reflect U.S.-centric emphases (e.g., U.S. politics) and we are limited in the claims we can make about global trends.

Yet there is so much that we can say. The data offer an incredible window into different pain points and puzzles of teens’ experiences behind their screens.

Privileging Youth Voices

The obvious bears mentioning: we are not teens. This is important because though we write extensively in this book “about the experiences” of youth growing up in today’s digital world, we cannot write “from experience” coming of age in an era of Instagram and Snapchat.4 Carrie, now in her fifties, was in her thirties when cell phones—specifically, flip phones—became ubiquitous. She had her first child in 2005 (when Facebook was just a year old) and used a photo blog to share baby pictures with the grandparents. Today, Carrie parents two technology-loving kids, ages sixteen and twelve. Emily, who is in her thirties, had Facebook as a high schooler, joined Instagram shortly after she finished college, and Snapchatted her way through graduate school. Her toddler does not have a TikTok (yet).

We wrestled with how to interpret and share findings from our research in a way that privileged young people’s voices. We are skilled at listening closely to adolescents: trained to notice—and to contextualize—both what youths say and what is left unsaid. Still, we are acutely aware that our positions and identities confer blindspots too. Though we bridge different generational perspectives, we are both White women and researchers who have spent most of our professional lives at an elite university on the East Coast of the United States.

Key to our approach was first collecting and centering data from diverse youth, and then co-interpreting the data with young people. Working with teens throughout our research process provided additional checks and balances as we continued to consider: What might we be misunderstanding or missing all together? We also repeatedly asked teens: What do you most wish adults understood?

Our advisory council comprised twenty-two teens (ages thirteen to eighteen) and three young adults from different life experiences and backgrounds. These co-interpreters brought to our research perspectives shaped by their own intersectional identities, including as teens who are first-generation American, queer, Asian American, Black, Latinx, White, biracial, and living in communities across every time zone in the continental United States. They brought insights based on their experiences in public school, private school, and homeschool. They had different family structures and living arrangements, interests and identities, and views on the positives and perils of tech.

Their voices feature prominently in the pages ahead, as do the voices of teens we captured through our survey data. When we quote these young people, we have preserved their original wording as closely as possible and used italics for their comments as we did earlier. In some cases, we note that we are drawing on voices from other teens in our past studies on digital life. Through projects we carried out together and separately over the past decade, our research teams have interviewed 275-plus teens about different aspects of growing up in a digital era. We also share stories collected through the course of our work, at times in composite form or with details modified to protect youths’ identities. In instances where we use a composite or modified story, the details have been (re)vetted by teens to ensure their validity.

For the sake of brevity, we use the terminology of “teens” to refer to all youths in our sample. We use more specific language where relevant to call out distinctions between the experiences of middle versus high schoolers. In all cases, the names we use for youths are pseudonyms. Wherever possible, we asked the teens to choose these pseudonyms for themselves and we use their self-selected names, which in many cases reflect the cultural identities salient to them.

Beyond our research with teens, we’ve been fortunate in recent years to be invited into communities where we engage with families and educators around opportunities and challenges of teens and tech. These data offer additional insight into what adults are seeing and what they’re often missing.

Centering young people’s authentic perspectives on digital life is our principal aim in this book. As we’ll say more than once, a crucial part of doing this is underscoring that teens are not a monolith. An essential corresponding acknowledgment: adults are not a monolith either.

An important complement to our account is the growing body of research that delves into tensions different adults face as they parent, teach, or otherwise seek to support young people today. A signature example: Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross’s book Parenting for a Digital Future: How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives. Livingstone and Blum-Ross deliver a nuanced and sympathetic account of the perspectives of parents, who engage different digital parenting strategies as they try to protect their children.5 These approaches reflect parents’ hopes and struggles as they guide children through a risky present and into an uncertain future. Importantly, the authors also unpack how digital parenting dilemmas are experienced and navigated differently by families based on social inequities. Although we often refer to “adult assumptions” and “adult messages” we do so with the recognition that there are complexities, too, behind adults’ frequent cautions to teens.

Teens on Screens: What We See and What We Don’t

When I (Carrie) traveled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to explore a potential collaboration, my colleagues and I found ourselves in a shopping mall during after-school hours. In Riyadh—as in many places around the world—the mall is a prime place for teens to gather. Yet for Saudi teens, prohibitions on unmarried males and females being in close proximity make certain peer interactions impossible, or at least a bit more complicated. Girls and women also often navigate dress codes that require them to wear abayas (neck-to-floor-length robes) and head scarves that hide everything but their faces.

