On a snowy winter day, we (Emily and Carrie) were in Portland, Maine, in the library of a charter middle school. It was the first of many school visits where we teamed up with teachers to try out classroom approaches for teaching thorny digital topics, from friendship challenges to civic dilemmas.1 Before a few long days of teaching and observation begin, we gave a presentation about our research and how it has fueled our interest in the ways adults talk to teens about tech.
We started the session as we often do—whether the audience is teachers, parents, or tech insiders—by naming a collection of common messages adults convey to adolescents about digital life:
These messages are well intentioned and in many cases on point. They’re shared with teens by adults who truly care about them and want to ensure young people are staying safe and on a path to a successful life.2
Still, these messages fall short. By this we don’t mean they are inaccurate or wrong; we mean they aren’t enough. Sometimes, they even backfire, amplifying anxiety without clarifying what teens can or should do when dilemmas or challenges come up. Today’s teens need more than just broad principles and panicked warnings.
Our trip to Portland kicked off a search for answers to the obvious next question: What do they need? To be sure, schools that create space for digital literacy education. Tech designers who re-prioritize for youth well-being (and policies that ensure it). Caring adults who stay alert to digital dilemmas, set warranted boundaries, and offer empathy, connection and validation. This all requires that we address the fundamental ways digital life is undercutting teens’ agency at a developmental moment when it really matters.
Psychologists have long recognized that we as individuals fare better when we believe our actions can influence what happens, when we can shape an outcome through our behavior—when we have agency.3 Conversely, routinely feeling out of control can threaten our well-being.4
In so many areas of digital life, we see evidence from teens of a struggle to feel and to be in control. The struggle shows up as they fight to regulate digital habits amid powerful design pulls and developmental sensitivities. It surfaces when features like Snapchat streaks compel ongoing exchanges they may not want to keep up. But also:
Looking across teens’ worries reveals a persistent struggle for digital agency. This is a strong undercurrent as they describe worries that stem from not having skills, not having good choices, not knowing how to navigate hard social situations made harder by digital technologies. The struggle is complicated by the true benefits and upsides of digital life for adolescents. Social media meets teens where they’re at developmentally: primed for self-expression, exploration of their interests and values, connection with peers, and curiosity about the broader world.
People are generally better positioned to cope with stressors when they believe that they can manage or control them in some way. This begs the question: If teens’ digital stresses are often rooted in a sense of compromised agency and control, how can we authentically empower more agency and well-being?
There are at least three critical paths, and they build on the different types of agency outlined by psychologist Albert Bandura.
First, build personal agency. Personal agency refers to the things an individual can do to exert influence over situations. Our account in this book has called attention to myriad ways teens’ personal sense of agency is strained, thwarted, or undercut. But if we’ve done our job, you also learned about inventive ways they create a greater sense of agency against the odds. You heard about teens who try to curate their social media feeds toward well-being by unfollowing or muting accounts that make them feel bad. You heard about those who set their own screen time limits or intentionally put their phones out of reach when they want to focus on studying. You heard about teens who strategically segment their online audiences to empower more intentional sharing to particular groups.
Building teens’ personal agency means supporting skills and strategies they can deploy when digital stressors come up. For example: by anticipating and discussing different dilemmas before they arise, we can help lessen anxiety and create ways to scaffold communication skills or strategic plans that position them to feel more agentic when the moment calls for it. One of our favorite quotes from an educator we interviewed captures the spirit of what we’re looking to support—specifically, teens’ decision-making “at ten o’clock on a Saturday night.” This can mean having go-to language to respond to a snap from a romantic interest asking for a nude or to kindly (but firmly) set a boundary with a friend whose texting has become overwhelming.
Collective agency is where people “provide mutual support and work together to secure what they cannot accomplish on their own.” 5 A signature example: the ways teens form pacts to vet photos of each other before tagging and posting. Even amid dismay about a world in which privacy feels forsaken, some teens find ways to protect and respect each other’s privacy and online public image. Collective agency is also at play when teen girls share intel about guys known to leak girls’ nudes so that they can be on alert and avoid them. Yet another example came up in the descriptions of teens who create online study spaces over Discord or Zoom to help each other maintain focus while keeping other digital distractions in check. Because friends are often poised to make digital life more or less stressful, when teens work together to reshape burdensome norms, everyone stands to win. We support collective agency when we validate efforts by teens to have each other’s backs in the face of digital age challenges.
