This perception could not be further from the truth. These children have developed the ability to take on the perspective of others and, as a result, experience empathy without having to be lectured about it, as so many of us were. They feel abundant empathy, from a very early age, to the extent that they are emotionally overwhelmed. I believe kids feel more deeply now than they ever have, but their young minds are wholly unprepared for the broad perspective they have on the world, including the awareness of the suffering of others.
Kids today have an exceptionally high empathy load. If their friends are hurting, they are hurting. It’s also important to remember that if you are hurting, they feel that as well. I don’t know the parent who wants to pile their suffering onto their child, but your children are absorbing that nonetheless. It’s important that you know that, along with their anxiety, your anxiety and fear is in their head as well.
Also, children today are far more open-minded, accepting of differences, and inclusive. They hold opinions on politics and culture. They are less likely to tolerate bullying or injustice of virtually any kind, and they recognize the emotional complexities not only of their own lives, but of the lives of others as well. This ability is creating a far more empathic generation, a generation far more engaged socially and politically than any generation preceding them. They feel deeply, not only their own joys, pains, and sorrows, but those of others as well, especially their peers. Too often, they serve as de facto therapists for one another, forgoing homework or sleep in favor of working through a friend’s emotional difficulties. I have been told countless stories of suicidal teens claiming they would not be drawing breath were it not for a caring friend available to them in the middle of the night.
As a result, a striking number of kids say they want to do what I do as adults. They want to help others.
Of course, as much as this appears to be an encouraging phenomenon, it is challenging as well. I lean on five years of graduate school and endless hours of supervision to do this type of work effectively, and our kids are attempting to save the actual and emotional lives of their friends, on their own, often silently, with no training whatsoever. It can be an unreasonable, dangerous task for them to take on.
And I have worked with more than one child who served as a default counselor to a friend who has actually gone on to take his or her own life. And the ensuing guilt, that nagging question of whether he or she could have done something more to prevent the tragedy, does far more emotional damage than any child should ever have to bear.
You may wonder why our children talk to each other, especially when they feel emotions that may be life-threatening. I’ve asked a number of kids that very question, and the answers are unequivocal, and strikingly consistent. We parents are too often afraid of their fears, depression, and anxiety. Further, our kids are fully aware of our fear. So, they often go elsewhere. Shifting this dynamic is a crucial component of the parenting mandate here. Because children are not prepared to feel this degree of psychic pain, nor are they prepared to guide one another through it. So, we need to allay our own fears in order to be fully available to our children when they are in the fog or darkness of anxiety and depression.
When we feel that inclination to shrink away from our child, or that draw toward anger because they are presenting us with some powerful negative emotion we feel we cannot control, we need to turn directly toward them. We need them to know they can come to us when they feel their worst.
Though I do not blame social media for all of the difficulties our children are suffering through, it does provide a frighteningly consistent set of comparison points for our newly self-conscious kids:
“She’s better looking than I am.”
“He’s built better than me.”
“She’s way more popular than me—look at all those followers and likes.”
“He has no acne, and I’m covered in it.”
“She’s so much skinnier than I am.”
“He gets so many more girls than me.”
For just a moment, picture the scene: Your child is alone in her room, silent, door closed. She is shut off from the world, alone with her social media. She reviews Instagram, and sees other girls posting photos (typically carefully selected from perhaps hundreds of selfies) doctored in the extreme, every blemish removed, every unwanted ounce erased, hair treated and digitally dyed, the posts accumulating likes as she watches. Your child looks on in a state of constant comparison, self-esteem bruised.
She switches to Snapchat, another widely-used social media platform. There, she may see group chats that exclude her, Snap streaks (consecutive days in communication with another user) broken, or friends at a party she either was never invited to, or was lied to by a friend about attending. And right before her is photographic evidence, not only that it is taking place, typically in real time, but also that it is awesome (for who among us presents our lonely, homely, broken moments on social media?).
In the past, we may have suspected that other people were deemed more popular than we were, or better looking, or were included socially on a more regular basis. Kids today—they know. They can see it, as they sit there alone, in their rooms, wondering why they were the ones excluded. And trust me here, many, many kids feel as if they have been singled out and left out. And they feel as if they are the only ones. This I hear an awful lot as well.
And here’s where it gets even trickier. I worked with a sixteen-year-old girl, Christine, a while back who demonstrated for me how she crafted her daily selfie Instagram post. First, she would take hundreds of photos from various angles, trying to capture the cutest, brightest, thinnest, most perfect shot. Then, she would get to work editing the photo as described above. All told, Christine informed me that the process took, on average, about an hour a day.
During one session, she showed me her photo from the day before. She said, “Cute, right? I know, it actually looks nothing at all like me.” Then she added, “But look at all the likes!”
Imagine the dissonance here: I take hundreds of selfies in order to find one that is workable, that makes me look physically acceptable. Then, I will change virtually every element of the pic, until I am nearly unrecognizable as myself. Only then am I willing to post my imposter image in order to gain likes, the slimmest of substitutes for self-worth.
And Christine is smart. She knows she is fooling herself. She’s receiving the likes, but she is keenly aware that she has effectively manufactured something to attain them. It’s a pretty empty win. But it works like an addiction. She feels as if she needs the likes, that they define an important part of her. Without them, she fears she would feel even worse about herself.
“This doesn’t really represent me, but I’ll be making another post like this tomorrow.”
Teenagers fall into these daily loops easily, as posts and likes quickly become primary components of their sense of self-worth. And on Snapchat, for instance, the loops are encouraged, as kids work to sustain Snap streaks, in which they send and receive daily strings of messages to and from the same people. I have seen teenagers in tears when their phones are taken away as part of a punishment for some behavior or another. Often, the fear is that their Snap streaks will be broken, and their friends will have perpetuated longer streaks with other friends, making them less relevant, literally out of the social game. Even one day off breaks a streak, and can truly feel socially devastating. This all sounds absolutely ridiculous, I know.
But remember: your child did not come up with any of this, and as far as she is concerned, it has always been this way.
Herein lies a big part of the problem