But their second finding was more interesting: the children they observed were less mature than the ones in the 1948 study—or, at least, their play habits were. For example, only a few of the kids were assigning specific roles and interacting with their classmates in an imaginary scenario—behaviors that Manuilenko had observed as common six decades earlier. “Contemporary preschoolers mostly demonstrated an immature ability to pretend play,” Smirnova told me in an email interview. She knows about play. She’s director of Moscow State University’s Toy and Game Center and the author of twenty books, including a textbook on child psychology.
And the third finding of the research stopped Smirnova in her tracks. She found a dramatic drop in self-control from fifty-five years earlier. While pretending to be sentries, the modern four- to five-year-olds could hold the pose for only one-third of the time their counterparts did in 1948. The six- to seven-year-old group could stand still for three minutes on average, compared with twelve minutes for the children observed in the 1940s.
That means that first- and second-graders of the early Cold War era could stay still four times as long as modern kids.
It may seem trivial to be concerned about child’s play. Aren’t there more pressing dangers confronting modern children?
But play isn’t minor at all. For decades, child development researchers have amassed evidence that play is a crucial building block in children’s growth, helping them develop abstract thought, self-control, social cooperation, and other essential skills. For example, kids begin to move beyond a concrete mind-set when they play pretend. When a child holds up a forked stick and declares, pretending it’s a gun, “Bang bang! You’re dead!” that’s abstract thought.
Games also help kids develop self-regulation. Both the inherent fun and the social pressure to keep a game going give children strong incentives to control their actions. If a child pushes and shoves, their peers may refuse to play with them again, or they may hit back. This reaction gives the disruptive child a powerful reason to override the urge to lash out—stronger motivation than if an adult intervened. By practicing self-control in play, they gain greater impulse control in other areas of life.
These are the reasons that the changes Smirnova observed in how kindergarten kids were playing in 2003 caused her deep concern. You may wonder whether these developments represented a side effect of communism, or perhaps a sign of the unraveling Soviet society. Yet in the United States as well, researchers have documented an erosion in children’s ability to self-regulate.
Jean Twenge first grew interested in whether we’re better off emotionally than previous generations during her graduate studies at the University of Michigan in the 1990s. A tomboy as a child, she’d started out researching gender roles, which were (and still are) changing dramatically. She became fascinated by mental illness in women. One day she was in Professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s office discussing her quest for a dissertation topic. Nolen-Hoeksema suggested looking at change in depression over time.
“I have this memory of her pulling these articles out of her drawer, saying, ‘There’s all this good evidence on depression going up,’” recalled Twenge, who decided to focus her thesis on anxiety and neuroticism. “And sure enough, that’s what I found.” She published a paper showing that college students and children in 1993 reported substantially more anxiety and neuroticism than the same groups in 1952.
But wait. Couldn’t it be that modern doctors are just more aware of mental health and better able to screen and diagnose for anxiety and depression?
Twenge had to verify that her results were real. To do this, she compared answers to the questions that related to impulsivity, depression, anxiety, and attention problems on four psychological surveys given to a total of 6.9 million high school and college-aged Americans in the 1980s, and to the same age group again two decades later. Since she was looking at symptoms, not the prevalence of disorders, her results couldn’t be skewed by different diagnostic practices or better awareness.
The results troubled her: there had been dramatic increases in depressive symptoms and distractibility over the past twenty years. For example, in one study she found that three times as many teens had trouble sleeping and thinking clearly in the period 2012–2014 as compared to 1982–1984. She also found a steady increase in college students’ rebelliousness. Now a psychology professor at San Diego State University, Twenge continues to rack up evidence that something has changed dramatically in our culture and is making young people today significantly more anxious, depressed, neurotic, and narcissistic than their counterparts three or four decades earlier.
Why is this societal shift happening? It’s impossible to know for sure, but Twenge shared some well-supported theories.
“We can’t ever prove that one thing causes it, or anything causes it. You can’t randomly assign people to grow up in different generations,” she said. “We know that focusing on money, fame, and image is correlated with anxiety and depression.”
Mass media, reality television, and celebrity culture became more pervasive over the same time period in which she found depression and anxiety rising. These cultural influences all drive young people to focus externally when figuring out their goals and desires, instead of looking inside themselves to ask: Who am I? What fills me with passion? What feeds my curiosity and desire to learn? People who focus externally—who are “extrinsically motivated,” in psychology lingo—tend to have lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction. It’s better to be intrinsically motivated, to follow your own internal drives and interests.
More recently, the advent of social media is a likely culprit behind rising mental illness, as studies emerge connecting personal electronics use to social disconnection and blunted empathy. One experiment found that when preteens participated in an outdoor education program without access to screens for just five days, they scored higher on emotional intelligence. Multiple studies have found that the more time people spend on Facebook, Instagram, and the like, the more likely they are to feel depressed.
