If high teen use of SM is the result of not being able to get together IRL (in real life), rather than its intrinsic addictive value, then the real problem would seem to be the curtailment of IRL activity, rather than SM itself. In which case over-protective parenting would seem to be the most plausible explanation.
Perhaps parents should hold up this article as a mirror in which to consider their own role in their children’s mental health. To paraphrase JFK, ask not what your teen can do for you, ask what you can do for your teen.
Michael, yes. This is what I have been saying for years, including in my book Free to Learn and many articles. As a society we want to blame social media because we don't have the courage to blame ourselves for taking normal (real life) childhood away from children.
When I was growing up as a child in the 60s and a teen in the 70s, when we played outside there was not a parent in sight. Either they were still at work, or if they were at home, they did not for one moment think that their place was to be outside supervising their children’s play. The very idea would have been laughable. It was during all this unsupervised outdoor play that we developed our social skills and self-confidence, learned to take risks and make decisions – from primary school through to high school.
It would be naïve to think that we can ever go back to such an environment, but even if we can replicate just a part of it, and parents can step back and give their children some space to grow, we’ll have a chance of reducing the need for SM (which I still think needs to be curtailed as it remains an environment designed to relentlessly suck in children’s attention).
Nov 15, 2023·edited Nov 15, 2023Liked by Peter Gray
Dear Prof. Gray!
First, I want to say that I find all your posts very interesting and inspiring, and I am currently reading your book "Free to Learn", which I enjoy a lot.
Personally, I detest social media, since I view it from a privacy/ data security perspective and I am also not very interested in the way of interaction social media enforeces. Therefore, I had always a 100% negative view on social media and social media use of children and teenagers. However, I found your points valid - currently, social media is one of the few spaces where teenagers can communicate without interference or observance from adults.
I live in Austria, where children and teenagers are more free to do things on their own than in the US, but their freedom has also been reduced dramatically during the last 20 years. I share your opinions on the value of play and the freedom children and teenagers need from adult supervision. However, I think that finding this freedom solely online - and especially using social media - is problematic in many ways.
First, if free play and social interaction is reduced only to virtual play, many physical aspects of play get lost. All the stimulation from the physical world, for example the physical thrill of chasing somebody, or the physical comfort of hugging somebody, get lost. Also, there is no way to explore nature, to build something with your hands, and so on. It is like eating a snickers bar on-the-go instead of a home-cooked dinner with your family. It will prevent you from starving and will give you comfort in the moment, but it lacks nutrients and is artificial.
Second, social media platforms are designed to generate profit. The profit is generated by tracking and then advertising to the user ("If it is free, you are the product"). To generate this profit, the user must be kept at the platform, by gaining the users interest with - in my opinion - very annoing and intrusive methods. I think it is highly unethical to predate on childrens/teenagers need for freedom to bind them to these platforms and generate profit with them. It is also shown, that social media platforms affect attention span, the deepness of focus and the ability to endure boredom and to fully embrace the moment that is experienced. All these abilities would be strengthened with play in real life.
Therefore, I can understand that children need social media as one of the few refuges left for them to be on their own. However, I think it is highly problematic to let those companies give them this refuge. We should let children and teenagers again be more on their own and give them spaces for interaction in real life.
Thank you for these thoughts. I very much agree with you about making it possible, again, for children and teens to play and hang out together in person. I am one of he founders of the Let Grow nonprofit that is working in various ways toward that end.
The teen responses make sense to me as a neurodivergent parent with autistic kids. For me and for one of my children, socializing in person can be stressful. You feel like you are on the spot, expected to come up with the right phrasing to participate in the conversation. I prefer writing to talking for that reason. I also like to get into online discussions and social media.
