Several sad stories: Parenting from pride in your child's social media use can cause dangerous blind spots.
Some cautionary tales--case studies of some serious parenting mistakes that are all too easy to fall into.
Good morning! For those new readers joining us, welcome!
I have been spending a lot of time this summer thinking and discussing teens and social media, based on cautionary tales I have seen as a teacher, administrator, and dad1.
I think this is one of the most pressing issues for parents to think about today. And, as I discussed earlier, our parenting must be ongoing in this area. It has to be intentional and dynamic, always adapting, evolving, growing, and changing with our child’s age and the amount of time they are online.
Our parenting has to be proportionate in intensity and engagement to the amount of time and intensity our kids put into their digital lives.
There are a lot of pitfalls and traps I’ve seen thoughtful, smart parents fall into over the years when it comes to parenting a child in digital realms. Often these are subtle and unexpected.
Some people spent their careers studying this, so you can search for “how-to stuff” from them. I’m spending a few posts on the “don’t-do-this” side of things.
As people consider their social media parenting strategy and approach, I’ve been discussing some mistakes I’ve seen (and made) over the years, specifically focusing on common pitfalls parents make.
These are fundamental problems and incorrect baseline assumptions that can have long-tail effects down the road.
The first three, which I shared here and here are:
Don’t ever say, or even think, “My child would never do that.”
Don’t romanticize or overestimate your child and their maturity
You have to understand the risks, and you have to understand that you are assuming those risks.
Today I want to talk about two more that go together
Don’t make social media decisions based on pride in your child’s precociousness or your past pain.
If you make mistakes, don’t give in to parental inertia.
This idea of not basing your parenting decisions on pride in your child is sort of a tricky one to explain, and it goes along with the idea of not overestimating your child’s maturity.
Let me share a few stories and see if they help make the point. As always, I change details to respect confidentiality—this might include age, genders, etc. Sometimes I use composites and combine different stories.
Nevertheless, the fundamentals of these stories are true.
I am always somewhat apprehensive about sharing mistakes people make. I don’t do this to be scornful or mean. We all make mistakes as parents and humans. I think there is a lot of value in learning from other people’s mistakes—the mistake is already made, so someone might as well get some benefit! That’s the spirit in which I share these anecdotes.
Story 1: Laurentia was interested in politics and got engaged at a fairly early age, earlier than many peers did. Her parents were thrilled with her interest and encouraged her to do all she wanted online in this realm.
This felt productive and proof of something we all believe deep down—that our child is special.
Laurentia’s engagement became a point of pride with the parents. They would talk often about how impressive she was and how precocious she was and how she knew more than anyone else, even adults.
They imposed no limits and saw a future mayor, senator, or even president, perhaps.
However, when politics took a turn away from Laurentia’s personal beliefs and political convictions, her mental health took a dark slide. She quickly became deeply depressed and anxious. She also became obsessive.
During tense elections, she would sit in class and keep hitting refresh over and over and over and over (I’m not exaggerating) to see if election returns had been updated in a district or state.2
Laurentia was not ready for the steady, unfiltered, imbalanced amount of politics and news she got. She didn’t have the cognitive skills to separate facts from pundit rants, political blather, and fear-mongering.
She didn’t have the life experience to moderate her fears or give her hope. She was not able to look at probabilities instead of awfulizing some fairly remote possibilities. She really and truly felt that the world was ending. I remember her sobbing and sobbing during the day, and I know her social media posts reflected her belief in the imminent end of the world.
I think too many adults do this same thing with politics, to be frank, but an adolescent is not ready for it. There are just too many ways that their brains and psyches are not ready for this sort of thing.
We might all make this mistake. However, when people expressed concern about where it was going, the parents were so proud of her precociousness that this blinded them to possible harm.
Then, when everything fell apart and she crashed, they said, “I know it’s not good for her but I don’t know what to do. She loves it so much. Maybe if I was giving her a phone today I’d do it differently, but what can you do?”
The child was a young adolescent, not on the cusp of turning 21.
There’s a lot that can be done. I’m not saying it’s easy, but we have to try. If we know something is harming our child, it doesn’t matter if they like it.
That was the second mistake. The first mistake was parenting from pride in a child’s precociousness. We all love our kids. We are all proud of them. We all believe they are uniquely special. That is natural—and even good—for a parent. But it makes us vulnerable to becoming blinded to important realities. This can quickly turn into a sort of hubris, which blinds us to important things.
Even if Laurentia was not seeing bad content, per se, she needed some limits and parameters. She also needed parental engagement and guidance—even if her online behaviors were essentially good and initially positive. We can’t just set our kids loose. Beyond all the terrible things they can expose to, they can be exposed to too much of neutral or good things.
Story 2: Marvin was a very gregarious kid. Fun-loving, warm-hearted, he was also funny and one of the most social kids I’ve ever seen.
This brought a lot of good things to Marvin’s life and his grade. At his best, he was the organizing principle for lots of fun for those around him.
Marvin hit early adolescence just about the time Snapchat and TikTok were coming on the scene. These platforms were perfect for his gregarious outlook and big personality.
Marvin’s teachers noticed that he suddenly had to use the bathroom a lot. We were worried that he had an infection or problem of some kind. But, it transpired, his problem was he was getting hooked on his phone and those platforms. At first, he could post in the morning and then check after school for responses.
Soon he had to check at lunch and in the afternoon. Then at mid-morning, lunch, and the afternoon. Before long, he was trying to check every 20 minutes or so. Between trips to the bathroom, he would find various ways to try to check his phone quickly. Phones were not allowed in classes, so he resorted to all kinds of creative methods of deception.
Whatever your feelings about the value and benefit of spending time on these platforms, you can likely see the problem here. Marvin could not function during the school day and this bright, happy, fun kid turned into a sneaky, deceptive, obsessive person. It was really sad.
When I contacted Marvin’s parents, they laughed and had a sort of light-hearted, “there he goes again..what can you do?” vibe about it all.
As we talked they said, “Well, he’s got a very busy social life. You know Marvin! The life of every party!”
I wish I could convey the tone of pride in their voice. They thought it was charming and impressive that he had this much social capital and found his sneaking endearing.
In addition to their pride in Marvin’s omnipresence on social media, I found out later that one of his parents had endured a very difficult time socially in middle school. So not only was the parent parenting based on pride, the parent was also parenting based on past pain—and neither of those is a good strategy.