Tweens, Screens, and the Perils of Independence: Ages Eleven to Thirteen
Don’t let your kids have computers in their room before age thirteen—you lose them if you let them have them earlier. I haven’t seen my brother the entire year since he has a computer in his room. It’s really sad. He’s in sixth grade.
—DAVE, FIFTEEN
NOT LONG AGO, a mother told me a story about her daughter, Danielle, and her daughter’s friend, Katie—two responsible sixth-grade girls who made a plan to go to a local pizza parlor for lunch. This was a privilege—to go to the restaurant on their own—that the girls had been granted in honor of entering middle school. Their parents knew they were going and were happy for them to do so. But what their parents didn’t know was that the girls had also sent a text to Allie, a friend from summer camp, asking her to join them. On the way, Allie ran into three boys who were her friends and invited them to come along. While at lunch, one of these boys, Eric, took photos of the girls with his phone. No one thought anything of it. After all, kids take photos of themselves and each other all the time these days.
Later, however, Eric cropped the heads from the photo of Danielle and Katie and Allie—eleven-year-old girls—and attached them to photos he found online of naked women; he then sent this image to six other boys from his school. Someone posted the photo on another boy’s Facebook page, and in no time it was reaching everyone who knew any of the participants, including a boy who knew these girls from camp. This young man told his mother, who called Katie’s mother. The girls were devastated at what had happened, and mortified.
Meanwhile, the girls’ parents fought bitterly about what they should do and who was to blame. Allie and her parents, who were friends of Eric’s family, insisted that Eric was a nice kid from a good family—he’d just done a stupid thing. Katie’s father, on the other hand, was in a rage. He wanted to go straight over to Eric’s house and “scare the living daylights out of that kid, call the cops and his school principal.” The debate went on for days, and it became a much-gossiped-about incident among the families in their community. This hubbub arose from an innocent lunch at a pizza parlor, a once-benign childhood ritual for preteens.
The idea of middle school as a transition zone between elementary and high school was created to punctuate the notoriously complicated three-year period in which children by eleven or twelve are no longer thinking or acting like they’re eight or nine but they are also not yet the relatively more sophisticated abstract thinkers they’ll be at fourteen and fifteen. It is the age of awkwardness and uncertainty. At home it’s a time of snuggling one minute and hating mom or dad the next. At school it is a world of hormonally charged changelings as puberty transforms the body and bathes the brain in hormones that affect how they think and how their emotions color the moment.
Preadolescents are painfully self-conscious and their capacity for cruelty is legendary. The mix of vulnerability, confusion, and emotional volatility is the reason some teachers fondly refer to middle school as “a holding tank,” a contained educational space designed to see kids through puberty when academic endeavor can hardly compete with the roiling physical and emotional action of the age. Others have called it a “bridge” between the developmental territories of elementary and high school. One superintendent called it “the Bermuda Triangle of education. . . . Hormones are flying all over the place.”
The age was challenging enough in the days when school dances and pizza parlor dates were the most exciting new thing on a preteen’s social agenda, the social getaways from parents where girls and boys braved the awkward encounters of curiosity, crushes, and social cruising. Summer camps introduced the first coed dance. Youth groups brought them together at church or temple. These were tame, well-chaperoned, structured opportunities for boys and girls to hang out. The kids were “pre”—not yet teens—and their social interaction reflected that. All of this was relatively manageable—for them and for parents.
The Internet blew the gates off this holding tank and swept us all out to cyber sea, into a new Bermuda Triangle of tweens, screens, and no limits. Now with laptops and smartphones, texting, sexting, and online social networking, we’ve lost all control, transforming what traditionally had been a de facto if unheralded rite of passage through a physical, social, emotional, and developmental metamorphosis into an online spectator sport.
In the new tweens-without-borders environment, when we lost control, tweens lost the essential preadolescent experience of hitting up against the limits set by the adults in their lives. We tell them, Don’t e-mail while you’re doing your homework, or Don’t look at the J. Crew site in class, or Don’t write anything online you wouldn’t say in person, but many do and they get away with it because we cannot stop them. They aren’t internalizing the early formative lessons in morality that come from thinking it’s wrong, don’t do it, I’ll get caught, or my parents will kill me. Now it’s my parents are clueless and this is so much fun. Parental warnings sail past to no effect; the lived experience is what they internalize and their lived experience is of getting away with it.
We call them “tweens” to designate their developmental locus between two worlds, childhood and adolescence. But in truth that notion of two worlds is outdated; access to the online world and social media has jettisoned preteens unprotected into the adult world. Our kids are gamely making their way as kids have always done. But psychologically, they face a far more complex and often confusing challenge in the digital culture where those defining elements of selfhood—friendships, interests, and sexuality—are so malleable. The casual yet hurtful hallway insult is magnified exponentially when you read about yourself on Facebook or online chats. Online information about sex, including content that would be X-rated on the street, is confusing, disturbing, and, for some, addictive. At a time when developmentally they need to be advancing their early relationship skills, tweens begin the drift away from face-to-face interactions that build social and emotional awareness and instead opt for texting and scrolling superficially in relationships online.
Nor are we as likely to hear about their adventures until they become misadventures. We are also often clueless about their adversities if they are venting on channels we aren’t tuned in to. It used to be in middle school that if your child was having a meltdown you knew it because she would wait to decompress with you at home. Now that they have unprecedented total access to each other 24/7, they don’t wait to debrief with you anymore. They are growing up in a culture that tells them to have those conversations with a friend, or a friend of a friend, or a multitude of “friends” online. The Internet is the primary source that millions of tweens go to for their education about sexuality, relationships, drug and substance abuse, what’s cool, and how to deal with all of life’s ups and downs. Facebook alone is the after-school study group for 7.5 million American kids under age thirteen—at a time when the legal age to establish a page is thirteen. Unfortunately the lessons being learned there and elsewhere online are not what we would sign our kids up for. And yet many parents do just that, as one lawyer mom said, “Putting aside the moral torpor of knowingly breaking the law with my child and getting her, at twelve, a Facebook account. All her friends had one.”
