Years ago – I retired from teaching in 2015 – I used Back to School Night as an opportunity to speak to parents about the ways they can help their child succeed in school. One suggestion was to refuse to give the kid a smartphone. Another was to never install a computer in the child’s bedroom. A lone computer for school work should be placed in a common area in the home and supervised by the parent. No personal smartphone, carte blanche internet access, and limit the availability of home electronic devices (TVs, tablets, etc.). Add making family meals a communal experience.
Good advice? Probably, but the genie has leapt out of the bottle long ago. Today, we have a youth culture that has taken a dark turn. Witness the school shootings since at least Columbine. Two, one in 2023 (the Nashville killer, Audrey Hale) and this most recent one, are transgender young adults targeting children. No, transgenderism is not an archetype for mass homicide. But maybe gender anxieties can come hitched to other emotional comorbidities. It’s something to seriously ponder.
We certainly have an entire generation intimately obsessed with the online world. There are many dark places in that space, and one of the darkest is social media. It has the awful capacity to accelerate discomfort, discontent, and organized bullying. The digital world has the nasty habit of according distance from the objects of online hate. The sentiment is depersonalized thereby removing the normal constraints that inhabit one-on-one encounters. It should not be surprising that an explosion of rage occasionally occurs.
In this regard, I am reluctant to turn to Netflix as a window into modern youth culture; however, I recommend “Adolescence” for a realistic perspective on the problem. The story and scenes are gripping for what it seems to be saying about the social underbelly of our children’s lives. A 13-year-old murderer, the edgy middle school social atmosphere, an ever-present online culture, a nearly dysfunctional school with a spottily competent teaching staff and administrators, and omnipresent video in the classroom make for a troubling stew. I have seen the first two episodes, and that is my impression at this point.
Are we making our children forever anxious and fundamentally illiterate? Is social media a catalyst for faddish ideologies and their ensuing emotional discomforts? Could we be breeding our own demise? Please watch “Adolescence” now showing on Netflix, at least the first two episodes. It could be a chronicle of our descent into madness.
RogerG