The Social Media Poison Pill

Canceling #grownupchallenge

The other day, I wrote a post about creating a “#grownupchallenge” that was a non-exhaustive list of tasks people need to learn in order to be a grown-up. Putting aside the person who told me it was boring, the column resonated with a few other parents. They had some other topics they’d love to see tackled, and one friend shared that she had considered running this kind of training as a summer camp for teenagers until she remembered that teenagers would hate it. Another friend shared that he is fascinated by lists of competencies after reading Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein, and they have new resonance for him now that he’s a parent.

In the course of these discussions, I realized something about my list. It is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy of parenting being as easy as a set of tasks that we train our children to perform. If we can get through the whole list, TA-DA, we will have raised them to care for themselves and the world around them. If only it were that easy. My friend’s summer camp will never be enrolled; my hashtag will never go viral. At the time when our kids need the most guidance to adulthood is the same time they are least willing to receive it. It’s a story as old as any other.

Social media is bad for parents

A few weeks ago, the Surgeon General released an advisory about the ill effects that social media has on young people and their mental health. Normally, when I share one of these scary-sounding health warnings with my kids, they argue with me or disagree or just ignore me, but when I talked to each of them about this, they both immediately agreed. One said that watching his (former) friends hang out via their Instagram accounts during the early days of the pandemic made him feel intensely lonely and angry because he was following the lockdown rules and they were flouting them. The other said that the internet has replaced kids’ reality and they don’t know how to navigate the real world because they are overwhelmed with both the number of options available online and the depths of the rabbit holes you can sink into. He can argue with strangers on Reddit or Discord but does not meet new friends in person very easily. Studies show that social media is even worse for girls, leading to increases in depression and suicide.

The Surgeon General has also warned about a loneliness epidemic, and I don’t think these issues exist in isolation, no pun intended. There are lots of reasons that loneliness is so pervasive (go read the report), but I think a contributing factor is adults’ attachment to social media and the internet. We are reluctant to police children’s usage because we like it so much ourselves. Adults are also not going outside to play anymore, hanging out with their friends, or finding connections in churches, unions, or social activities.

The fact that our kids are terminally online makes it even worse. When we first let our kids join social media sites, we finger-tagged them on Youface so that we’d know what they were doing. My friend’s daughters had to be reminded that sideboob wasn’t appropriate for 14-year-olds and their sons ought not to be pretending to smoke weed while holding a water pistol like a real gun. At some point, though, our kids blocked us, and we didn’t even know. They just weren’t in our social media feed anymore, and when asked, they said they didn’t use it anymore. I became like Valerie in The Princess Bride, screaming “LIAR! LIAR!” in my mind until I found out about spam accounts and finstas, or whatever they’re called, that kids set up to evade their parents’ watchful eyes. Our peeking into their private lives, the ones where they were constructing new identities, created deception.

Meanwhile, like all the other kids on the ‘gram (that’s Instagram for you fogeys), we parents were also feeling jealous and left out of our kids’ lives. Consequently, we checked more often for updates and followed their friends to catch a glimpse of them or at least their vibe. Grandparents, too, lurk in the shadows, hoping to see how their children and grandchildren are doing. Instead, they see only happy, staged photos, and feel left out and far away.

I can tell from the sheer number of family members who have discovered me on Facebook that we are all craving the connection we once hoped to only endure at the occasional reunion. People who barely know me celebrate my wins with a little thumbs up that triggers some dopamine for both of us. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have genuine connections with fewer people, and go back to barely remembering everyone’s name?

The final thing I will say about this is that being able to see what we are all doing on social media means that we don’t have anything to ask one another. I don’t need to call you or write to you to get an update on your life, and I don’t need to call or write to tell you what I’m up to. You can just follow me at @alaiacona or subscribe to this substack newsletter and we’ll never have to talk ever again.

Maybe my kids will let me follow them again if I promise not to ask them anything or tell them anything ever again.

No, really, subscribe.