A big thank you for the information and insight provided by Tonia Mihill, a person-centred counsellor and head of therapeutic services at MAP, offering services to 11- to 25-year-olds across Norfolk, including three one stop shops in Norwich, Kings Lynn and Great Yarmouth. MAP provides positive activities and right space advice and information, as well as counselling and psychoeducational guided self-help interventions.
This is a topic that is important, partly because it’s so live in our culture and society. Social Media is, essentially, a completely new area related to this particular generation of young people. It is unprecedented, and previous generations have not had to negotiate the social media world that the current teenagers and young adults are having to do. This can make the topic particularly challenging, as we’re unable to compare it to previous generations.
We do have to accept that we don’t know everything, especially as it is ever changing, and that can be a very uncomfortable place to be as adults responsible for children and young people. You can only know so much as a professional, and this area will constantly be adapting. And it can often difficult for parents and carers to reach out for help, and say “I don’t know how to help my young person, can you?”
It’s also important to centre the young person as being the expert and listen to them and the way that they navigate the online world.
“I think sometimes I have likened the position of adults versus young people in this arena as to what it is like if people migrate to another country and then they have children who have grown up in that country and how the young people often have a greater insight into the culture than the parents who are needing to take a kind of a caring guiding role. And that can be a real challenge in terms of negotiating power. “
Research reveals that nearly 70% of 16- to 21-year-olds feel worse about themselves after spending time on social media. Half (50%) would support a digital curfew that would restrict their access to certain apps and sites past 10pm, while 46% said they would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether.
A quarter of respondents spent four or more hours a day on social media, while 42% of those surveyed admitted to lying to their parents and guardians about what they do online.
While online, 42% said they had lied about their age, 40% admitted to having a decoy or burner account, and 27% said they pretended to be a different person completely.
Secrecy on Social Media
That idea of secrecy is important when it comes to how we support young people through things that they do find challenging on social media.
Often, when parents or carers come to you for support and advice around their children using the internet, there can be a knee jerk reaction if their child has expressed discomfort about a message they’ve received, or something they’ve seen, for example, to simply take it away. It’s important to show them that the response of immediate removal can actually increase the young person’s secrecy.
CYP are very good at finding their way onto things that they’re not supposed to be on, and it can lead to the feeling of “I’m not supposed to be on here, but I’m going to do it anyway”. Then, if something uncomfortable happens again, they can be far more reluctant to go to their parent or an adult for help in case they are punished for being on there when they were told not to.
This then creates layers of challenge where, instead of taking away the thing that was causing them distress, it adds an additional wall of secrecy against not telling an adult if or when something goes wrong.
Even if you take it away from your particular child, the chances are they’ll have a friend who has access, or another device they can access the account on. The other challenge within this is that it is developmentally appropriate for teenagers to require privacy, which is another way of terming secrecy.
Secrecy is almost a negative of privacy, but teenagers have to negotiate aspects of the world on their own to learn how to be adults in the world, which is always going to be a difficult time. We need to try to empower young people and enable them to have the conversations that they need, rather than possibly the ones that we would like to be having.
The more open that you can be as to what might be going on for them, the better. If we shut it down, they’re less likely to say anything, but if we open it up, they’re more likely to discuss these issues with you. If you, as a trusted adult, can signal to them that you’re open to learn and accept their expertise and their knowledge, you can have a more valuable conversation with them. Plus, it is important for teenagers and adolescents to feel part of their peer group and to build friendships and relationships, a lot of which is done through social media and online.
Social Media and Image
Another aspect of social media is filters and editing photos. It can be incredibly difficult to spot when something has been altered, so young people are seeing these images that are often not reflective of real life.
Intellectually, they know that these things exist, but something that we also know about adolescence in terms of neuroscience and brain development is that young people are using their amygdala, which is their emotional brain part and they’re working out. They’re processing the world through their emotions, so they might intellectually know that there are filters, but emotionally, they’ll still be having the same responses. They’re still getting very profoundly affected and it can be hard for them to understand the two parts of themselves.
In Norfolk and Waveney, you can access the Just One Norfolk website for professionals and for parents and carers and learn more about the teenage brain and how it changes through adolescence.
New ways TikTok is supporting parents and helping teens build balanced digital habits
- New Family Pairing features give parents additional tools to set boundaries and customisable limits for their individual family needs
- A new in-app meditation feature is designed to help teens wind down if they use TikTok after 10pm
- Re-enabling the feed dedicated to STEM, if their teen has turned it off. This is now available in more than 100 countries
- Setting customisable daily screen time limits. For example, parents could choose to limit their teens to 30 minutes on TikTok during the week but a little longer on a weekend. Once a parent-set limit has been reached, a teen can only use TikTok if their parent shares a unique passcode.
- Even if a parent doesn’t customise their teen’s settings, everyone under 18 has a 60 minute daily screen time limit by default.
- Switching their teen’s account back to the default private setting, if their teen has made it public.
The Effect of Sleep and the Pandemic
It is also important to understand the significance of the pandemic for this generation. For a good few years and a high proportion of their lives, they were dependent on social media to have social interactions because they were not able. It can be hard for them to then adjust to going outside and meeting their friends, when for so long that was impossible. We do need to keep reminding them and it’s not surprising if they’re experiencing challenges.
We have the Better Sleep programme training available through the TALK Centre and professionals can either attend a bite-sized session to learn more about sleep or a more in depth session if they’re delivering the intervention. The more we learn about sleep, then we can feel a bit more empowered to guiding our young people through any sleep challenges, and making the link between social media and sleep is really important for our young people.
The Climate Crisis and Drawing from Fiction
The climate crisis is a problem with no single solution, but many, just as there is no one saviour but many protagonists in the struggle. In 2019, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said we must embrace cathedral thinking, adding we must lay the foundation, while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.
No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit is a selection of essays collected together about the climate crisis, as well as her broader reflections on women’s rights, the fight for democracy, the trends in masculinity, and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic, positive and engaging, these essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action, making a case for seeding change wherever possible, and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.
A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler
Okay, the young man challenged. So whats the answer?
There isnt one, I told him.
No answer? You mean were just doomed? He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
No, I said. I mean theres no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. Theres no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers-at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.