Life as a teen without social media isn't easy. These families are navigating adolescence offline
The damaging consequences of social media are increasingly well documented, so some parents are trying to raise their children with restrictions or blanket bans on social media use.
Good on these parents for trying to raise their kids off social media. I can say with confidence social media only hurt me in middle and high school, and I wish my parents had had stronger opinions on me using it
I am so thankful that I got out of school before social media blew up. We had Myspace, and Facebook opened up to everyone I think my junior year of HS, but smartphones didn't become a thing until my senior year, and they weren't that prevalent either.
Same! I didn't even have a computer till the year I graduated high school because they cost too much then. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people had them. We were the odd family in the neighborhood. Not that anyone cared. Once I got one, the only social media type stuff that I remember using was AIM, Photobucket, and shudder LiveJournal. I couldn't imagine navigating the internet today where everyone has figured out exactly how to exploit you for everything without you even knowing because you are too young to understand still.
I grew up with access to social media. I got an Android 4.1 tablet when I was 8. Actually, I wish my parents had less strong opinions on it.
That's because they went the other way around.
My dad wanted me to have a Facebook account, which I created, and then was upset at me when I deleted it when I was 12 because of the dumb hateful "jokes" floating around there.
Then later he again urged me to at least use Messenger, as if he didn't have a plan with unlimited SMS and phone calls...
I am an adult now, but not much has changed. It only went from Facebook to TikTok.
I quit all non anonymous social media a while back and it's lonely as fuck. If I wasn't a low level autist with a small very online friend group I'd miss out on a lot. When people make plans for parties, get togethers, anything like that, they do it on social media and if I dont somehow hear about it and ask, I don't get an invite. This works for me as many of those people and parties are things that I don't wanna do, but if I had a kid in school I could not imagine the massive social gap it would create for them to not have social media.
For kids it really seems like a pick your poison situation, social media and all that comes eith it, or being left out of a lot of social activities at the most social time of your life.
I was disgusted with them and kept telling everyone how good ICQ and forums were, but they still hurt me, haha.
Experts: social media is harmful for kids
Schools: let’s use social media as an official communication platform!
WTF.
It doesn’t sound like the school is actually using it as an official communication platform (thank goodness), just that all of the student run clubs use it as their means of communication, which is just driven by where the majority of them like to communicate. Obviously this is a sign of the issue, which is that most teens are on social media all the time, so that it becomes their preferred mode of communication.
While I'm at it, the ongoing dialog
Life as a teen isn’t easy anyway
Glad that shit is over for me. We only had MySpace and MSN Messenger. Must be so much worse now
I'd say so with those constant little dopamine hits. Shit, I'm 40 and I've had to put a bunch of efforSHIT IM ON LEMMY AGAIN!
Oh fuck you just reminded me I'm supposed to be working
I can echo the frustrations expressed about social media becoming a necessity as it becomes the primary channel for communication by an institution. Both my university and student dorm use exclusively Discord to communicate events, exams, and general announcements. I don't run Discord on my phone and due to this I have come close to missing several important things, if not for a friend letting me know. I'm not sure what if anything could be done to change this...
The school could switch to a K12 comms provider that actually meets the needs of the school's end users (you). There are good options out there that enable easy multi-channel (email, SMS, voice, Twitter, etc) messaging through like two button clicks.
Run a matrix bridge, sure you still have to have an account but at least the malware client doesn't get installed.
This is a good option for most of it, as the bridges seem quite solid. Sadly it won't make up for calls (some courses have extra content in the form of "Discord Stages" which is like a big video call).
Same boat, I just use the Discord website on my phone. The account I created with designated e-mail address for this.
Unfortunately, e-mail notifications are kinda random. It can be like 1 day late before I receive notification that someone tagged me or whatever. They could just use regular mail at this point.
I mean I got along without it, i just played video games and masturbated most of the time
Sounds like you're older though. Social media wasn't nearly as ubiquitous a decade ago as it is now.
There was separation between online and everything else. But for these kids, online is everything. The spaces are nearly equal in experience and importance.
Yeah I suppose so, but all I mean is, kids are pretty good at finding ways to entertain themselves
I grew up when social media was already ubiquitous, in the 2010s. Still mostly video games, walks and studying.
Life without the internet made me feel alone and isolated with no recourse by which to find resilience to my abusers. While I can't say I'd be different with social media and the internet to advise me they were lying to me and treating me unfairly for their own benefit, I'd at least have that perspective, and it wouldn't be ingrained that I am just broken and should unlife and stop burning resources that could be better used elsewhere.
These days, I have management skills and a support system, but I still deal with suicidality every day, and am incapable of seeing any value I produce to the world (or see it insignificant compared to my footprint), and the internet and social media have figured largely in my comprehension of the mechanics of my mental illness (especially when dealing with professionals who are less interested in understand me as affirming their own ideology, not a new problem, but the current batch is particularly egregious).
It is, as I see it, a human right for people to be informed when they need to make life decisions (with concurrence from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and without access to public information, kids rely on authorities who are either ignorant or complicit in feeding them false information. They should have access not only to the internet, but also to a robust community of people with differing ideas.
Fail to provide this and you get grown-up crackpots like me, who wonder every day if it's time to check out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As youth coped with isolation and spent excessive time online, the pandemic effectively carved out a much larger space for social media in the lives of American kids.
They educated the girls, and their younger siblings, on the impact of social media on young brains, on online privacy concerns, on the dangers of posting photos or comments that can come back to haunt you.
Senior year got especially intense, with college and scholarship applications capped by an unexpected highlight of getting to perform at Broadway’s Shubert Theatre in March as part of a city showcase of high school musicals.
Romero drives the girls to their three schools scattered around Brooklyn, then takes the subway into Manhattan, where she teaches mass communications at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Grace, 11, is a sixth grade cheerleader active in Girl Scouts, along with Gionna, 13, who sings, does debate team and has daily rehearsals for her middle school theater production.
The girls look the same in short crop tops and jeans and sound the same, speaking with a TikTok dialect that includes a lot of “Hey, guys!” and uptalk, their voices rising in tone at the end of a thought.
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