The teens in the mall appeared to be following the rules. A group of girls congregated together in a cluster around the water fountain. A safe distance (about fifteen feet) away was a group of boys. The groups seemed to respect an invisible boundary, keeping physical distance between them.

I couldn’t help but notice this familiar sight: teens, hanging out with friends, a smartphone in every hand. They consulted their screens at regular intervals, in between chatter with their same-sex peers and furtive (and sometimes not-so-furtive) glances toward peers across the way.

Imagine you were in my position, looking on at this scene in the mall. Perhaps you’d sigh or lament how teens around the world seem so focused on the devices in their hands that they aren’t fully present for the people right in front of them.

A few young Saudi educators shared some insider intel and a different perspective. A recent phenomenon: when teens are hanging out in sex-segregated groups and appear to be eyeing a group of the opposite sex, they’re often “talking” with them below adults’ radar. They use Bluetooth to establish connections with close-by peers who catch their interest. Then, they can interact via WhatsApp and Snapchat—staying a respectable distance physically while swapping “uncovered” selfies of their faces and hair, and even building relationships with romantic intent.

This anecdote illustrates a principle we’ve found to be true time and again: there is more to the teens and tech story than most adults are privy to. There’s value in tabling our assumptions long enough to ask, listen, and look anew.

Behind Their Screens, but Not Behind Their Backs

Several years later and many miles from Riyadh, I (Emily) was sitting at a conference in Austin, Texas, looking on with permission as a peer scrolled through his Instagram account. In our interview studies, we use different versions of this exercise. We ask someone to browse one of their social media accounts while they narrate their reactions. “What are you seeing?” we ask, even though we can also see exactly what they’re looking at. “Share whatever reaction pops into your head.”

When we’ve set the right tone—open and nonjudgmental—people get into the rhythm of thinking aloud. In this case, I saw that thirty-year-old “Ben’s” feed was filled mostly with poetry (he’s also a poet), a few celebrities, and images of people who looked around his age. If someone were browsing Ben’s Instagram from a distance, say by using a monitoring app or plugging in his password behind his back, they’d see an unremarkable collection of his hobbies and interests alongside seemingly benign social content.

But because we were browsing together, I got a more accurate sense of what Ben saw in his own feed. The poetry was “too long” to read and disappeared quickly from his screen as he scrolled past it. He double-tapped on photos from a certain celebrity—adding purposeful likes because, he admitted, he and the celebrity had recently met and he hoped she would reciprocate with likes on his posts. Most notably, his feed was filled with pictures from women he’d previously dated and their friends.

When Ben stopped scrolling, he turned to face me. We both had the same realization: his casual browsing was offering up a steady stream of reminders of failed romances.

The title of this book invites a look behind teens’ screens. But to be very clear, the book is not an invitation to covertly peer over teens’ shoulders. Philosophically, we aren’t keen on digital snooping without cause. Older teens especially see this as a major violation of privacy that shatters trust. More practically, the Ben story illustrates another principle: there is often more than meets the onlooker’s eye. And this gap is even wider when the observer is an adult, and the account belongs to a teen.

Our aim is not simply to know what they see on their screens, but also to see it as they do. This positions us to have their backs, rather than just looking over their shoulders.6

Rethinking Familiar Topics

We chose the chapter topics for this book based on concerns that were salient to adolescents but often misunderstood by adults. Some topics likely seem predictable, such as social conflicts or online politics. But teens’ experiences with them aren’t. We also give chapter-length treatment to topics like sexting (chapter 5), where a constellation of unique pressures and complexities are illustrated by teen practices, such as “watermarking” nudes: adding a barely-visible digital watermark with the name of the intended recipient as a kind of warranty. Then, the sender will know who leaked the picture if it is ever shared.

We start in chapter 1 with a provocation: you’ve been misled. Alarmist headlines that shape the public narrative about teens and tech often lead us astray. We need an intentional, data-driven pivot. We talk in this book about “teens,” but as we’ve said: teens are far from monolithic, and their identities and contexts shape their digital experiences. The features of today’s networked technologies also inform and amplify their digital interactions in important ways. We then turn to teens’ worries, beginning with the pull of the screen.