My son went through a video game stage in his teens, and now likes to browse social media and informational sites. He has learned a tremendous amount from watching educational YouTube videos. When he was playing video games a lot I was concerned, but I read somewhere that kids with autism can feel like that is the only arena where they have control. It becomes a retreat from the stresses of the neurotypical world. I think he also felt more comfortable socializing with the brief comments they make to each other in the context of the game. He is now looking into being a creator of some sort - he has taught himself digital animation skills and also wants to do a podcast.
I agree that we need to be less skeptical about new technology. I'm in my fifties and I tend to embrace it for its usefulness. The boundaries you described are perfect! First and foremost is letting teens have more interaction with the real world: friendships, starting businesses, or whatever they are interested in. Then we can be a little more open about their use of technology.
Dear prof. Gray, in your last post I comment too late. Let me repost my questions about the relationship between play, media use and depression (plus another one):
1. About school openings and suicides: seasonality seem to be a possible other explanation for the trends you showed. You mentioned that when schools opened sooner/later, this was reflected in suicide rates, but I would like to see some data about this
2. Other countries showed exactly the same pattern of depression symptoms and suicides without NCLB or pre-K literacy and numeracy programs. What are your thoughts about this? Is it a spreading of parental controlling strategies over multiple countries (even if with very different demographics/school systems)? Is it social media? Or a combination of the two?
3. Did mobiles interfere with schooling? They distract (making it more challenging to keep up with the pace), they decrease the sleep time and most importantly, they interfere with free play/chat at school. During lecture breaks I used to see a lot of people talking to each other, to hear a lot of joyful noise. Now not: everybody is staring at the phone. An impressive silence. The same goes for school trips. I remember the travel (by train! by bus!) moment as the best, the most exciting, the one that really matter of the whole trip. Now you can sit in a train in the middle of 13-years old pack of students and writing an article or reading a book without problems. The kids are silent. That makes a huge difference in the quality of their free play/time. What is your position about these phenomena?
In brief, I read all your letters and some paper you posted. There is a paramount difference between the type of joyful, interactive, free play/interaction you describe and the one which is mediated by screens. It just do not work. Huge tech companies profit from it and model your experience to be more profitable. If phones alone do not explain suicides/depression, perhaps is the combination with the elements you describe that does it.
Giovanni, thanks for these questions. Here are my thoughts regarding 1,2,3.:
1. Concerning relation of teen suicides to the school year, it is only school-aged kids who show this. Those over 18 do not show decreased suidice rate in summer. Suicides also go down for school-aged kids during shorter vacations from school in the winter. I did give references to this work in Letter D5. Also there I gave a link to the study showing suicides were down during Covid lockdown and went up in months when school reopened. Here is is again: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30795/w30795.pdf
2. I will address the question of trends in other countries in my next post. However, my preliminary look indicates that suicides did not increase in the EU countries as they did in the Anglophone countries-- US, Canada, UK, and Australia. More in my next post.
3. Regarding the points you make here, I do think it makes sense that kids should put their phones away in certain circumstances, including when they are physically present with friends. I suggested that in this post. However, neither you nor I is inside the heads of the kids on the bus who are communicating by phone versus talking aloud. We think the latter is better because that's what we did and what we observed until a decade or so ago, but we don't really know. Kids have a new way of communicating; it's not necessarily worse.
Dear prof. Gray, thanks for the answer. However, I do think that the medium is not neutral at all, and available evidence do shows that such medium is damaging our kids in a variety of ways, also because it has been carefully engineered for maximising profit whatever the cost. So, in principle I can agree with your last sentence. I think though that such a big shift in our time spending (avg. 8 hours a day) and communication modes do have an impact. And I am also convinced that such impact interacts with your thoughts on the problems of over-control. What worries me is that i. Kids are not communicating in reality, only to a minimum extent, as far as I can see and read ii. Some features of play get completely lost in this way, iii. the difficulty to cope with tasks (even school tasks) is multiplied by the pervasive use of phones (that act as irresistible distractors) and lastly iv) we are not talking about adolescents anymore. The median age in some countries nowadays to get a phone is 8/9 years old. We are talking about that issue now, not about "15/18 yrs old making their own way through life". I think that such a massive shift in the shape of human relationships during developmental age makes a difference, or is at least worth investigating also under your perspective. I beg your pardon, but your last sentence seems a little bit dismissive. Hope to read more from you on this letter series on this issue.
