Your Teenager Is Not Crazy

by Jerusha Clark

  Does the way a teen uses technology benefit his or her life (relationships, character, academics, communal responsibility, etc.)? Most likely the answer is “sometimes, but not always.” How can we use technology for all it’s worth, optimizing the positive potential and diminishing negative effects?

  Because electronic media is such a huge topic, we’ve divided the issues into two chapters. The structure for these chapters will differ slightly. Instead of a “Psych 101” section, we’ll tackle specific technology concerns individually. This chapter will deal with cell phones, social media, and internet browsing. We’ll tackle TV, film, music, and video gaming in the next.

  Your Teen’s 24-7 Companion

  The cell phone wields tremendous power in teenage life. Statistics show that 77 percent of adolescents own a phone and approximately 40 percent have a smartphone.4 Teenage girls typically spend more time on their phones—both talking and texting. But factoring in data for both genders, the number of texts sent and received averages out to 3,853 per month; that’s well in excess of 100 texts every day.5

  Studies have shown that almost half of adolescents experience feelings of anxiety and insecurity when their text messages go unanswered, and 73 percent feel “panicked” if they misplace their phone.6 How can parents help teens manage this virtually omnipresent technology?

  The first and perhaps best way is to have them deliberately turn off the device at prearranged times. Choosing to turn off the phone demonstrates that life can be lived without it. Making dinnertime a no-cell time frame and setting a “bedtime” for your teen’s phone are good places to start. Of course, the practice will work best if you set aside your device at the same time.

  Turning off the phone before bed results in significant benefits, while not doing so leads to detrimental effects. Using a cell phone to text, talk, or surf the web at night has been linked to poor sleep habits (more on this in chapter 20) as well as depressive symptoms. Since approximately 80 percent of smartphone users and 53 percent of conventional cell phone users leave their device on twenty-four hours a day, millions of teens are suffering from fatigue and mood disruption as a result of never disconnecting from their phones.7

  Studies also show that adolescents who are heavy cell phone users have shorter attention spans, make more errors in memory-based tasks, learn slower, and retain less than their peers.8 Excessive cell phone activity can also be dangerous. Increasing incidents of traumatic brain injuries can be linked to texting while walking, and digital use while driving has surpassed drunk driving as the leading cause of teenage accidents and fatalities. Some research indicates that driving while texting is six times more dangerous than driving drunk.9 Finally, while we will discuss the impact of pornography specifically in chapter 23, it’s essential to mention the peril of instant access on cell phones. Many teens first view porn on a mobile device, and since they stimulate the brain so violently, these salacious images can be burned into an adolescent’s memory. Reduced use equals reduced potential for negative influence or harm.

  How you use your cell phone also influences how your teen uses his or hers. If you’re habitually telling your teen to wait while you finish your message, post, or level, don’t be surprised if you often get a “Hold on, I just have to . . . ” response. Many of the physiological and psychological effects we’ve outlined thus far—fear of being disconnected, anxiety when someone doesn’t respond to a message, and a sense of emptiness when no technology is available—apply equally to adults as they do to teenagers. Please show your teen that technology doesn’t rule you.

  Another excellent way to help your teen use his or her cell phone well is to practice the “People first, devices second” rule. People are infinitely more important than apps and alerts. Most adolescents won’t be able to see this instantly, so anticipate a learning curve. It’s okay for teens to struggle. Help them succeed by suggesting an activity or topic of conversation that interests them and encourage their efforts.

  Networked

  Parental approaches to social networking differ widely. Some prohibit it altogether, others monitor it heavily, and some believe it’s “no big deal.”

  Many of our daughters’ peers had social network accounts prior to age thirteen. We drew a line by showing our girls the user agreements, clearly indicating thirteen was the minimum age to establish an account. We told them we wouldn’t lie so they could be “connected.” Judging by our daughters’ reactions, it was as if we’d decided to become Amish.

  To us, things seemed very straightforward: it would involve lying to allow our girls on any of the typical social networks at that time, so there was nothing to “choose”; it simply wasn’t an option.

  On her thirteenth birthday, however, our oldest daughter wanted to open an account on the photo sharing site her friends used. We’d researched this and talked to others, and we decided to sign up for our own account so that we could monitor her posts. We talked to her about online etiquette, privacy, and ethics, and we limited her access.

  After a couple of years, we can report on the positive and negative aspects of allowing her to be networked. From online artists, she’s learned some fantastic techniques. The cool facts she’s gleaned and gorgeous images she’s come across have given us fodder for great conversations. We’ve laughed a lot, and shared humor is a huge blessing for our family.

