Panicking over wildly exaggerated dangers in BOTH the virtual and physical worlds is destructive to young people
The biggest danger to children and younger teens is grownups around them and misguided restrictions
Contrary to critics of social media led by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, children and teenagers risk vastly greater dangers (including violence, sexual abuse, damaging interactions, etc.) in the physical (“real”) world than they do online. As one of my students said, “would you rather run into a serial killer in a chatroom, or at a bus stop?”
Haidt has expressed horror that children and teens can click onto terrible virtual depravities online. Strangely, those demonizing social media rarely mention that kids suffer terrible real depravities in the physical world. So, here’s the applicable question: Is seeing even the most horrific virtual image more damaging than actually being sexually and violently abused?
While one facile answer might be, protect children from both, “save the children!” crusades targeting popular and virtual culture inevitably invite escapism and drown out attention to real violent and emotional abuses inflicted mainly by parents and other adults – always a difficult topic.
Especially now. The Centers for Disease Control’s massive 2021 youth-risk survey found 13% of girls reporting violent (injurious) abuses and 63% emotional abuses by parents and household grownups. That stunning finding has been greeted with abject silence by authorities and social-media blamers winning obsessive media attention – even as the CDC survey associates parental abuses with far more teenage depression, suicide attempts, and self-harm.
It’s disturbing that the most dangerous place for a child or younger teenager is at home, with household grownups. The biggest single reason guns are the leading instrument of non-natural death for American children and youth is that they’re shot by grownups age 21 and older (usually at home), FBI tabulations show. While the rare teen whose death stems from an online encounter is sensationally headlined, the hundreds of teens killed at home every year by adults are daily occurrences winning only fleeting news attention.
Tens of thousands of parent/grownup-inflicted abuses victimizing teens are substantiated every year, but we don’t know how many actually occur or whether they’re rising or falling. We do know parents’ drug/alcohol overdose deaths have skyrocketed over the last decade.
That said, the dangers of the outdoors also have been unconscionably exaggerated by alarmists from Michelle Obama to News at 11, exploiting the same emotional scare tactics deployed to vilify social media. The street, park, bus stop, and, especially, school are vastly less dangerous than demonized by breathless sensationalists.
So, if they are serious about teens availing real-world experiences, I would hope Haidt and colleagues are lending their voices to actively opposing policies to shove teenagers out of public life via driving bans, mall bans, curfews, alcohol-related exclusions, movie ratings, and other age-based banishments. These consistently have proven unwarranted (today’s adults behave worse than teens), useless (they don’t work), and damaging (nannying just transfers greater risks to adult ages). Young people benefit far more from grownups who manage their own lives better while leaving teens freer to grow up.
These findings warn that we are radically misinterpreting the complex ways teens’ physical and virtual worlds supplement each other. For one example, the CDC survey shows girls who spend the most time online (5-plus hours per day) are nearly twice as likely to be abused frequently by parents/grownups compared to girls who are rarely/never online. Likewise, the most-abused girls are much more likely to go online frequently (64%) than non-abused girls (45%).
That is, the heavily overlapping populations of girls who are online the most and who are abused the most are also among the most likely to report poor mental health. So, is being online a lot, or is being frequently abused, making girls more depressed? Mathematical analysis (and common sense) show it’s no contest: real-life parental abuse is a far bigger factor driving girls’ depression, suicide attempts, and other risks than whatever virtual hazards they encounter online.
That’s not exactly a shock – it just seems like one amid the official stampede to blame social media and to ignore or exonerate troubled and abusive adults. And worse: to push bans, restrictions, and parental supervision of girls’ access to social media even if those measures jeopardize abused girls’ efforts to seek contacts vital to helping them (as both CDC and Pew Research surveys suggest).
Finally, while Haidt worries that teens are being desensitized to horror by terrible online images, today’s manifest desensitization really infects grownups, especially professionals, who raise incessant alarms lamenting teens’ unhappiness but refuse to acknowledge grownup-inflicted abuse, its most serious known driver (peer abuse, they talk about endlessly). The mostly-young student protesters against the slaughter in Gaza demonstrate far more sensitivity to violence victimizing people across diverse ethnicities and religions different from themselves than their mostly-older critics, who seem capable of sensitivity only toward violence that affects them personally or victims they perceive as “like me.”
Surveys find the greater sensitivity of younger people to mass suffering from war, migration, social injustice, and climate change accompanies their greater use of social media, whose broad-ranging coverage provides a more realistic – and yes, often graphic – picture of true human and environmental tolls than do the sanitized, censored mainstream media consumed by older ages. Does that mean social media promote more sensitivity and compassion? To avoid the backwards-correlation mistake made by those who blame social media for teens’ depression, it may simply be that more sensitive people use social media in the first place.
The bottom line is that virtual and physical worlds are not zero-sum. Except at the extremes, participation in one does not detract from participation in the other. They are complements, not antagonists, especially as used by teenagers. A troubled professional and political elite quailing from facing the realities teenagers must face should show grownup humility by backing off until more focused research fills the huge gaps in present knowledge.
BOOM. Indeed, the dangers of both the real world AND the virtual world have been grossly exaggerated by the culture of fear promoted largely by the 24/7 fearporn news cycle, whose roots go back to the early 1980s moral panics.
Well-said as usual, Mike! Preach! Once again, the answer is MORE liberty for young people, NOT less. And grownups need to get their own act together too, stop spreading moral panic, fix themselves, and get the logs out their own eyes first before even considering the specks in the eyes of young people.