very interesting, this m feels really out of alignment with what i’m watching with my eyes. it makes me think of how every thing they’ve sold is as okay was okay in the beginning (cigarettes, asbestos, etc) there are so many problems with social media and children being on it not that feel unaddressed here-- the way it upholds problem areas like the beauty industry (now lovingly sold to us by influencers) and how that effects girls, their self esteem, how they perceive their intrinsic value, continued objectification; the wildly inappropriate data they can find (current day news, porn, substances), how it affects their ability to communicate (my eldest is 12 and this is already a problem), my list goes on. this segment feels like an “it’s okay, it’s not bad” when in fact i am witnessing myriad negative effects in real life. bummer.
Dr Gray, thank you again for all your hard work and insight into this topic! I think the decline in face-to-face interactions is a large part of the mental health issue. I would love for someone to explore the impact of technology in the classroom on this topic. Schools have moved to 1:1 (ie. Chrome book/lap top for all children). Kids as young as kindergarten are using computers through their school day for instruction. The amount of time they sit in front of a screen during the school day is alarming. I encourage you to read this article as well! https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=interested-sort-of-social-anxiety-digital-devices
One of the problems in technology is that, in order to be effective in class, it has to be tailored to the needs of the individual, i.e. highly customized, giving personalized feedbacks. This goes at the cost of the social building of the school and of education in general, which is what most people, especially kids, see as the most valuable thing. I am 41, I cannot remember a single moment of instruction during my long story as a student. I can remember a myriad of moments during lecture times in which I talked, laughed, played with friends. That was what motivated me to go to school everyday. And I perfectly understand and share the point of prof. Gray, but how loneliness (like many kids are feeling) and desperation can make your life more miserable if you are already under pressure?
Thank you for a well-researched article looking at all aspects of this. The findings are reassuring, and I note that there is speculation regarding the fact that rather than SM and perhaps also Gaming being the cause of issues, it might be a relief for some children: I agree, a parent came to me in a refugee camp where I was working with the children, she couldn't get her 15yo away from the computer. I pointed out that it might be giving him an escape from all the trauma in his life, and doing good for his mental health. I had heard Dr. Stuart Shanker speaking on a case like this some time back, and his solution was not to prohibit the technology, but rather to offer interesting activities so the child would naturally move away. Your points about solutions, providing easier access to meet ups with friends for example, are good. Adults need to provide better circumstances for teens.
I'm really glad to read a balanced take on all of this. Have you addressed access to bad content that isn't easy for parents to regulate (i.e. porn, foul language, drug use, violence, immature acts of pranking, etc.)? I see a lot of highly viewed/viral content from teens I work with which are really out of alignment with not only their parents wishes but that is just bad for them. They imitate these things. A girl I know was hospitalized permanently from imitating something dangerous she saw on social media. Besides that anecdote, I see kids in cities doing/saying foul things with their cameras out just to try to go viral and make money. There have been many trends that have gotten kids in real trouble in various ways and disrupted society. You could argue that these things might have happened without social media, but that's like arguing "guns don't kill people, people do" in my opinion. Sure, but the gun helps. I've really been enjoying and been refreshed by your take on this series, and have learned some things that gave me pause to reflect and dig deeper on what we agree on (free time, free play, self directed learning, etc.), but I would love to hear your take on this darker side of internet access.
"A good rule to keep in mind is don’t send anything into the Internet that you wouldn’t want a future potential employer to see."
Following this rule would eliminate most communication online. Generally speaking, people do not want employers to see their private communications, their complaints about work, their jokes with friends, their political beliefs, or their romantic messages.