Children tell me they are also less likely to talk with their parents because some parents’ workplaces are stricter now in response to cell phones; it’s easier to text, harder to call. Other tweens say their parents are routinely absorbed in their own work, interests, or online activities, or they are out and about. Some parents tell me that even though they are home and available to their children, they are intimidated by their children’s problems and complaints, unnerved by their exploits. They are silenced by their tweens’ insistence that “it’s their world online,” while worried about their children’s obliviousness to what seem obvious risks. The parents are embarrassed to show their ignorance or helplessness, as well as afraid to ignite a storm with questions. At times, even when they know and take heroic measures to protect their children, they are helpless to stop the viral mob that can descend on a child with stunning ferocity.
Many schools and religions have a rite of passage to punctuate the developmental passage: bar mitzvah, confirmation year, or a big youth-group project. In school, the literature for kids this age is all about the hero quest, meeting the limits, and having character-defining experiences that clarify and fortify core values. Girl Scout and Boy Scout badges were once emblematic of the age. In order for a rite of passage to happen, the ritual has to contain a clear beginning, a middle passage, and an end. Without the ritual learning and preparation that a rite of passage implies, the tween world now bleeds directly into the teen world because they all roam the same media and online world together. The epic quest has been rewritten; online the odyssey of self-discovery is now a daily competition to see who can find the edgiest new YouTube clip or bring down an online foe, whether that’s a dragon or a kid who dissed you in the hall. Meanwhile, as researchers like Dimitri Christakis and Jackson Katz point out, the preadolescent’s character is being informed not only by virtual experiences but by all too real life experiences.
Tweens Meet World: Coming of Age in the Age of Butt-Dialing
If you’re not on top of this, and even if you are, the reality is that while you might have put good privacy settings on your phone and computer and you have not given a smartphone to your child by sixth or seventh grade, chances are your child has access to what has become the standard fare of games and online life. The 2012 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey found that young people (ages twelve to eighteen) are “routinely able to get their hands on games” rated M for mature content and AO for adults only. Three-quarters of parents reported that they “always” or “sometimes” check the ratings on the games their kids play, yet the study found that half the boys questioned rated an M or AO game as their favorite. This compared with 14 percent of girls.
Our children are never far from a friend or schoolmate or kid on the corner who’s got the newest phone or tablet or game or app. Somewhere, at home or in someone else’s home, there is a computer or tablet unguarded, and those who want to can go online and go anywhere they wish almost any time they wish. Once online they may seek out risky business or stumble onto it purely by accident. And there is little we can do to protect them in the old-fashioned sense. As schools are stepping up their efforts to educate children about responsible use of technology, the parenting mission now, as well, is education and prevention: talking about family expectations and netiquette; clear guiding principles, family contracts, and rules; monitoring children’s access to media and their use of tech whenever possible; and teaching them how to be safe and responsible. When that isn’t enough—and inevitably it isn’t—we move on to damage control, that is, teaching our children to take responsibility and learn from their mistakes. This becomes all the more difficult at an age when children need more independence, not less, to practice being responsible for themselves as they take the first small steps toward adulthood.
My friend says she used to believe that tech offered “relatively benign tools and exciting new ways to experiment,” for kids like her three daughters. “It really wasn’t all that different, I thought, than the notes I exchanged all day, every day, at school with my girlfriends, only to go home and spend the entire night on the phone with the same girls,” she says. Or so she thought until the day her daughter Alexa, thirteen, unknowingly sat on her phone and “butt-dialed” a boy she had met once several years before at a fourth-grade dance. When her phone buzzed, there was a text from a number she didn’t recognize and the blunt question: “Who is this?” Unaware that she’d started the exchange when she pocket-dialed the number, she shot back, “Well who is this?” After a testy texting exchange in which the unknown texter was “getting rude” and threatened to post her number to Craigslist, she told the texter off (via texting, of course) and turned off her phone.
The next several days exploded in a texting frenzy and the discovery that her phone number had indeed been posted on Craigslist with a sexually suggestive photo of a woman and the message that she was only in town for two days. Alexa says:
I went to sleep, thinking it was over and I woke up the next morning to thirty-six text messages and twelve missed calls, and there were all these pictures of men with their shirts pulled up saying things like “Hey cutie, I hope we can meet up” . . . so then the panic started to set in, I’m feeling a little out of my range.
She called her parents but they were en route home on a flight, so she called her two older sisters, first Stella, eighteen, who was scared and knew it was serious. Together, they called Rose, twenty-one. Alexa tracked the number in her contacts and identified it as belonging to the boy she’d met in fourth grade. Stepping up, Rose called the number to speak to him about what he had done. It turned out that the number no longer belonged to the boy at all. Rose met with an angry response from the new person on the other end of the line. It turned out that Alexa had pocket-dialed a transsexual prostitute, who was offended by her comments and decided that Alexa needed “to learn a lesson.” In what became an X-rated comedy of errors, before the day was over, Alexa’s phone number was posted on an online site for a transsexual escort service in Los Angeles. Her parents arrived home to the drama unfolding and brought the curtain down quickly. They changed Alexa’s number and got her a phone that was password protected so she couldn’t accidentally dial again. It was indeed a learning experience for all, says Alexa.