  We’ve also seen firsthand how easily trashy comments or pictures can slip onto the feed, as well as how “likes” and comments (or lack thereof) impact teens. People “like,” repost, or comment on something online for a variety of reasons, but it always goes back to their personal preferences: Was that interesting, shocking, funny, or important to me? As Dr. Gary Chapman and Arlene Pellicane note in their book Growing Up Social, “It’s hard enough for adults to deal with disparaging comments online or a lack of comments, which communicate, ‘No one is interested in me.’ Imagine how hard it is for children who don’t yet possess the emotional maturity to cope with the digital world.”10 Online “likes” are conditional, but teenagers need more unconditional love in their lives, not more appearance- and performance-based admiration, which easily leads to insecurity, anxiety, and resentment toward others who are “liked” more.

  Studies demonstrate that heavy usage of social networking sites leads to envy, triggering both physiological and psychological symptoms of depression in adolescents. This was particularly true for those who “strongly agreed” with the following:

  “It is so frustrating to see some people always having a good time.”

  “Many of my friends have a better life than me.”

  “Many of my friends are happier than me.”11

  When adolescents perceive life is better for “everyone else,” dissatisfaction with their own situation increases.

  Research also indicates social networking trains teenagers to become undisciplined adults. Scientists have linked social networking to lack of self-control, since it “interferes with clear thinking and decision-making, which lowers self-control and leads to rash, impulsive buying and poor eating decisions. Greater social media use is associated with a higher body mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for consumers with many close friends in their social network.”12 Obviously, those are not the character traits we want our teenagers to develop! Our teens—whose ability to evaluate cause and effect is under construction—need help recognizing that constant exposure to advertising triggers the desire to eat or shop excessively.

  Adolescents also need help navigating the additional pressures ever-widening social circles can create. According to one study, the more “friends” a person has online, the quicker social media becomes a source of stress.13 As more and more “friends” or “contacts” are added, teenagers begin to treat those with whom they are “connected” as commodities. If they don’t like what someone says, they hide or “unfriend” them. There’s no need to work through relationship difficulties when you’re on to the next
click. Increasingly, teenagers avoid the natural challenges of friendship by hiding behind technology. Teens who train their brains to use electronic, “srry 4 htng on u” messages shortchange their ability to interact with people face-to-face, now and in the future.14

  We recommend the ABCs of handling social media well: awareness, boundaries, and communication.

  Be aware of your teen’s social media habits. Even if you don’t allow your teen to be on the most widely used networks, he or she is likely watching videos online, reading posts and emails, or being exposed to social networking with their friends. Because of this, all parents—both those with strict limits and those with looser ones—need to be aware of how social media plays a role in their teen’s life.

  Establish boundaries. It’s best to do this before your teen starts using social networking, but boundaries can be set up at any point. Though daunting, it’s a battle worth fighting. For younger adolescents, identify specific times when they can and cannot be online. Since older adolescents need to learn self-regulation, gradually releasing control over your teens’ choices is essential. If you’ve helped them develop self-restraint along the way, you can trust that their decisions will be good much of the time and that when they fail (which they will!), they can learn from it.

  Finally, communication with your teen about social networking is nonnegotiable. Ask them to show you the funniest thing they’ve seen recently or whether they’ve learned anything new online. Eventually these conversations about social media will enable you to ask about negative things they’ve seen or experienced online. Talk about your own social networking, sharing your thoughts and emotions. This normalizes conversation about online activities, making it more likely that your teen will talk with you in the future.

  Surf’s Up . . . Always

  Internet surfing is more than a pastime for teenagers; for many, it’s their primary source of knowledge and entertainment. The massive amount of wonderful information available to adolescents and the sheer volume of possible distractions (many of them brain-numbingly silly) is overwhelming.

  As noted previously, every digital click and alert signals the brain to respond. For teens, with highly charged reward systems, every computerized “surprise” (e.g., new video or website) primes the neural pump for pleasure. But when there’s so much available, teens end up drinking from a proverbial fire hydrant. The human brain—adolescent or adult—simply cannot process continuous stimuli and information.

  Did You Know?

  The most popular video streaming website in the world recently published statistics about its virtual omnipresence. Boasting more than 1 billion users who generate billions of views every day, this website uploads 300 hours of video every minute.15 According to a Variety magazine survey, its “stars” (popular video creators) are more influential amongst teenagers than mainstream celebrities.16

  More than 1.3 million applications are currently available in the iOS App Store, serving 155 countries around the world. More than 300 million users visit the App Store each week. In October 2014, a new record of 7.8 million daily downloads was set.17

  Google now processes an average of 40,000 search queries every second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.18 Teenagers can surf approximately 920 million active websites at any moment of any day, in any location that has an internet connection.19

  According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, deep thinking becomes increasingly impossible as the online world overwhelms neural circuits with fleeting and temporary information. “Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow. . . . When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” which is “the type of thinking technology encourages and rewards.”20

  The online world also reinforces what Dr. Kathy Koch calls the “I Am the Center of My Own Universe” myth, a falsehood teenagers already tend to believe.21 Because the online world is structured around each person’s “preferences,” it’s easy for teens to find the virtual world of perpetual entertainment and personal relevance exciting and enjoyable. In the real world, limits to individual autonomy and responsibility encroach on the “what I want, when I want it,” “only if it makes me happy” mentality.

