Adults are sacrificing social connection to veg out with their phones, setting a bad example for kids.
By danah boyd
24 janvier 2025 at 12:00 UTC+1
Parents Have a Worse Relationship to Tech Than Kids (Audio)
7:31
A decade ago, danah boyd wrote It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale University Press) to “shed light on the complex and fascinating practices of contemporary American youth” navigating the evolving online world. In this Next Chapter, boyd explores the role of parents, who are upset about their kids’ online habits — but also modeling the same or worse behaviors.
Many kids are not OK. Over the past few years, we have seen countless headlines about the mental health challenges young people face. Much ado is made of their relationship with technology. This isn’t the first time there’s been a panic about the role of tech broadly, and social media specifically. When I wrote It’s Complicated, the dominant fears were bullying, predation and addiction.
But now, as then, people have the analysis backwards. Technology is not creating a lack of social connection; it’s the lack of social connection that is driving young people to technology. This time, ironically, parents are also a much bigger part of the problem than they were a decade ago.
Many parents today focus all their spare time on helping their children thrive, often to the detriment of nurturing their own friendships and activities. The result of this intensive parenting is that too many young people don’t get to witness their parents socializing or engaging in activities they’re passionate about. Instead, all the children see is their parents staring at a phone.
In 2014, teenagers told me that they were turning to social media to find entertainment and to connect with friends. They were stressed, exhausted and had no time to hang out, other than online. A decade later, parents seeking downtime and connections make the same excuses. It’s an understandable response to soaring stress levels. But since they were little, many teens have watched their parents using technology to veg out or pretend to be present at the game while doomscrolling. Through a teenager’s eye, adulting looks like a horror show of exhaustion, lost friendships and zero joy.
Social Connections
The problem goes well beyond hypocrisy. By letting go of their own social connections to manage their kids’ lives, parents are hurting their offspring in ways they most likely don’t realize. The deep connections forged by intensive parenting during the elementary years start to feel overbearing during adolescence. As teenagers pull away to develop their independence, some parents become co-dependent caregivers whose identities depend on being needed.
Recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the more toxic a home environment is, the more likely it is that a teenager will struggle with mental health and the more likely it is that they will have unhealthy technology use.
After writing It’s Complicated, I became a founding board member of a mental health organization called Crisis Text Line, which supports people in their darkest hours by connecting them with trained counselors. Through my involvement with this group, I’ve gotten a front-row seat to the issues that bring teenagers to the brink. A little secret? Its almost never about technology.
When trained counselors work to de-escalate someone in the throes of a suicide attempt, the top priority is to get rid of the gun or the pills, or to otherwise walk someone back from the edge. The next move is to create an alternate plan for the next 24 hours and beyond. Crisis work isn’t about fixing the underlying problem, but assisting the person in seeking out more sustained support. A key element is to help the person in crisis identify a responsible, trusted individual they can turn to. When it comes to young people, that person is typically a non-custodial adult.
Teenagers today, however, struggle to identify any trusted adult they can turn to. It’s a dynamic that was exacerbated during the pandemic, which upended social practices. We saw a range of natural experiments unfold as kids were maximally online and had few interactions with people outside of their family.
Supportive Adults
“Non-custodial adult” sounds awfully clinical, but I’m using the term intentionally. This category could include aunties and pastors, neighbors and coaches, mentors and camp counselors. These adults are present in a kid’s life in varying ways, and ideally not as a source of pressure or oversight. (Sadly, many coaches are now a source of pressure rather than support. And because of new state laws requiring that teachers inform parents if their kids identify as LGBT, many teens are scared to talk to teachers.)
Think back to the adults that had your back in different ways when you were growing up and you’ll find that many were not your parents. These supportive adults aren’t just there for kids when they need them; they are also often well placed to identify a problem. They can recognize changes in mood or behaviors over time.
But when Covid-19 hit, we saw a disturbing pattern: Many young people in crisis couldn’t identify a single trusted adult they could turn to. This made sense since teenagers were stuck at home. But even as stay-at-home restrictions eased, the dynamic didn’t let up.
Through a teenager’s eye, adulting looks like a horror show of exhaustion, lost friendships and zero joy.
In my book, I talk about how young people have lost access to public spaces since the 1970s, but I didn’t identify the parallel loss of access to trusted adults. When I went back to interviews from a decade ago, I realized that the signs were already there.
Teens were telling me that every adult in their life was putting pressure on them — to succeed in school, to perform at sports, to be perfect for college admissions. They were telling me about how they’re not allowed to sleep over at friends’ houses. They were describing how their parents don’t have any friends anymore. And two decades of fear-mongering about interacting with adults online meant that few teens had digital connections with adults, even among their own family. This has only gotten worse.
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For many adults, social ties also disintegrated during the pandemic. But even though the pandemic is over, many of us feel too busy to rebuild them. This is dreadful for our children. Meanwhile, adults who were once amazing anchors for teens — like teachers and coaches — feel pressured to minimize informal interactions with young people. Fewer non-parents or empty nesters are devoting time to ensuring that the kids around them are doing okay. Decades of sexual-predation paranoia means that even well-meaning adults don’t want to create the wrong impression.
Key Connections
Young people need to bear witness to grown-up relationships and they need to have access to a wide range of adults who will be there for them when things get rough. Today’s dominant intensive parenting strategy leaves no room for either of these. It’s not just bad for parents; it’s also bad for their children.
Teenagers are still turning to their phones to find and maintain social relationships. We should recognize their longing to socialize and support them. This will not happen by simply taking kids phones in the hope that they will wake up from some stupor and go play outside. If you tell young people to stop using social media, they don’t suddenly have “real” connections. Nurturing relationships takes time, space and support. Technology use is not the problem here; it’s the symptom.
Relationships matter. Technology can play a supporting role, but it is neither the solution to the relationship problem nor the cause of it. For young people, learning how to develop healthy relationships is a journey. Not only do children need the space to nurture relationships, they also need role models. One major challenge today’s children face may be that their parents have forgotten how to nurture relationships of their own. Luckily, this is something that we can all do something about.
danah boyd is an incoming professor of communication at Cornell University.