I didn’t do anything mean or start off trying to annoy anyone. I didn’t send naked pictures to anyone. It was just something that spun out of control. It showed me how fast you can lose control in a situation online and how much the Internet and social networking can conceal people’s identities. I used to laugh at girls who got into situations talking to fifty-year-old men online, like how could you not know who you were talking to? But I really had no idea who I was talking to.
“Mea culpa,” her mom said later. “I was completely wrong. It’s not the same thing at all as writing notes or talking on the Princess phone.”
Alexa’s is a story in which there was no real damage done—it was more funny than scary. But this is not always the case. For a year and a half, Cindy in Connecticut had been “best friends” with a young man she thought was her age, who lived in Wisconsin. Practically every afternoon and evening they chatted online and she shared her day’s events with him and she had come to trust him and think of “Rusty” as one of her closest bestest friends. Then came summer and a special out-of-town trip for the most senior campers, which included Cindy and a group of her longtime summer campmates. It was a huge deal to make this trip, and the destination was always kept top secret to add to the suspense. When the destination was announced—a city in British Columbia—she shared this exciting news with Rusty and, true to form, he wanted to know all the details—what day they’d arrive, where, and their trip itinerary. On the day of the trip, when the girls and their counselors all arrived at their destination, there was Rusty—not a boy her age at all, but older and “creepy” and accompanied by a couple of his unsavory friends.
Cindy’s fellow campers and counselors were freaked out by the sleazy visitors and furious at Cindy. How could she have been so stupid to tell a stranger where they were going? What was she thinking, having an online relationship with a boy she’d never met, telling him all the details of her life? The boys were sent away and the trip went on, but Cindy grew anxious, depressed, and—with no history of disordered eating—went into an anorexic slide. After the trip, she still felt upended by all that happened and it was scary to her: her friends’ anger and lack of support for her, the adults’ difficulty understanding how this could have happened, and the way it had added to the counselors’ worries about keeping the girls safe. It altered the rest of her summer and shook up her sense of herself, rocked her world in a very bad way.
We talk about “stranger danger” to our kids, but more often than not a predator is someone known to the child. In this way, tech becomes the network where creepy people can get to know your kid in just the way “Rusty” zeroed in on Cindy. Further, the morass of privacy issues around Facebook, social networking, and online marketing makes it hard to know who has what kinds of information about your child. It is a natural and wonderful inclination of tweens to want to reach out and connect to the world at large. While so many wonderful, healthy online social groups are available to kids, the questions we used to ask our teens before we handed them the keys to the car—who, what, where, when—we now have to ask at an earlier age when our kids have access to the keyboard.
“A large part of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cellphones,” notes the 2011 report of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media. It describes enhanced social connections and communication as potential benefits of social media. But the report goes on to paint a familiar troubling picture of the gap between what preadolescent children need for healthy development and the impact of extensive everyday use of media and tech.
Many teens have easygoing, positive, relatively uncomplicated experiences online. They don’t get caught up in heavy usage or heavy drama. And research confirms that when you do comprehensive social and emotional education you reduce the drama significantly. But even the simplest moments hold the potential for trouble, as Lyla found out while doing homework with friends one evening.
Lyla, in eighth grade, was doing her homework online with her two best friends since kindergarten, Paula and Melanie. As they often did, the girls were simultaneously Skyping, IMing, and doing homework. In the flow of their screen chatter, Lyla mentioned that her parents were going away for the weekend. The rapid-fire IM chat went like this:
Paula: let’s have a party at your house, haha
Melanie: great idea!
Paula: yay I’m going to tell everyone now
Lyla: don’t you dare!
Paula: but it would be so cool!
Melanie: so much fun!
Before Lyla could get out another “don’t you dare” Paula had hit send and the e-vite went out:
Party at Lyla’s Saturday at 8. RENTS free (no parents)
What Paula and Melanie had forgotten was that they also Facebooked, IM’d, and Google-chatted with Lyla’s mom, so she received the invitation along with the more than fifty kids in the eighth-grade class. In the middle of her own evening screen time, Lyla’s mom saw it instantly and strode upstairs to find Lyla crying, still struggling online with the girls. Mom cut in on the screen chat and told the girls in no uncertain terms: “You have to clean this up right away. How could you do this to Lyla? I’m really disappointed in you. Take care of it NOW and I won’t tell the school.”
They did. But instead of apologizing to Lyla, the girls were punitive toward her: “Way to go running to your mother!” When she explained, “No you idiots sent it to my mother cause your just that smart,” again, instead of apologizing, they got even huffier. For the next three weeks Lyla cried every day before going to school. Every day Paula and Melanie iced her out in the most obvious, hurtful ways. Her attempts to get the girls to “just deal and be friends again” were futile. And so it went, with verbal jabs—along with that in-your-face IM text lines—delivering low blows and sucker punches, an IM version of the “girls fighting” meme videos on YouTube. It was an experience of friendship, trust, and unexpected betrayal that was searing for Lyla for a couple of weeks. It was a lesson for all of them in how fast and furious online connectivity can amplify social dynamics.
A 2011 study of teens, kindness, and cruelty on social network sites found that while teens across all demographic groups generally had positive experiences watching how their peers treated each other on social network sites, younger teenage girls (ages twelve to thirteen) stood out as considerably more likely to say their experience was that people are mostly unkind. One in three younger teen girls who used social media said that people her age are mostly unkind to one another on social network sites, compared with 9 percent of social-media-using boys twelve to thirteen and 18 percent of boys fourteen to seventeen. The unkindness they witness ranges from snarky comments about someone’s hair to brutal verbal assaults or humiliating disclosures.
“Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out”
I like Mimi Ito and her colleagues’ description of kids’ use of tech for three basic purposes: “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.” In my work with children, I see those three patterns in healthy socializing, gaming, entertainment, and pursuit of special interests.
Ito describes hanging out as that “ongoing, lightweight social contact” that allows kids to connect with peers and experience some independence from parents, teachers, and the world of adults. They hang out and create their own social world and that has always included the language of their culture—the music, movies, and cultural reference points—as well as the ongoing sagas of their own development, their struggles and victories with relationships, responsibilities and the emotional intensity of their age.
Hanging out online makes it easier to be part of the ongoing conversation with friends. For some tweens, especially those who feel socially isolated at school, finding friends online provides a healthy sense of connection and belonging that is otherwise painfully missing for them and can be lifesaving. The online hangout is how kids socialize today and they learn the “rules” and values from their peers in that space. Social networking provides creative venues for learning as kids join social network sites, follow blogs, and post on YouTube.
Especially at this age, kids with special interests often “geek out” online, endlessly absorbed as they discover sources of content, experts, or peers with similar interests. My daughter Lily and her friends—a wonderful posse of boys and girls—would make hilarious movies and entertain themselves for hours writing and filming dramas. Kids in middle school often use technology extremely creatively, introducing arts, videos, the wonderful way of saving a narrative, documenting the world as they see it. If you are the parent of a geeky tween, you have no doubt been grateful for such opportunities. There are intricate strategic ARGs (alternative reality games) that kids—and many adults—are playing, some designed to create solutions to real-world challenges such as urban planning, or limited water and oil. The intellectual content is high, the ethic is prosocial, and the experience of collaborating is empowering and certainly better than endless hours of World of Warcraft.
As for messing around online, we all know what that is and we do plenty of it. As one middle school boy explained to me, his complaint about his parents’ “obsession” with their iPads and the home computer had nothing to do with his desire to spend more time with his mom or dad; he wanted more time with the computer. “They’re kind of hypocritical,” he said of his parents, for rationing his time so closely while spending unlimited time online themselves.
Hanging out, geeking out, and messing around all have a place in a healthy media diet for children this age. But as a therapist, I also see the dark side as preteens struggle with issues of body image and identity and flex their social power and capacity for cruelty more boldly, and often anonymously, online. A few that my patients have shared:
Quit trying to be everyone’s friend. Can’t you see how much your new “friends” hate you? If you had eyes in the back of your head you’d see all the faces they make every time you talk.
You’re such a slore (slut-whore)
Hanging out is how they keep tabs on their friends, yes, but it is not always positive—even between supposedly good, supportive friends. The notion that others are always watching, always waiting for a reply, always quick and sometimes sharp with their own, carries an edge of expectation. The constant need to be in touch is itself stressful and works against the sturdy sense of self and the capacity for reflection and inner dialogue that we want our young adolescents to develop.
Tweens struggle with the new vicissitudes of relationships. On the one hand, despite some possible awkwardness at times, face-to-face friendships are richer in the three-dimensional way that life is. On the other, as one tween girl explained to me, you can talk more openly in the two-dimensional world online. She had been friends with two boys online who had upsetting things going on in their lives. They talked about it all openly in their online exchanges, and, she said, “We got really close.” She soon discovered that created awkwardness in person:
I mean, I know so much about you and you know so much about me, but we’ve never had this conversation face-to-face. But you actually exist and you know all my secrets and I feel really vulnerable, and so I turn on you . . . it’s like realizing that the person you’ve been talking to is actually a—a person—and you realize the person you were talking to online is more “perfect” than the person in real life. Being online allows you to create a persona, an identity and a person that don’t necessarily match up. You know how to deal with the identity but not actually the actual person.
Children sometimes find themselves trapped by the persona they’ve created and they struggle with the consequences of needing to live it out in real life in school. A wallflower of a boy who was marginalized in the social hierarchy at school created a brash comic persona online—rude, crude, sarcastic, and willing to say anything for a laugh or just to shock—to say what others wouldn’t. An observant classmate of his who had known him since elementary school told me,
The Internet is sort of trapping him into being this person, everyone expects him to say the most horrifying thing or the rudest thing to make them laugh, and any time he does something different everyone is like, Whoooa what are you doing? We have you in this place, you can’t change! So he is trapped because no one wants him to be a nicer person. In sixth grade, he was nicer and I bet if no one was around he would say “sorry,” but the more people are watching this whole show, the harder that gets.
When Hanging Out Turns to Zoning Out
Imagine an opportunity to work your way up from an entry-level job to senior management, even CEO, at a place where you love to go to work every day, where the mission is clear, the objectives straightforward, and success is yours for the taking—all this by age twelve or thirteen. That’s the attraction of screen games for many kids who play them. They may play a lot, especially by the standards of worried parents, but if their gaming is part of a larger balanced life that includes nonscreen activities and interests, a core of good friends, reasonable attention to school and grades, and a lifestyle that supports good physical and psychological health, it’s probably fine. I’ve talked with so many young adults—like my son Daniel and others in that first generation of gamers—now immersed in careers or graduate school, who say that screen games were simply an enjoyable social activity and a place where they could be, more so than at home or school, masters of their own fate. Facebook and social networking have a game quality, too: kids post, they play, they collect social capital, they lead the equivalent of raids to rescue or punish others. They fire off quips and “likes” and gossip and innuendo. Words become the currency of the realm and can be used to make allies or punish enemies.