In chapter 2, we reframe the screen time debate and detail teens’ worries, struggles, and strategies related to digital habits. Our research challenges the idea of tech use as an adults-versus-teens battle and instead points to areas of real and mutual concern. We unpack teens’ worries about dependence (on devices), disruption (of face-to-face connection and other activities), and distraction (especially from focus on schoolwork). Teens also contend with social media highlight reels and a pull toward social comparison—these are among the dark clouds they navigate. But dark clouds coexist with true bright spots. Overall, new insights point to the fatal flaw of a single-minded fixation on screen time.

In chapter 3, we examine the culture of constant connection and zoom into the dynamics of teen friendships. Many adults assume teens crave limitless contact with friends and peers. Yet our research reveals how burdened teens can feel behind their screens as they grapple with what it means to be a good friend in a 24/7 digital world. Teens describe new expectations as friendships play out under a social media spotlight, and stresses related to digitally stratified audiences, from group chats to exclusive “Close Friends” lists.

In chapter 4, we delve into the spectrum of drama and social conflict. We begin with a timely incarnation: tea accounts, where anonymous posts “spill the tea” or gossip about peers. While adults typically register concerns about cyberbullying, teens share how they make sense of more subtle forms of digital conflict that fly below adults’ radars. Social media is a context for covert “jabs” as well as blatant call outs—all of which can play out in front of watchful audiences.

Chapter 5 covers sexting. We ask: If teens know sending images of nudes is risky, why do they still do it? Our research challenges the idea that teens are simply unaware of the risks, and instead clarifies the motives and pressures that are typically hidden from adults’ view. In reality, not all sexting is equally concerning. We differentiate wanted sexting, pressured sexting, and sexts shared without permission. Chapter 5 also spells out nine reasons why teens send nudes and clarifies why sweeping warnings (“Just don’t sext!”) fall short.

Chapter 6 directs attention to today’s political landscape. Adults at once criticize social media use as shallow and meaningless and simultaneously fret about kids getting in over their heads with real issues. Today’s teens feel compelled to get into the issues—both because they care and because silence has social costs. Where social media posts are received and monitored by peers, the political is interpersonal and friendships are on the line. Concerns related to cancel culture, performative activism, and echo chambers further weigh on teens, even as they acknowledge the upsides of a digital civic sphere.

Chapter 7 zeroes in on privacy issues including the potential permanence of digital artifacts from the adolescent years. High-profile cases of online missteps and dire consequences abound. Adults often assume teens are unaware of these risks or simply don’t care. The natural result is to ramp up messages about harsh consequences, like “ruining your life.” Yet our data reveal why such messages can fall short or backfire. We detail teens’ perspectives on the risks of misposts that may stay with them for years to come. We complicate the idea that teens can really control their footprints by identifying other “coauthors” who sometimes hold all the cards. And we return to the looming notion of social cancellation. A clearer understanding of the dynamics—developmental, social, personal—begs a rethinking of what adults should say and do to help.

Each topical chapter follows a similar sequence. We open with a story that tees up relevant dilemmas. We then dive more deeply into teen experiences, uplifting youth voices from our own research and putting their perspectives in conversation with key ideas from other research. In various places, we connect apparently new phenomena to existing knowledge from the fields of psychology, communication, neuroscience, and even evolutionary biology. We close each chapter with a synopsis of what “Teens Want Adults to Know” about the focal topic, whether it be digital habits or friendship challenges, sexting pressures or civic participation.

By the time you reach the conclusion, we hope you’ll share with us a new sense of empathy for today’s teens. How can we translate this empathy into actions that truly support them? The conclusion offers a path forward: we outline “the agency argument” as a new way of thinking about our collective quest to support youth in a digital age. We address adults in diverse roles: parents, educators, clinicians, tech designers, and policymakers.

When adults start by asking over assuming, we can hear directly from teens about the digital dilemmas that are most relevant to their lives. By channeling empathy over eye-rolling, adults can counter the impulse to immediately judge what we think we hear (or see). This allows us to tune into the details about what’s hard (or great) and why. We’re then better positioned to provide immediate support to teens, create effective policies, and identify valuable interventions. Complexity over commandments is an essential reminder to avoid defaulting to overly simplistic “solutions” that are destined to fail.

The research center we call home—Project Zero—has a long history of developing short, accessible “thinking routines” that invite deep thinking and reflection. “I Used to Think. . . . Now I Think . . .” is a perennial favorite, and we often use it to invite reactions after we share our research.7 We wrap up this book by sharing a collection of responses from teens and adults, and by revealing how our own perspectives changed in writing it. Surely, there is plenty that you now think to be true about teens and screens. Like us, we suspect you’ll find that there is a whole lot that you were missing.