Proxy agency is where adults often come in. This mode of agency acknowledges that on their own—and even when they collaborate with others—teens only have so much control over their circumstances. Proxy agents are typically those who hold more power and can wield it on others’ behalf to support their agency. Because adults usually create the rules, policies, and relevant laws (not to mention the very technologies teens use!), we are critical proxy agents in a context of digital opportunities and risks.
Some adults are in positions that offer particularly relevant powers as proxy agents. Parents are perhaps the most obvious figures here, as they make day-to-day decisions that grant and limit teens’ digital access (beginning, often, with the purchase of a first phone). Those who hold gatekeeping roles make decisions about whether to consider digital artifacts in school admissions, scholarship awards, and hiring. Adults may be the recipients of online receipts with evidence of transgressions. Those who work in education are often tasked with handling cases that unfold among students—where a teen is a target of persistent cyberbullying or where a nude a teen shared with one person was circulated around the entire school. Those who work at tech companies, designers especially, have the power—and the responsibility—to raise questions about whether features will hook and pull teens in at the expense of their well-being. Recognizing our roles as proxy agents means acknowledging our complicity in creating conditions that can unintentionally undercut youth agency.
Whatever roles adults are in, it’s past time to consider: How do our decisions support or compromise young people’s agency and well-being? Where, when, and how should we intervene and disrupt existing devices, apps, norms, policies, and laws? How can we design for more agency? And: how can we center considerations about differential susceptibility and equity when we do so?
Let’s get more concrete about where (re)designing for digital agency can happen and what it might look like.
At home, building personal agency for teenagers means tuning into dilemmas. This can mean moving beyond rules that simply impose arbitrary screen time limits. To be sure, teens often need support developing healthy screen time habits and curbing unregulated binges. An important aim is helping teens recognize moments when tech use adds to or undercuts their well-being or personal goals. This requires focusing more on what a teen is doing during their screen time and to what end. By modeling intentional digital habits (e.g., “I need to turn off my notifications for a bit, I’m feeling so distracted by my phone today”), we can help teens do the same for themselves. In this spirit, Tom Harrison writes about the value of parents being “thick exemplars” who share with children times when we struggle with our own digital experiences, misstep, or puzzle over how to “do the right thing.”6
Parents can also validate efforts that support collective agency, like when friends decide to keep phones in an untouched stack during dinners together. Or when they use location-sharing as part of a group effort to keep friends safe during a night out. Such approaches reflect a “digital mentoring” approach to parental mediation rather than simply limiting or permitting unlimited tech access.7 While younger adolescents need more direct oversight, parents can support personal agency through a gradual release toward more age-appropriate independence and privacy as their children get older.
In classrooms and school communities, building digital agency requires doing more than mandating that students agree to a list of “don’ts” in acceptable use policies. Instead, educators can play the vital role of creating space for young people to explore true tensions and dilemmas about issues like sending nudes or collecting receipts. With Common Sense Media, we created free classroom materials (dilemma scenarios) and tools (thinking routines) that support both skills and habits of mind (self-reflection, perspective taking, communication skills) that empower personal agency. We’ve seen firsthand the power of these kinds of learning experiences. When educators lean into rather than shy away from complexity (a principle we will describe further), they create intentional space for students to think through digital dilemmas with real-world trade-offs. As one high school teacher reflected: “I personally like the complexity of dilemmas because that’s what they WILL deal with . . . I like that there isn’t a clear take away because that’s reality—that’s the reality of the situations they’re going to face. . . . [This] prepares them to . . . handle these situations.”
In admissions and hiring, gatekeepers can proactively adopt policies that take into account the complexities of digital footprints, co-construction with peers included. Digital posts etch moments in time from long ago that young people may have learned from and evolved past. This mode of proxy agency doesn’t mean overlooking clear violations of community values, but it does mean inquiring about context and considering learning opportunities alongside sanctions.