Beyond a reasonable, healthy social and recreational experience, screen and social media time also often serve as coping techniques for kids under pressure in an increasingly high-pressured early adolescence. Healthy coping strategies help us deal more effectively with the large and small stresses of life. But when a tween’s coping mechanism leads to excessive or compulsive TV or screen time, texting, or social networking, what began as a fun helpful pastime can suddenly hijack a life. Until recently, we associated problems of excessive use with older teens. We are now seeing them at younger ages, and we are learning from clinical experience that the seeds of addiction in the teen years often are sown in the middle school years, as more tweens have access to tech and are developing habits that can easily tip toward dependence.
JACOB: WHEN GEEKING OUT IS FOR A GOOD REASON
Jacob’s mother was so worried about her thirteen-year-old son’s fixation with his online interests—science and news from publications around the world—that she got materials from Al Anon, the support organization for families of alcoholics, to learn more about how to deal with him more effectively. Then she called me. She listed some of the warning signs she observed in his screen use:
It’s hard for him to go long periods without it. He knows when he turns it on that it regulates his mood and it does something to his body chemistry. “Trust me,” he’ll say—which is what addicts say—it’s always the language of trust. And I understand that it is in some ways about trust, but that could also be a sign that he is hiding something.
At the same time, she understood that certain other truths about Jacob put those behaviors in a different, possibly more reasonable light. “He is so smart,” she said, “and he understands things about the world that I will never understand.” It was true. Jacob was an extremely bright boy by any academic measure and he had a passion for world news and for science. He had always had those passions, but his extreme online pursuit of them had begun during an extended period of serious illness when he couldn’t attend school and was homebound. During that time he had been somewhat depressed at the turn of fate that had changed his life so dramatically, his mother told me. Now he was back in school and doing well enough, but he would return home each day and stay glued to the screen for hours and hours—more than seemed good for him, she said.
“I worry about the multitasking, having so many windows open,” she said. “I remember how I learned to learn, and he was very on track to discover that—that you put in a sustained amount of work and have that aha moment that comes from developing the power of concentration. I want him to have the skill of analyzing content deeply,” she said. She was worried that his screen time was eroding his capacity to do that.
I met with Jacob a short time later to discuss his mother’s concerns and how he himself viewed his relationship with tech. He could see his mother’s point of view, but he did not feel he had developed an addiction. He explained:
I have to use my computer a lot for school. It doesn’t really pop into my head that I’m distracted on my computer ’cuz I’m on it for homework and I just lose track of the time, but I don’t think “has it been too long” . . . I don’t really monitor it, but my eyes get tired and that’s usually a sign, then I’ll take a break from it.
I asked him to describe a normal day, including his online and any other tech time. Like many students, he typically got out of school at 4 p.m., would hang out with friends for about forty-five minutes, then come home by 5 p.m. He’d say hi to his dog and go on the computer, break for dinner with his parents “and other stuff,” then be back on the computer from about 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., when he went to bed. What did he do on the computer during those blocks of time? Homework usually amounted to about three hours of work, he said, though it was interspersed with other diversions. He would visit an average of thirty news sites—he is a news junkie—and then watch Truth or Fail, a trivia game and “a few” YouTube game shows. And TV. “I consume the majority of my TV on my computer and I’ll watch my three shows or five on Hulu.” He also had gotten an iPhone, which he used as a phone and would call friends, as an online connection for playing games (often with a friend), for texting, and for photography.
As Jacob shared more about his health issues and the impact they had on him physically, it was also clear that his condition had been emotionally challenging and that plugging in had been a helpful coping mechanism. Jacob’s passion for world affairs had deepened, although he also acknowledged that he had become “a skimmer,” not reading as deeply as he once had. Nonetheless, in Jacob I heard a very mature capacity for reflective critical thinking: a cool, creative, intelligent kid.
As we talked about tech use versus tech dependence or addiction, it seemed that while he did devote significant time to those activities, which can be a sign of dependence, he was also able to be off tech comfortably when circumstances called for it. He wasn’t restless when unplugged, didn’t feel a craving for it, and easily left it behind for tech-free time with his parents. Once when he’d developed symptoms of repetitive stress injury in his wrists he dropped gaming for a month until the symptoms went away. He had friends—face-to-face ones, good ones, and not only online friends—and he didn’t neglect them. He didn’t lie about the time he spent on tech nor did his activity interfere with his schoolwork. When his mother would ask him to get off-line or come to dinner, he did as she asked.
I have worked with several young boys who, like Jacob, developed a useful, temporary dependency on tech during a time when they were socially isolated at school or circumstances forced them to change their familiar routines—an illness or injury, a move, or a best friend’s move away. Jacob was eager and ready to begin high school, and signs were good that he would be fully engaged there. His passion for news and politics may ultimately distinguish him as a serious student of debate, perhaps of international relations or politics. Or maybe some night I’ll see him on CNN. As it was for Jacob, for many middle school boys life online is a lifeline, a world where they can connect with interests and with others who share them.
KAREN: WHEN COMPUTER ADDICTION IS A COPING MECHANISM
Karen had always been the family firebrand. She had been “the challenging one” from the time she was born, her mother, Rona, explains. Hard to feed, hard to settle for the night, hard to keep occupied and happy through the day. Rona struggled as an at-home mom through Karen’s early childhood. Through elementary school, Rona found it easier to park Karen in front of the TV because it was one of the few things that kept her happily occupied. “I feel so bad about it now,” Rona tells me. “The function of it, if you got to the very bottom of it, was that it kept her out of my hair. When she was in front of a screen, she wasn’t fighting with her sister, teasing her brother, causing a disturbance in our house. It’s not a great reason.” But so understandable.
She goes on to explain how she didn’t get help early enough with her second child, and while struggling with her, lost footing with regard to tech in the home. By the time Karen reached middle school, the family had four TVs in the house. TV and computer games had become the salve, exposing Karen to everything Rona hated in the culture—“junk programs, junk values, junk language, and junk attitudes.” Her daughter’s most recent obsession: the Kardashians.