If high teen use of SM is the result of not being able to get together IRL (in real life), rather than its intrinsic addictive value, then the real problem would seem to be the curtailment of IRL activity, rather than SM itself. In which case over-protective parenting would seem to be the most plausible explanation.
Perhaps parents should hold up this article as a mirror in which to consider their own role in their children’s mental health. To paraphrase JFK, ask not what your teen can do for you, ask what you can do for your teen.
Michael, yes. This is what I have been saying for years, including in my book Free to Learn and many articles. As a society we want to blame social media because we don't have the courage to blame ourselves for taking normal (real life) childhood away from children.
When I was growing up as a child in the 60s and a teen in the 70s, when we played outside there was not a parent in sight. Either they were still at work, or if they were at home, they did not for one moment think that their place was to be outside supervising their children’s play. The very idea would have been laughable. It was during all this unsupervised outdoor play that we developed our social skills and self-confidence, learned to take risks and make decisions – from primary school through to high school.
It would be naïve to think that we can ever go back to such an environment, but even if we can replicate just a part of it, and parents can step back and give their children some space to grow, we’ll have a chance of reducing the need for SM (which I still think needs to be curtailed as it remains an environment designed to relentlessly suck in children’s attention).
Dear Prof. Gray!
First, I want to say that I find all your posts very interesting and inspiring, and I am currently reading your book "Free to Learn", which I enjoy a lot.
Personally, I detest social media, since I view it from a privacy/ data security perspective and I am also not very interested in the way of interaction social media enforeces. Therefore, I had always a 100% negative view on social media and social media use of children and teenagers. However, I found your points valid - currently, social media is one of the few spaces where teenagers can communicate without interference or observance from adults.
I live in Austria, where children and teenagers are more free to do things on their own than in the US, but their freedom has also been reduced dramatically during the last 20 years. I share your opinions on the value of play and the freedom children and teenagers need from adult supervision. However, I think that finding this freedom solely online - and especially using social media - is problematic in many ways.
First, if free play and social interaction is reduced only to virtual play, many physical aspects of play get lost. All the stimulation from the physical world, for example the physical thrill of chasing somebody, or the physical comfort of hugging somebody, get lost. Also, there is no way to explore nature, to build something with your hands, and so on. It is like eating a snickers bar on-the-go instead of a home-cooked dinner with your family. It will prevent you from starving and will give you comfort in the moment, but it lacks nutrients and is artificial.
Second, social media platforms are designed to generate profit. The profit is generated by tracking and then advertising to the user ("If it is free, you are the product"). To generate this profit, the user must be kept at the platform, by gaining the users interest with - in my opinion - very annoing and intrusive methods. I think it is highly unethical to predate on childrens/teenagers need for freedom to bind them to these platforms and generate profit with them. It is also shown, that social media platforms affect attention span, the deepness of focus and the ability to endure boredom and to fully embrace the moment that is experienced. All these abilities would be strengthened with play in real life.
Therefore, I can understand that children need social media as one of the few refuges left for them to be on their own. However, I think it is highly problematic to let those companies give them this refuge. We should let children and teenagers again be more on their own and give them spaces for interaction in real life.
Thank you for these thoughts. I very much agree with you about making it possible, again, for children and teens to play and hang out together in person. I am one of he founders of the Let Grow nonprofit that is working in various ways toward that end.
The teen responses make sense to me as a neurodivergent parent with autistic kids. For me and for one of my children, socializing in person can be stressful. You feel like you are on the spot, expected to come up with the right phrasing to participate in the conversation. I prefer writing to talking for that reason. I also like to get into online discussions and social media.
My son went through a video game stage in his teens, and now likes to browse social media and informational sites. He has learned a tremendous amount from watching educational YouTube videos. When he was playing video games a lot I was concerned, but I read somewhere that kids with autism can feel like that is the only arena where they have control. It becomes a retreat from the stresses of the neurotypical world. I think he also felt more comfortable socializing with the brief comments they make to each other in the context of the game. He is now looking into being a creator of some sort - he has taught himself digital animation skills and also wants to do a podcast.
