Where are Kids Supposed to Connect?

I have been mulling this thought over for a long time. I don’t have a good answer for why we think this is going to help the mental health issue among teenagers and other kids, yet here we are.

What do we know?

• We know that teens are dealing with mental health issues at alarmingly high rates.
• We know that many of those issues tie back to being lonely – disconnected from peers and supportive adults.
• We know that our communities have also become less connected – the loss of third spaces, for example, is harming our mental health.

If we consider what has changed for kids over the last couple of decades, the issues are similar. Kids don’t wander around our communities on their own anymore. We’ve decided that was too dangerous. Outside organized sports, there aren’t many places where teens can socialize offline.

Naturally, in a world where they no longer had access to peers outside of school, they turned to the internet. Phones and social media were the fallback for connecting. Now, however, many find that the option has been taken away as well.

That’s why this article resonates with me:

Young people’s social worlds are ‘thinning’ – here’s how that’s affecting wellbeing

Research suggests that children today have significantly less freedom to roam, play outdoors, or gather with peers than previous generations.

The environments in which young people can explore, fail safely and develop social mastery have been radically narrowed. It is into an already thinning social ecosystem that digital platforms enter.

The article links to additional information on the harmful effects of not developing the social skills teens acquire in some of these settings. Among the reasons for the thinning are societal factors, loss of funding for programs and activities, risk-averse parenting that doesn’t provide space for experimentation, and polarization among groups.

This gap has been widening, and the online world has been there to fill some of it. Is it perfect? No. It also has risks, and I’m not going to argue that the big tech companies haven’t been working hard to manipulate us into spending more time on their platforms. They have.

But it also provided space for teens to develop crucial social skills they haven’t been able to practice. Without it, I come back to the question at hand. Where are teens supposed to go? Where can they develop social skills and connections by experimenting and learning with a variety of peer interactions?

Banning teens from social media and smartphones will not answer that question. What are we doing to make sure there is space for that?