“My thirteen-year-old knows every last fact about the Kardashians, and I want to throw up every time I see her watching the Kardashians, and the things they talk about, and the morals that they exhibit on that TV show.”
Things got worse when Karen began seventh grade and the school issued laptops to students for school use. Instantly, she became even more screen-obsessed, Rona says. She was glued to her laptop after school, claiming to do homework but clearly multitasking on noneducational web sites, chat rooms, and social media. She would contact her mother online from school and beg her to play games with her on her iPad. The school had no control and did nothing to monitor students’ computer use during the school day. Rona felt overwhelmed and now very concerned about her daughter.
Karen arrives for her session a bit defensive about her behavior; she thinks her mother was overreacting as usual. She wiggles and fidgets through our session, yet seems unaware that her body is in constant motion. Her eyes are huge and expressive and she can go from sunshine to stormy in a nanosecond. Unlike Jacob, Karen does show early signs of addictive behavior: she describes how her mood will change when she is plugged in; she feels happier. When her parents pressure her to get off screens, she responds angrily; she sees it as an intrusion, after all. In diagnostic terms—and practical ones any parent would recognize—she is unable to transition away from screens in a reasonable way. She also prefers tech to any nontech activity with family and friends. She will hedge about the time when Rona asks her how long she has been watching TV or playing online. She also admits that she sneaks her laptop into bed and watches more there, often late into the night, costing her sleep and making the next day at school all the more difficult.
Shortly after we met, I recommended neuropsychological testing and Karen was diagnosed with ADHD, which her parents now see as having been at the heart of much of the tension at home from the start and which most likely played a role in her screen addiction. For children with attention and some other learning disorders, screens can become quickly addictive as they soothe the anxious or agitated mind. The plan of treatment for Karen’s ADHD would include constructive attention to her media and screen time.
For any child using screen time to de-stress, the risk is that he or she isn’t getting the kind of conversation and interaction with parents, friends, or family that help develop the self-regulation skills and social and emotional insights they need. The more they depend on their computers to cope with underlying, often unidentified problems, the greater the chances their dependency can turn into an addiction. Connected as they may be to so many online, the experience of this kind of immersion is often one of isolation. We know good, strong friendships and support from parents are critical at this age; when computer time disrupts that personal connection, it’s time to reboot.
Sexual Development, Drives, and Diversions Color the Tween Scene
A teacher told me the story of how proud she was when her thirteen-year-old son took his laptop into the bathroom during homework time. “I thought, ‘Wow, he’s really into his work!’” Then she discovered he was masturbating to online porn. “Okay, so I guess it’s not under the covers anymore,” she told me.
Our children are entering puberty at an increasingly earlier age, some at ten or younger, whether due to hormones in the food chain or other environmental factors, and many are arriving at changing bodies earlier than their parents did. They are doing so in an era that overexposes them to the adult world of sexuality. Puppy love in the age of sexting, vying for social capital on Instagram and Facebook, grinding and freaking at your first middle school dance—all of it fast-forwards tweens into a world of confusing messages.
As wonderful as the Internet is as a primary resource for academic and a lot of everyday information, clearly it has also become the primary source of sex education. This is especially so for children in families uncomfortable with having thorough, ongoing, positive conversations about all aspects of love, intimacy, good sex, bad sex. And that is a great many families. Ironically, we live in a culture where sex is all around us, yet parents are reluctant to talk about sex with their tweens, as if talking about it will plant prurient ideas in their minds. Meanwhile middle-schoolers are fluent in the language of sexting, booty call, and FWB (friends with benefits—that is, sexual ones). They sit with us and watch a Superbowl commercial in which a beautiful woman in a bubble bath texts a picture of herself and men fall off ladders and, what?—we all laugh together. Popular culture exposes kids to a virtually unlimited range of sexual behavior, a great deal of it unreal, often unhealthy and trending toward emotionally damaging and abusive and violent behavior. Parents feel utterly ill equipped to deal with it. Very few of us had the kinds of conversations with our parents that we should be having with our children today.
Kids today know far more about sex at an earlier age than generations past and are often more sexually aware than their parents because of their exposure to TV—including so-called family TV—YouTube, and the sites their friends show them online. When we hit the mute button on candid conversation about sex and what they see online or hear from their peers, they lose the opportunity to talk thoughtfully about their own sexual development with adults who care about them, and we lose the chance to talk with them about how to protect their own introduction to healthy sexuality. “Safe sex” means more than condoms. Without conversation we leave them psychologically unprotected for exposure to sexual content in the media and adolescent culture.
When the psychologist Michael Thompson interviewed a group of high school boys for his Raising Cain PBS documentary several years ago, the boys spoke openly about viewing porn pretty much daily and about their masturbatory lives. When parents see the film, he told me, “What is unnerving for them are the stories the boys told about seeing porn in third or fourth grade. The average American child sees pornography now at eleven, and their parents are still not able to talk to them about it when they’re thirteen or fourteen. So they’re getting information unmediated by any adult guidance. And what that requires is for parents to stop hoping that their boys don’t see porn.”
With Internet porn so accessible, Thompson notes, “boys are seeing everything and they’re seeing everything early. And they get that it is exciting, and they get that it is forbidden. And when you are ten years old, how can you go to your parents and say, I saw these explicit pictures, and they were very exciting to me and baffling and overwhelming? To whom do you turn? You can only turn to your friends or to older boys.”
Now that peer culture accepts slut-chic and views sexting as cool, marketers have stepped up offerings that express and encourage that kind of ambient sexuality. Halloween costumes for tweens now include the “sexy nurse” and “sexy warrior woman,” or outfits clearly designed to look like hookers or strippers.
