Social Media – A Manufactured Childhood

Before the debate, I was a staunch believer that social media ruins childhood, and after the debate, I find myself in the same boat. There are many times as a parent and a teacher that I wonder if kids know how to be bored anymore. It also makes me feel a bit like a Boomer to say things like that, but I honestly see the truth in it.

Kids don’t know how to handle being bored. Social media, used by both parents and kids alike, manufacture childhood to be instantly gratuitous, and with the constant barrage of dopamine-inducing videos and games, there isn’t time to just sit and be. One of my biggest fears is that my kid will grow up to be an i-Pad kid.

I watched this video on manufactured childhoods and I think that it is so important that we as educators do not blame the kids for their inability to switch off from their devices – it often starts at home above them with their parents. When seeing all of the glamourous childhoods online there is a competitiveness that happens with parents and children; I want that too! This comparative nature of social media harms both parties, child and parent, and strains already naturally somewhat rocky (especially during teenage years) relationships. It is here where I think problems begin.

I have heard often that millennials have a parenting problem and that that problem is reflected heavily in Gen Alpha kids – our predominant student body. Statements like “your kids can’t read” (by teachers/adults) or “I can’t read!” (said in [hopefully jest] by students) are common, but it isn’t that students are illiterate – it is that they lack literacy skills like critical thinking and processing skills because the information they are taking in is so fast and rewarding that they don’t have to really grapple with anything difficult. This inability to develop and utilize critical thinking skills is hitting hard in the classroom, and I think I speak for the majority of teachers when I say that it makes our job so much harder when we are supposed to be preparing them to enter the world as a literate person, able to see, understand, and interact with the world around them.

Beyond the inability to concentrate for long periods of time, be bored, and be critically literate, there are numerous safety issues with social media as well. I teach high school and have for my whole career, and the sheer amount of inappropriate things that happen through social media is insane. That’s not to say that having unrestricted access to the internet when I was young didn’t happen – we all know the videos that circulated that we definitely should not have been watching – but that viewing did not happen during school hours or get shared so instantaneously. I have had students arrested for child pornography that they had viewed while during school hours (nude photos of teen girls in the school), cyberbullying and threats, and even human trafficking into the cities via social media.

I can’t help but think that children want to get away from all of the social media and problems that come with it, but they are so indoctrinated and absorbed in to their phones that they don’t know how. The validation students get when they get likes or shares, or when they are the topic for gossip has to be filling a hole that parents and trusted adults have created for them.

The global community and connectivity that social media gives students is only a fraction of the things that social media provides, and I don’t think that it outweighs the issues that surround social media and childhood. Social media might not be the start of the problem, but once it has its grips on our kids, it subsumes the problem and creates entirely new monsters. Perhaps our cellphones and social media have become the ultimate panopticon – constantly viewing and judging – and we are nothing but prisoners in a self-made prison.