  Teenagers must learn they’re not the center of the universe. They should also spend more time in the real world than in the digital one, which means limiting web surfing. I know it’s not easy, but that’s no excuse. It takes discipline to teach your teenager to limit him- or herself, but thankfully God gives us the wisdom and courage we need as parents to set these boundaries and stand behind them.

  Faith 101

  The Bible consistently enjoins God’s people to “pay attention” to wisdom. The book of Proverbs admonishes us to “pay attention and gain understanding” (4:1), while the book of Exodus reminds us to “pay no attention to lies” (5:9) and the book of Jeremiah reveals what happened when God’s people “did not listen or pay attention”—they went their own way and suffered greatly (17:23, 27).

  The powerful digital world has made it more difficult than ever to pay attention. According to Joseph McCormack, author of Brief: Making a Bigger Impact by Saying Less, the average person’s attention span has decreased by 40 percent since the year 2000. Typically, people now pay attention for approximately eight seconds before becoming distracted, tuning out, or choosing to refocus on the original source.22

  Eight seconds. Wow.

  In Search of Balance author Dr. Richard Swenson adds, “We have no longitudinal attention span today. Instead, we have ‘continuous partial attention.’ Technology has enhanced our productivity and simultaneously destroyed our depth.”23

  The endless stream of information to which we’re exposed on smartphones, tablets, computers, and other digital devices tells us what to pay attention to and what to think about. Entire days can easily go by without a teenager choosing what to think about or choosing to pay attention to what really matters. Neural circuits contributing to faith, hope, and love need stimulation and attention so they can grow healthy and strong.

  Research shows that not only has attention span decreased, but people rarely pay attention to one thing at a time. Among teenagers, electronic multitasking has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years.24 Adolescents often pride themselves on being able to do “lots of things at once,” but studies show that effective multitasking is a myth. Paying careful attention to multiple things at once is impossible; multitasking inherently “decreases our attention, making us increasingly less able to focus. . . . This opens us up to shallow and weak judgments and decisions, and it results in passive mindlessness.”25 Surely it is our responsibility as Christian parents to help our adolescents learn to pay attention to what matters. Model paying attention to one thing at a time, especially to life’s most important dimension: a relationship with God.

  Your teenager’s prefrontal cortex is under major construction during the adolescent years. And guess what helps activate it? Deep thinking. Focused attention also improves connections within and between nerve networks, particularly in the frontal and middle regions of the brain, including the emotional limbic system. Neural integration in these areas helps teenagers tremendously.26 It also increases concentration, decreases switching between tasks pointlessly, makes necessary transitions between tasks more effective, decreases emotional volatility, and results in increased completion of projects.27 What teen wouldn’t benefit from this?

  God wrote his truth in us on a cellular level. We perform better, feel better, and live better when we pay attention, as he commands us to do.

  Help your teen pay attention to the right things by ensuring an appropriate environment and providing opportunities. When attending to one task (i.e., homework) is important, disallow electronic multitasking, unless it’s listening to calming instrumental music, which studies show actually aids in conc
entration. Consider reading a passage of Scripture at the dinner table or before bed. Buy your teenager a devotional to read on his or her own.

  Rewarding teens for memorizing Scripture gives them an attractive reason to pay attention to the truth. There are few ways you could better spend your money, as the investment is eternal and kingdom-building. And because God’s Word always accomplishes its purpose, never coming back void (see Isa. 55:11), you can trust that eventually your teen will discover the reward of knowing God’s Word for its own sake.

  Try It Today: Start Writing a Tech Agreement

  If you’re like most parents, supervising tech usage is difficult. One way to help teenagers take responsibility for monitoring themselves (an important task in adolescence) is to collaborate with them in writing and agree to a tech use “contract.” This also increases adolescent buy-in. Negotiating a tech agreement will require you to compromise in some ways, so before you broach this subject with your teen, remember to “sort” your battles (review the steps on page 97).

  Here are some important areas to address in a tech agreement:

  Privacy. Research shows that 59 percent of teens “interact with strangers online and overshare information, even though they realize that these activities can put them at risk. . . . This could be because 33 percent of them [teens and tweens] say they feel more accepted online than in real life.”28 Discuss this with your teen and then remind them (often) that giving out or posting phone numbers, email or home addresses, and other personal information, like whereabouts or employment locations, is never acceptable.

  Propriety. Identify inappropriate web content, including cyberbullying, pornography, and online gambling. It’s also important to emphasize that you expect your teens not to text or post anything they wouldn’t say to someone face-to-face. Finally, reinforce with adolescents that if they encounter disturbing images or text online, they can talk to you about it.