From his long work with boys, Michael Thompson sees the power of the family culture and parents’—especially fathers’—influence for good. “Pornography stokes a boy’s fantasies. Does it tap into every boy’s future possibilities as a rapist? I think not,” he says. “I think loved and well-raised boys who haven’t seen women exploited and who have seen their fathers and the other men in their life respect women—I think they have the fantasies, but they understand that it’s a zinger, it’s just a fantasy.” I’ve had conversations with thoughtful fathers who upon discovery of their sons’ use of online sadistic porn have given them more respectful nonviolent erotic images of women for their viewing enjoyment.
Research suggests that for many boys it is harder to separate out fantasy and reality, entertainment and exploitation, in the era of reality TV shows where teens are entertained watching adults behaving horribly to each other. A study of 1,430 seventh-grade students found that many are dating and experiencing physical, psychological, and electronic dating violence. Teen-dating violence and abuse is a major public health problem nationally and prevention needs to be a public health priority, the report said.
While the hookup culture may seem hip, it isn’t benign. FWB usually means boys convincing girls to bring them to orgasm without any commitment or relationship. When asked if it is reciprocal, girls often say eww gross, no way, revealing their real level of psychological, social, and sexual development. The disconnect between healthy sexuality and a caring connection, between who they are and what they are doing, is striking and worrisome. Between adults, casual, recreational sex is a choice. But it is not a value we want to promote for preadolescent children. It’s also not legal, and a boy who engages in sexual activity with an underage girl—whether it is consensual or not—runs the risk of criminal charges and potentially a permanent record as a sex offender. Who benefits from FWB? It might seem that boys do. But let’s step back and ask if boys really benefit from a culture that teaches them to treat women as sexual objects, to disconnect their own capacity for love and romance from sexual intimacy, and at worse to be frankly demeaning and abusive to girls. Nobody benefits from FWB. It has always been the province of preadolescents to figure themselves out sexually as they approach adolescence, but this is the first generation to grow up in a culture where being sexually intimate is understood to be disconnected from the context of a relationship and caring interpersonal intimacy. Using the word “friend” in this context can be confusing, especially to girls because most often they are the “friend” providing the benefits. In middle school, would a true friend really ask a friend to sexually gratify them this way? We need to talk with our kids about what it means to be friends in the context of FWB.
Jackson Katz says media has become “the great . . . teaching force of our time,” and that the porn culture “has shaped a whole generation of boys’ understanding of their sexuality and the way they interact with girls sexually.” In the absence of thoughtful discussions about sexuality and in the absence of thoughtful, information-focused education, Katz says, the pornography industry rushes in and introduces “an incredibly brutal form of men’s sexuality.”
Parents and most adults in teens’ lives tiptoe around the issue, embarrassed by it or in denial. We hide behind language that prettifies and minimizes the disturbing reality, Katz says.
Boys are not “looking at porn” or “watching porn videos.” They’re masturbating to porn. And that’s much more active engagement with it than the words “look at” or “watching” suggest. They’re actually having orgasms to it. So again, think about the profound experience of a boy, say a twelve-year-old boy who’s just through puberty and really charged and sexually vibrant, and they can easily get to the Internet, and on the Internet this is what they get, right? They get scenes of men gang-raping women, scenes of guys calling women “F-ing bitch” and all this stuff, while they’re having sex with them, grabbing their head and putting it down to their penis, the stereotypical “you’re going to give me a blow job” kind of thing. And these young guys who are just charged up sexually and heterosexually attracted to women and girls—this is what they’re seeing as normative and they’re obviously getting turned on by it.
This is damaging to boys and girls alike. The public conversation among adults so often becomes polarized and unproductive in that boys get cast as aggressors and girls as victims. The argument is also made that erotic content has always been out there and there is nothing to be done about it. This is not the place to take up that debate. But what gets overlooked in all that is what is happening to our children. And that is this: children are learning a model of sexual intimacy and romance from pornography. All of them are ill served. It is a shame when we let the conversation stop there and ignore the fuller emotional life of boys and girls, their need to find love and be loved, to be responsible and appreciated, to make a difference and matter in the best way.
There is a world of difference between normative sexual arousal and gorenography. Looking at a model—whether it’s in a swimsuit ad or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition or a Playboy—can serve as a fantasy that stimulates the erotic arousal process, which is the inner fantasy world of a twelve- or twenty-year-old. In a boy or young man’s own imagination, they take an image and make a movie. That’s been going on forever. That’s a world apart from triangulating those basic sexual responses to sadistic and violent movies that you’re actually watching, participating in a script that’s being acted and likely introduces a level of sexual content that is developmentally and psychologically inappropriate for a young “viewer.” When boys link their sexual response cycle to gorenography, it ruins their capacity for normative sexual arousal. Boys are confused: a thirteen-year-old boy at a school one day asked me, “I don’t get it—why would a woman get turned on being choked?” In focus groups, in schools where I’ve facilitated other kinds of group discussions, and in the privacy of the therapy sessions they have asked these questions and shared these pornography-based assumptions about girls and expectations of girls. They see these images that imprint on them the arousal and they don’t realize this is not the kind of sexual intimacy that most girls long for or would ever want to get involved in. If they see this over and over they think: this is real. I’ve worked with boys who have been surprised, disappointed, and confused by girls’ unwillingness in real life to role-play sexually violent scenarios or otherwise satisfy the fantasies the boys have internalized from porn.
When my friend Nina’s daughter and her girlfriends posted Facebook photos of themselves posing model-like in bikinis at the beach on spring break, they liked that they looked cool and sexy like movie stars. Nina could see the obvious pin-up-girl potential and suggested to her daughter that they might want to reconsider posting them online. Her daughter insisted it was fine because “only our Facebook friends can see them.” Nina decided she needed to clue her in.