CELIA DURRANT, FORTY-SEVEN, SEEMED ALL blond curls and Southern drawl as she described her befuddlement with her teen daughters’ peer group and social media use. She has observed the full spectrum of online adolescence in the upscale Dallas suburb where she lives with her children Kaya, sixteen, Alex, fourteen, and Olivia, twelve, and her husband, Bobby Ahern. His children, London, fourteen, Violet, twelve, and Edison, ten, divide their time between Dallas and their mother’s home in Houston. I followed Durrant home from work on a sunny spring day, and we walked together up the driveway to her five-bedroom Craftsman home, set in a lush landscape of trees, bushes, and a private pool.
“The two older girls are quite popular, and I think that adds to anxiety, that they are scared to death they are missing out on something if they don’t have the phone with them,” Durrant said, noting that both Kaya and London see therapists for anxiety. “I’m a very laid-back mom. I’m pretty open. All of our kids just do their stuff. I don’t ever have to get on them about homework. It’s not an environment of stress. I truly believe it has to do with this social media, never unplugging, the stress of the social part of it.”
Over a recent spring break, her girls noticed “snaps” coming daily from the accounts of their friends who were traveling in Europe—but the snaps weren’t photos of European scenes. In an act of adolescent friendship peculiar to the social media age, the traveling teens had given their friends their Snapchat logins and asked them to blast out a picture each day to all their contacts so that they wouldn’t lose their Snapchat streaks while on vacation. Snapchat creates a “streak” when two friends have sent each other snaps for at least three consecutive days.
Durrant introduced me to Kaya, Olivia, London, and London’s friend Dvora, who was visiting Dallas for a weekend sleepover. Three poodle-mix dogs barked excitedly at our feet. Durrant pointed out the family chickens through the glass door, all named after famous women: Marilyn, Rosie, and Eleanor. A fourth chi
cken, Beyoncé, had recently died. The older girls and I walked to the kitchen, taking seats around a heavy wooden table with ten chairs.
Looking at their Snapchat accounts, I saw long columns of names, many labeled with a number next to a flame emoji. The number tells how many days in a row the account holder and the listed person have exchanged snaps.
“If you have a streak with someone, even someone you barely know at your school, you have to open it and close it every day. They may have a hundred on there that they have to open and close,” Durrant said. “It’s like a job.”
The girls didn’t seem burdened by the work. Kaya showed me the screen on Snapchat displaying her friends’ “stories,” a collection of recent videos and photos they had posted. The screen was divided between updated stories that she hadn’t viewed yet and stories she’d already seen. Kaya selected about a dozen names.
“Basically, you can tap all these and that means you’re going to watch them consecutively. It plays them, you tap until you go through them,” she said. As the updates began to play, she tapped them quickly, forcing each one to advance before the preset time of five seconds—too fast to look at any of the images.
“I don’t like looking at these people because I don’t care about them. I need to unfollow these people,” she said. “Basically, you just tap and you can look at them or, like me, just don’t.”
I watched the blur of faces and settings. Then a flash of skin. “Was that a topless photo?” I asked.
“She’s a fitness guru, and she’s always talking about her fitness routine,” Kaya said. She pulled up the account to show me a trim young woman in a sports bra and leggings, reclining on a lounge chair. “She’s really annoying. She’s always boasting about her body.”
“Why don’t you drop her?” Durrant asked.
“I need to unfriend her, but I keep forgetting,” said Kaya, explaining that perhaps 40 percent of her Snapchat friends are people she follows but doesn’t know, either celebrities like Kim Kardashian or social media celebs like this woman.
I turned to London’s phone. The screen was slightly cracked. She began tapping through a similar row of names, opening snaps from her friends as quickly as a telegraph operator. “I am too lazy to answer people, so I’ll click on all of them and open all of them,” she explained.
But then a photo of a boy and girl kissing caught her eye. She quickly switched to the camera, snapped a selfie, and typed a caption over the image: “Awee cute couple.”
Then she backspaced. Created a new caption: “Awee y’all are cute.” Sent.
Why had she paused the onslaught of snaps? It was a personal snap the boy sent just to her, she explained. He knew she was friends with the girl and wanted her to see their joint selfie.
The conversation switched to Instagram. London spends more time on “Insta,” as they call the social network, scrolling through profiles or watching food videos. Kaya likes the cute animal videos. They both use the “explore” feature to discover accounts that are similar to the ones they already follow.
“It’s such a waste of time, but I like watching these food videos,” London said. “It’s like eating it, but not. It’s like, insane.”
I asked about the rules associated with each social media platform. On Instagram, they post once a week or even less often, and only when they “look pretty”—they’ve put on makeup and fixed their hair for going out. The day I visited, Kaya and London wore T-shirts and shorts with their faces scrubbed clean. Kaya’s hair hung in waves past her shoulders, still damp from a post-school shower.
When we had spoken by phone before my visit, they explained that many kids create “Finsta” accounts. That’s teenage shorthand for Fake Instagram, which is a second account that parents don’t know about. Teens post sexier images or ask about parties and drugs on Finsta accounts.
London’s thumbs worked her phone sideways, up and down, faster than I could follow. She reminded me of a blackjack dealer. I asked whether social media influenced their self-images.
“I definitely think when you follow a bunch of famous people, you see their pictures and you compare yourself to them,” Kaya said. “You see it all the time, it’s constantly in your face. In reality, only 10 percent of the world looks like that, but it doesn’t seem like it when it’s always in your face.”