I agree that we need to be less skeptical about new technology. I'm in my fifties and I tend to embrace it for its usefulness. The boundaries you described are perfect! First and foremost is letting teens have more interaction with the real world: friendships, starting businesses, or whatever they are interested in. Then we can be a little more open about their use of technology.
Dear prof. Gray, in your last post I comment too late. Let me repost my questions about the relationship between play, media use and depression (plus another one):
1. About school openings and suicides: seasonality seem to be a possible other explanation for the trends you showed. You mentioned that when schools opened sooner/later, this was reflected in suicide rates, but I would like to see some data about this
2. Other countries showed exactly the same pattern of depression symptoms and suicides without NCLB or pre-K literacy and numeracy programs. What are your thoughts about this? Is it a spreading of parental controlling strategies over multiple countries (even if with very different demographics/school systems)? Is it social media? Or a combination of the two?
3. Did mobiles interfere with schooling? They distract (making it more challenging to keep up with the pace), they decrease the sleep time and most importantly, they interfere with free play/chat at school. During lecture breaks I used to see a lot of people talking to each other, to hear a lot of joyful noise. Now not: everybody is staring at the phone. An impressive silence. The same goes for school trips. I remember the travel (by train! by bus!) moment as the best, the most exciting, the one that really matter of the whole trip. Now you can sit in a train in the middle of 13-years old pack of students and writing an article or reading a book without problems. The kids are silent. That makes a huge difference in the quality of their free play/time. What is your position about these phenomena?
In brief, I read all your letters and some paper you posted. There is a paramount difference between the type of joyful, interactive, free play/interaction you describe and the one which is mediated by screens. It just do not work. Huge tech companies profit from it and model your experience to be more profitable. If phones alone do not explain suicides/depression, perhaps is the combination with the elements you describe that does it.
Best whishes,
Giovanni
Giovanni, thanks for these questions. Here are my thoughts regarding 1,2,3.:
1. Concerning relation of teen suicides to the school year, it is only school-aged kids who show this. Those over 18 do not show decreased suidice rate in summer. Suicides also go down for school-aged kids during shorter vacations from school in the winter. I did give references to this work in Letter D5. Also there I gave a link to the study showing suicides were down during Covid lockdown and went up in months when school reopened. Here is is again: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30795/w30795.pdf
2. I will address the question of trends in other countries in my next post. However, my preliminary look indicates that suicides did not increase in the EU countries as they did in the Anglophone countries-- US, Canada, UK, and Australia. More in my next post.
3. Regarding the points you make here, I do think it makes sense that kids should put their phones away in certain circumstances, including when they are physically present with friends. I suggested that in this post. However, neither you nor I is inside the heads of the kids on the bus who are communicating by phone versus talking aloud. We think the latter is better because that's what we did and what we observed until a decade or so ago, but we don't really know. Kids have a new way of communicating; it's not necessarily worse.
-P
Dear prof. Gray, thanks for the answer. However, I do think that the medium is not neutral at all, and available evidence do shows that such medium is damaging our kids in a variety of ways, also because it has been carefully engineered for maximising profit whatever the cost. So, in principle I can agree with your last sentence. I think though that such a big shift in our time spending (avg. 8 hours a day) and communication modes do have an impact. And I am also convinced that such impact interacts with your thoughts on the problems of over-control. What worries me is that i. Kids are not communicating in reality, only to a minimum extent, as far as I can see and read ii. Some features of play get completely lost in this way, iii. the difficulty to cope with tasks (even school tasks) is multiplied by the pervasive use of phones (that act as irresistible distractors) and lastly iv) we are not talking about adolescents anymore. The median age in some countries nowadays to get a phone is 8/9 years old. We are talking about that issue now, not about "15/18 yrs old making their own way through life". I think that such a massive shift in the shape of human relationships during developmental age makes a difference, or is at least worth investigating also under your perspective. I beg your pardon, but your last sentence seems a little bit dismissive. Hope to read more from you on this letter series on this issue.