For tech companies, designing for agency requires attention to the ways different features shape youths’ experiences. How soon is too soon? An expert in development, Katie Davis argues that designers should build with attention to agency even when creating for toddlers and young children, and certainly for teens. She describes how design features like virtual trophies and autoplay grab young children’s attention versus empower choice and self-direction.8 Consideration must be ongoing, not only at the outset of product creation. Naturally, young people’s uses of technologies can shift over time.9 They may converge with the design team’s intentions, or they may sharply diverge as teens start using features in ways that were never imagined. (An example here might be the close monitoring of Snapchat maps to detect evidence that one has been excluded from friends’ plans.) Tech companies should have a responsibility to continually evaluate the ways their platforms are used and experienced by youth. Is a feature that was designed for practical value actually creating considerable stress for adolescents, as we saw in the case of alerts that a message has been Read but seemingly ignored?
Youth with particular vulnerabilities must get extra attention. Is an algorithm trapping a depressed teen in an unwanted content bubble, serving up dispiriting quotes and posts about self-harm? This requires going beyond light-touch user feedback. Admittedly, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) can pose a practical challenge to collecting data on the tech experiences of youth under the age of thirteen. But ongoing research with youth and their families is necessary as a way to elevate their voices and experiences. In light of youth vulnerabilities, tech companies’ sustained attention to how advertising partners leverage user data is also crucial and challenged by the data-driven business model of the Internet.10
No matter what your role or room(s) you are in, empowering digital agency may seem like a tall order. Even if you are on board with the mission, implementing new approaches is hard—whether it’s disrupting parent-child dynamics at home or reworking deeply entrenched school procedures for digital mishaps. But there are a few guiding principles that you can take on board immediately. None is particularly mind blowing or new; these principles are tried and true to good teaching, parenting, and design. We’ve repackaged them here in the form of memorable “keys” to better conversations with teens about tech.
The first key is asking over assuming. Throughout the book, we’ve pointed to the many ways well-intentioned messages can fall short, often because they’re rooted in simplistic if not entirely flawed assumptions.
In our research, we noticed a profound shift when we doubled down on listening to youth. We learned that open-ended questions are especially generative (e.g., What’s your view of TikTok? What’s great about having Snapchat, and what can get tricky? How do you decide who to follow on Instagram? What do you wish I understood about gaming? Is there anything you would change about Fortnite if you could?). If we want real answers, we also learned that we have to set a warm and nonjudgmental tone from the beginning. For parents and educators, this might mean making clear that a conversation isn’t going to lead to immediate sanctions or new rules.
When we ask and listen, we may find that our initial assumptions were on the right track. In other cases, we will discover that things are “good” or “bad” in ways we hadn’t seen. We may learn that a teen’s time on TikTok isn’t just wasted—because it supports their interests, learning, or self-care. Or, we may learn that a challenge isn’t really what we thought, like when reluctance to unplug is rooted in concerns about a friend’s mental health versus a phone “addiction.” We may come to appreciate that advice we thought was helpful (“You are what you post, now and forever!”) has some drawbacks.
The second key is empathy over eye rolling. As teens share their perspectives, there can be an understandable impulse toward judgment and even its visible marker—eye rolling. (Are you really telling me your friends can’t live without your texts for one hour?) As we witness a teen’s daily phone habits or observe their emotional reactions to a close friend’s latest snap, it can be powerfully tempting to criticize. We offer empathy over eye rolling as a reminder to adults to press pause on knee-jerk judgments in moments when compassion is warranted.
We can likely tap into empathy when we recall our own adolescent missteps and perhaps feel a sense of relief that smartphones weren’t around to record the damage. Empathy is constructive: it moves us past the stance that “they must not be thinking” and instead helps us attend to what teens are thinking about—often a web of social pressures from multiple sources. Empathy is also productive: it changes the tone and tenor of our responses in ways that lay the groundwork for teens to share, listen, and accept our support.