“I just said it. ‘I hate to tell you this, but eighth-grade boys do a lot of masturbating. They are gonna be looking at you in that bikini and they’re gonna be touching their penises.’ She said, ‘I’ll be taking that down.’ I told her, ‘I know they’re your friends, but this is what they’re doing right now.’ And she was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ Part of her was like, ‘Please don’t tell me that.’ ”
“Throwing Them into This World . . . Kids Make Terrible Mistakes Every Day”
On a crisp fall morning I sit with Robert Warren, a seasoned head of a middle school at an independent school in the Midwest. A dad of four young children, he’s a thoughtful man, always open to rethinking assumptions and always approachable. He is firm and fair with students and laughs easily with them.
His school, in a progressive initiative just before he came aboard, had embraced laptops for all students. In the decade since, he has seen a paradigm shift in the tween world, as the gathering ground for students’ social life has shifted from school, sports, after-school playdates, and the neighborhood mall to online and social media. The revolution in the living room has sent educators like Warren rushing to broaden efforts to help children, parents, and communities navigate the challenges when kids and the media culture collide.
When they first implemented their laptop program, the biggest issues had to do with kids wanting to play video games in class or use the school e-mail system to send messages to each other, which was not allowed, Warren says. “The worst thing somebody would do was send somebody else a nasty e-mail and call them a, you know, ‘fucking bitch’ or whatever. And then we’d have tears the next day and we’d talk about it.”
As it has been at so many schools, this was just the beginning of degrees of difficulty in school dynamics that popped up with laptops. The situation has gone from name calling online to far more complicated problems. Now that the honeymoon with laptops is over, many educators are becoming increasingly concerned about the complexities of giving middle school students unlimited access to a computer when they are not developmentally ready for that kind of responsibility. More and more schools are developing policies, contracts, and expectations of what can and cannot be done on school laptops. And as is always the case, some kids will follow the rules and some kids won’t.
The preadolescent brain is not ready for the responsibility that comes with open access to online media that can take an image or message viral in seconds and that have such serious consequences for sender and subject alike, Warren says. Given unfettered access to the Internet, “kids make terrible decisions every day . . . and why not? It’s more fun, it’s more exciting, it’s more set up, it’s more—everything. And I’m not just talking about watching a lot of pornography. I’m talking about the social networking and how they interact with one another in a way that’s not nice.”
The idea that online anonymity provides a safe cover for meanness is true but not the whole truth, says Warren. Contrary to the idea that kids find it easier to send nasty notes by text or e-mail because they don’t see the impact on the recipient and aren’t aware of how hurtful it is, Warren thinks part of the thrill for them is that they are well aware of the pain they’re inflicting. “I really think that kids know what the impact is, and they’re doing it specifically to generate that impact. I don’t think it takes away the capacity for empathy, I think it just makes it easier to be worse and to be more powerful the more removed you are.”
In one of the worst situations to arise at his school, students set up an ask.fm page with a child’s name on it, a socially awkward new girl living with her grandparents who was struggling to make friends. On the ask.fm page the students described her as “a miserable, soul-sucking, stupid, ugly fucking loser” and they warned other kids to stay away from her. After consulting with the family, the school leadership decided to share the most offensive portion of this hateful post with the entire grade in a strongly worded assembly that drove home these points: the post was egregious, there would be consequences, and everyone was responsible for any behavior that hurts someone and undermines the community. When reckless behavior becomes routine, children are emboldened. This head of school was unwilling to let these kids think that their habit of using online posts to gossip and post grievances about each other was benign.
Warren urges parents to establish house rules and clear guidelines for media use. Programmable or other installed parental controls that limit a child’s use of devices are essential, he says, “because what kids can do is not what kids should be doing. It’s not okay.”
Parents often tell me they feel lost defining limits on computer use because their kids are on screens for so many different reasons and seem to assume they’re entitled to do as they wish. The basic message you want to send then is this: This is not your computer—I know it has your name on it, but this is my computer (or your school’s computer). I’m your parent and I reserve the right to see everything that’s going on there.You need to be on the computer in an open place. I have the right to know what your homework assignment is. You can’t be in your room with the door closed. You can’t take it to bed with you. You can’t collapse a screen when I walk by. We have a code of conduct and we expect you to stick with it: don’t be mean, don’t lie, don’t embarrass other people, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not, don’t go places you’re not allowed to go. Don’t post pictures that Grandma wouldn’t love. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t approve of.
FEAR, ANXIETY, AND the thrill of competition amplify the online schadenfreude into a spectator sport. In the digital world, where children this age need boundaries, there are none. Where they need more experience in face-to-face communication and relationships, they are getting less. And where they need the connection to family to ground them as they move into the wider world, many find a growing isolation. So they turn back to their screens.
Given the reality of our culture and the digital environment, our best shot at protecting our children comes in educating them early and continually, as they become increasingly independent and active participants in the digital culture. Caught between the cozy world of elementary school and the propulsion to the world of YouTube, they need our time, attention, and courage to discuss subjects that make us uncomfortable—whatever that may be for you. They need the kind of “hanging out” family time and conversation in which you and your tweens can talk about values, love, flirting and hurting, civility and cruelty, and what constitutes crossing the line. Your tweens really do want to understand how you see the world, what matters to you, your values. And they want to feel that you want to understand what matters to them. They want to be able to bring all the identities they are trying on that day, without you overreacting or getting too preachy. They need you to be curious and clear, to set limits, and to be flexible. It’s an in-between time for everyone.