very interesting, this m feels really out of alignment with what i’m watching with my eyes. it makes me think of how every thing they’ve sold is as okay was okay in the beginning (cigarettes, asbestos, etc) there are so many problems with social media and children being on it not that feel unaddressed here-- the way it upholds problem areas like the beauty industry (now lovingly sold to us by influencers) and how that effects girls, their self esteem, how they perceive their intrinsic value, continued objectification; the wildly inappropriate data they can find (current day news, porn, substances), how it affects their ability to communicate (my eldest is 12 and this is already a problem), my list goes on. this segment feels like an “it’s okay, it’s not bad” when in fact i am witnessing myriad negative effects in real life. bummer.
Dr Gray, thank you again for all your hard work and insight into this topic! I think the decline in face-to-face interactions is a large part of the mental health issue. I would love for someone to explore the impact of technology in the classroom on this topic. Schools have moved to 1:1 (ie. Chrome book/lap top for all children). Kids as young as kindergarten are using computers through their school day for instruction. The amount of time they sit in front of a screen during the school day is alarming. I encourage you to read this article as well! https://www.socialthinking.com/Articles?name=interested-sort-of-social-anxiety-digital-devices
One of the problems in technology is that, in order to be effective in class, it has to be tailored to the needs of the individual, i.e. highly customized, giving personalized feedbacks. This goes at the cost of the social building of the school and of education in general, which is what most people, especially kids, see as the most valuable thing. I am 41, I cannot remember a single moment of instruction during my long story as a student. I can remember a myriad of moments during lecture times in which I talked, laughed, played with friends. That was what motivated me to go to school everyday. And I perfectly understand and share the point of prof. Gray, but how loneliness (like many kids are feeling) and desperation can make your life more miserable if you are already under pressure?
Thank you for a well-researched article looking at all aspects of this. The findings are reassuring, and I note that there is speculation regarding the fact that rather than SM and perhaps also Gaming being the cause of issues, it might be a relief for some children: I agree, a parent came to me in a refugee camp where I was working with the children, she couldn't get her 15yo away from the computer. I pointed out that it might be giving him an escape from all the trauma in his life, and doing good for his mental health. I had heard Dr. Stuart Shanker speaking on a case like this some time back, and his solution was not to prohibit the technology, but rather to offer interesting activities so the child would naturally move away. Your points about solutions, providing easier access to meet ups with friends for example, are good. Adults need to provide better circumstances for teens.
Imelda
I'm really glad to read a balanced take on all of this. Have you addressed access to bad content that isn't easy for parents to regulate (i.e. porn, foul language, drug use, violence, immature acts of pranking, etc.)? I see a lot of highly viewed/viral content from teens I work with which are really out of alignment with not only their parents wishes but that is just bad for them. They imitate these things. A girl I know was hospitalized permanently from imitating something dangerous she saw on social media. Besides that anecdote, I see kids in cities doing/saying foul things with their cameras out just to try to go viral and make money. There have been many trends that have gotten kids in real trouble in various ways and disrupted society. You could argue that these things might have happened without social media, but that's like arguing "guns don't kill people, people do" in my opinion. Sure, but the gun helps. I've really been enjoying and been refreshed by your take on this series, and have learned some things that gave me pause to reflect and dig deeper on what we agree on (free time, free play, self directed learning, etc.), but I would love to hear your take on this darker side of internet access.
"A good rule to keep in mind is don’t send anything into the Internet that you wouldn’t want a future potential employer to see."
Following this rule would eliminate most communication online. Generally speaking, people do not want employers to see their private communications, their complaints about work, their jokes with friends, their political beliefs, or their romantic messages.