The third key is complexity over commandments. This becomes important when we need to shift from empathic listening to providing more active and direct guidance. Leaning on commandments is a go-to move. Be honest! Do the right thing! Don’t send a text you wouldn’t want grandma to read!
Yet, the right thing is not always so easy to sort out, especially in networked life. Teens often face situations where values we want them to hold are in direct tension with one another. Is what people do or say in public fair for others to record and post on social media? In other words, which is more important: privacy or accountability? If a friend asks for honest opinions on an anonymous app, should you respond honestly even if it might hurt their feelings? That is, should honesty be prioritized over kindness, or vice versa? These tensions—and the resulting lack of a clear-cut right/wrong path—are characteristic of the digital landscape. In this context, commandments based on values like “be honest,” “be fair,” and “be a good friend” are important, but alone provide insufficient guidance for the dilemmas teens face.
Better conversations lean into complexity over leaning on blanket commandments. In a context where there is often no one right answer, teens need support thinking through tricky situations and identifying possible paths forward.
Another feature of complexity is the way in which contexts, circumstances, and teens themselves differ. What is essential as an intervention for one teen is at times unnecessary or unhelpful for others. Complexity over commandments creates space for these differences. Likewise, as tech companies iterate their approaches (e.g., through A/B testing), attention to complexity requires ongoing awareness that what builds agency and well-being may differ based on people’s ages, identities, and circumstances.
Up to the very last minute, discussions with our teen advisory council yielded gems. The council met regularly over six weeks, digging into data on various topics (digital habits, close friendships, sexting, civic expression, footprints, and more). Each week, teens exchanged and unpacked different perspectives. To wrap up our final session, we turned to a compelling prompt—a thinking routine created by our colleagues at Project Zero: “I Used to Think . . . Now I Think . . .”11
As they shared their reflections, we were particularly struck by a repeated theme: teens were surprised to learn that other teens shared many of their thoughts about growing up with today’s technologies:
I used to think that I was alone in my thoughts but now I know that I’m not. Everybody here has just given me some good ideas and seriously, this has been really good.
I used to think that no one had a problem with social media and that everyone just saw it as like this perfect thing. And now I know that [other teens] realize that it has problems with it. They just don’t want to talk about it because nobody’s talking about it.
I used to kind of think that . . . I was the only one who had these kinds of opinions and thoughts. But now I see that it’s shared by a large amount of people. And it’s been really cool talking with y’all and, like, learning everyone’s opinion and different viewpoints from different places.
I used to think that we were all similar, but now I really think that we have a lot in common. Especially like seeing everyone’s opinions. You know, we all come from different backgrounds, you know, gender, religion, race, everything. Grades, age groups. And it’s interesting to see how much we have in common [as] like just teenagers in general.
Surely, we had thought, teens must know they’re not alone in their worries and struggles. But they hadn’t—and recognizing throughlines across their experiences felt “really good.”
This isn’t to say that they walked away with a sense that teens’ digital experiences are all the same. Their reflections also captured a keen sensitivity to the importance of identities and contexts:
I used to think that people’s personal experiences were solely affected just by what stage of life, like what age group they’re in. But overhearing people’s opinions, I realize how much of a factor environment has. I used to think it was just like race [and] gender. But just where you grew up has such a shaping factor in what you believe in, and like what you’re exposed to; what you see [and] what you don’t see; what your opinions are and stuff like that.
I used to think that I knew the range of opinions on different topics. But then, through this group, I learned a lot more. There’s a lot more, like, nuance to everything as well. And a lot of different perspectives and experiences that I hadn’t factored into a lot of these topics. So I’m grateful for that.
I used to think that everyone had the same or at least a similar experience when it came to these topics. And I think I’m pleasantly surprised that that’s not true. Like, everyone has very different experiences and I think that’s dope that now I know that. And that is true.
The wisdom in these responses suggests the relevance of two additional keys for adults to bear in mind. First, the value of normalizing without minimizing. When teens hear that their challenges are shared by others, it both normalizes and validates their struggles.