“I have bad body issues because of Instagram,” London said. “You think you look pretty, and then you see a photo and you’re like, ‘Nope.’”
“Why do you keep looking?” Durrant asked.
“You’re always going to see it,” said Kaya, her voice rising in pitch. “Why are you interrupting?”
“I’m sorry, I’m just interested.”
“It’s not like a choice. It’s there, always. You don’t even follow them, you’re always going to see them,” Kaya said.
“You’re always going to see them, it doesn’t matter,” London agreed.
Olivia appeared in the doorway. Flat-ironed hair. Face fully made up. A lacey blue blouse over white pedal pushers. She was waiting for a ride to her friend’s birthday party. In the meantime, she plopped down at the table, cuddling the dog. She listened intently to the older girls.
The discussion picked up pace. The four girls switched off speaking and listening as quickly as they were flipping through their phones. My gaze moved from one girl to the next like the camera in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
People in Olivia’s grade (seventh) send nudes via Snapchat. A sixteen-year-old boy in the community is currently being prosecuted for child pornography because he recorded friends having sex and shared the video. Kaya knows a guy who had to switch schools because of sexting. London knows a girl who sent nude photos to a guy and his mom saw them. Dvora knows a girl who sent nudes over iMessage and the boy’s mom saw them. The mom forced him to break up with the girl.
Guys, not girls, they said, ask for nudes. Guys may randomly send nudes, something even Olivia agreed happens. When a girl sends nudes without being asked, that’s just desperate and dumb, the girls said. They expressed shock at the stupidity of the kids in these stories, or sympathy. They would never send nudes themselves, they said.
“There are weird things going on. Things have been changing quickly,” London said. “When we were in sixth grade, we never did that stuff. But when we were in seventh grade, the sixth-graders were crazy bad.”
“In high school, since everyone does it, sending nudes, it’s never really talked about. It’s never talked about unless a girl sends it to a guy and they’re not even dating,” Kaya said. “The guys have gotten smarter about sending them around because they know the consequences.”
“That is not true in Houston. The guys have gotten worse. There are so many group chats of guys that literally all they do is send nudes,” London said. “The guys are so pushy. One of my friends, the only reason she sent nudes is he kept asking her over and over. She was young, so she just—it was too much.”
When one girl had the floor, the others took the opportunity to peek at their phones. Dvora stuck her tongue out one inch to snap a coy selfie for posting. The conversation turned for a while to the behavior of boys in Dallas versus Houston, and then I asked how their use of social media had evolved over time.
“As a teenage girl, I think everyone uses it to post cute pictures of themselves, in high school for sure. It’s definitely changed from sixth grade, when it was pretty innocent,” Kaya said. “You think: That’s cute, I’m going to share that with everyone so they can see it and validate it.”
London shared the thought process behind what to post on Instagram: making sure the photo is high-quality, the setting looks good, and the caption is clever, funny, or even just straightforward. “I want to get as many likes as possible, so I’m not going to post just random things. I want my feed to look good,” she said.
The girls explained the unwritten rules. No random photos. Selfies only—no flowers or scenery. You can post a bikini picture, but only from the front, not from behind. (
None of them posted bikini shots, though.) No weird or long captions. Don’t post a picture with a guy who isn’t your boyfriend, or people will think it’s an announcement of coupledom. Stay positive. If you decline an invitation with a lie, don’t subsequently post something on social media that shows you’re doing something other than what you said. Use Twitter to wish friends a happy birthday.
For boys—“guys”—there are only three types of posts, London said. “A picture with their friends chilling, big group photos. Guys post a lot of group photos. Or one of them holding a fish. We live in the South; that’s the only type of guy around. Or them with their family. A guy wouldn’t post a solo photo of themselves.”
Social media morphs from an innocent curiosity in middle school to a tool for older teenagers to define themselves. “When you’re younger, you use it because you’re surrounded by it constantly. You’re wondering about it. As you grow older, it’s your page, you’re trying to show what you’re about. In high school, you compare yourself a lot, you’re constantly looking at other people’s posts. At first, it’s fun, and then it turns into a competition almost. That’s a big part of it,” Kaya said. “I definitely think it causes anxiety for a lot of people, and I’m sure depression too, when you’re always looking at models on there. I definitely think they’re related.”
RESEARCH SUPPORTS KAYA’S SUSPICION. ONE experiment led by the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross found that college students were more likely to feel lonely, worried, or sad the more often they used social media. In addition, the heaviest social media users felt less overall satisfaction with their lives.
Psychologists believe that’s because of a phenomenon called “social comparison.” All of us instinctively compare ourselves to those around us, in order to gauge our well-being. Social media not only gives us a bigger pool of people with whom to compare but also presents a distorted picture. People most often put up posts that show themselves in a positive light—looking attractive, on vacation, happy—so it’s natural to feel inferior by contrast. And because children’s brains are still developing, social comparison has a greater impact on them than on adults. Follow-up research suggests that passive social media use—idly scrolling through a feed—harms mental health more than active use—going onto Facebook with a plan to post something or connect with a specific person.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 2