Here’s an example of normalizing with minimizing, and then one without. If Graham says that comparison on social media happens all the time and makes him feel crummy, a normalizing but minimizing response might be, “that happens to everyone, you just have to learn how to deal with it.” Another response, “just delete Instagram,” is minimizing in another way. Deleting it may well be a good step. But this stance denies that Instagram may be a gateway to friend support and positive content, alongside comparison-inducing highlight reels.
A response that normalizes without minimizing: “That happens to me too, and it’s such a real struggle with social media. It’s hard and definitely can lead to feeling crappy.” Going a step further—toward agency building and empowerment—might involve brainstorming strategies Graham can self-employ like curating his feeds to follow more of the content he likes and less of what brings him down.
A further key, normalizing without essentializing, recognizes that while adolescents have commonalities by virtue of being adolescents, their experiences are powerfully shaped by their identities and contexts. Certainly, teens feel the pull to peers, alongside a need to express themselves. And yet, they experience the world (on screen and off) in important ways that intersect with their race, gender identity, sexuality, and more.
Recall our developmental and ecological lenses. Teens’ needs, wants, and choices are informed by predictable developmental processes. When we normalize without essentializing, we acknowledge both shared aspects of teens’ experiences and the real differences among them. These surface, for example, in the pressures they feel to post about timely civic issues, and in the differential risks they face when their digital content is surveilled or exposed. This means that our approaches to supporting youth agency need to take such inequities into account.
This is an apt moment to try our favorite thinking prompt on for size: How has engaging with teens’ voices shaped or reshaped your thinking about their digital lives? What is something you “used to think” before reading this book, and what do you think now?
I Used to Think ___________. Now I Think ___________.
When we’ve shared the ideas from this book in workshops and talks, adults have offered responses like:
I used to think teens knew so much more about tech than older people. Now, I think they are actually seeking guidance from us.
I used to think teens were just using their devices out of habit. Now I think they use them for social-emotional reasons too.
I used to think young people didn’t care about digital privacy, but now I think they do and it’s pretty complicated.
I used to think digital well-being was just about scarcity of tech use, now I think forming healthy habits is essential.
I used to think talking about this stuff was important. Now, I think I have a better way to frame the conversations.
Our perspectives evolved too. After wrapping up this latest round of research, we have our own list:
We used to think adults would benefit from learning more about teens’ digital experiences; now, we think teens need opportunities to hear about each other’s experiences, too.
We used to think adults might be too worried about social media without cause; now, we think some worrying is well-warranted—though adults often misunderstand what’s hardest and why. We also learned about savvy ways teens leverage apps for well-being, new dilemmas they face related to online civic expression, and intense expectations they can feel related to their friendships.
We used to think that conversations about teens would benefit from including their voices; now we think such conversations are inherently flawed when they don’t.
If we thought our work would be done when we finished this project, we know now that it’s far from over. A mapping of what teens are facing (and adults all too often are missing) tees up fundamental questions about how we can do better by them.
We started this book with an optical illusion and a promise: when it comes to teens and social media, there is more than at first meets the eye. In the chapters thereafter, we looked anew at hot topics, digging into current incarnations including tea pages, highlight reels, cancel culture, effusive comments, digital receipts, performative activism, and the complicated calculus around sexting. The struggles we gave voice to in this book aren’t relevant to every individual teen. What’s more, there are certainly struggles we didn’t name and haven’t yet surfaced. The keys—beginning with asking over assuming—will help all of us continue to discover what we’re missing.
Looking closely at teens’ perspectives, we traced connections to developmental needs and sensitivities. At once, we identified the importance of teens’ identities and contexts as they confer different kinds of risk, resilience, and vulnerability. We also looked through a digital lens. From the opportunities of mobile 24/7 access to one another to the realities of public metrics and persistent content, we saw how digital affordances shape and amplify teens’ experiences.
Technologies (and the ways teens use them) will inevitably continue to change. Some changes are necessary and overdue, like recalibrating apps and policies with youth well-being in mind. Developmental, ecological, and digital lenses will remain essential. If we keep these lenses close, we’re poised to keep seeing what teens are really facing behind their screens.