“Hold on to your Kids”: children and social media
By Joseph Shaw | 21 August 2024
I don’t like referring to children as “kids”, but this is the title of a book some readers may find interesting or useful: Hold on to your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter more than Peers, by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. It was first published in 2004 but has been republished this year, with an extra chapter, by Penguin, nothing if not a mainstream publisher.
The idea expressed by the subtitle is not a new one. In 1997, the folktale enthusiast Robert Bly wrote a book called The Sibling Society: An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood, which had a particular focus on how men find it difficult to come to maturity without good father figures. This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but Bly felt that he had to work very hard to get it across to his audience, and he wasn’t wrong.
Neufeld and Maté take a more scientific approach, citing sociological and psychological research, and their concern is with both boys and girls. To give a flavour of the book, here is another much-needed statement of the obvious, about the nature of peer groups. The authors address the question, “Aren’t parents often far from perfect?” (p 11):
“Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other. When we compare peer relationships with parent relationships for what is missing, parents come out looking like saints. The results spell disaster for many children.”
Bly’s phrase “sibling society” expresses the situation in which parents are replaced, for children, by people of their own generation, as sources of guidance and support. Considering it today, it seems to give this situation too optimistic a spin. Siblings, when push comes to shove, generally have your best interests at heart, even if they lack the maturity to advance them very effectively. An alarming number of peer groups in the social media age will drive a member into a breakdown, or even to suicide, and boast about it afterwards. Things have become so much bleaker since Bly was writing, with the advent of social media.
Indeed, one reason that it has been so difficult to get parents, schools and policy-makers to take the problem seriously is that people in a position of influence today grew up when things were not nearly so bad. In a larger sense, many are still acting from a script dating from the 1960s, when parents were typecast as hidebound, unimaginative and over-protective. Many factors combined to undermine the influence of parents over their children in the 1960s, including the prosperity that put money in children’s pockets, the expansion of tertiary education, television, and the breakup of extended families as a result of war damage, migration, and suburbanisation.
Callum Brown, in his seminal The Death of Christian Britain, notes how, again and again, parents are reported in the 1960s as saying “I don’t understand my children”. Though born only 25 to 35 years apart, parents and their children were products of such different sets of cultural influences that they seemed to be from different planets. The ambitions and expectations of parents simply didn’t map onto those of their children, and nor did their values or religious practice.
This can be expressed as a society-wide failure to pass on culture, including religion. What parents had received, in terms of values and practices, they failed to pass on: not deliberately, but because they were faced with a baffling level of resistance by their children.
The influences on children in the 1960s and 1970s were not solely each other. I’ve noted the role of television and tertiary education. Television programming from that era today seems astonishing wholesome, and university courses astonishingly sane; the problem was that they differed from what so many of the parents had received: they represented a break of continuity. Parents and children could not so easily talk to each other; they lacked common reference points.
Today’s problem is not the same as the problem of the 1960s but downstream of it. All kinds of cultural traditions were disrupted over the following decades, diminishing the resources of successive generations of parents. People who had kicked over the traces in their youth were not psychologically well-suited to laying down the law as young parents. Parents often regard a high level of intergenerational conflict as normal, and even to think that it is right for their children to break out of old patterns. They have been encouraged by many parenting guides to maximise their children’s autonomy, and schools have told them that many core tasks of traditional parenting would now be done by professionals in a classroom.
And then came social media. The most disempowered generation of parents in human history has had to face the most powerful challenge to parental influence that silicon valley has been able to devise.
Social media is not just a way for people to communicate with each other. Email, messaging apps and discussion forums (with human moderators) are that, and the speed and impersonal nature of the medium (even when users are not actually anonymous) make these potentially dangerous, and ideal for bullying and sexual harassment. Social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter/X, Instagram and Facebook add to these problems algorithms to keep users engaged, which seek to create something as close as possible to an addiction. Users’ feelings of achievement are manipulated by features rewarding contributions that stimulate engagement, and it is made competitive. These features create insatiable pressures to create shock and outrage and — paradoxically — to conform, to jump on bandwagons. In combination, there is a built-in tendency, only partially mitigated by moderators, to imitate successful social media accounts in doing shocking things, up to and including indecency, bullying and self-mutilation.
In the meantime, social media interaction becomes such an important part of children’s social lives, that the children themselves exert pressure to maintain access to it, even if it is making them miserable.
Concerns about children on social media do not arise out of naivety, moral panic, or a desire to limit children’s creative opportunities. They come from a realistic understanding of how social media works. From my own experience witnessing bullying on Twitter/X, it is clear that bullies can become completely detached from their normal sources of self-restraint, as they egg each other on. “Watch this!” they say, as they seek to get a reaction. In one case I recall particularly, the bullies were not only adults but supposedly Catholics.
To say that it is irresponsible to place children in this environment would be an understatement. The problems are set out in detail in Jonathan Haidt’s recent book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, if anyone needs to be convinced.
A lot of the public debate revolves around ways in which the algorithms could be tweaked, so that, for example, children contemplating suicide are not encouraged to do it by thousands of posts brought to their screens automatically. This has its importance, but what is more important still is parents resuming their authority as the decisive and daily influences in their children’s lives.
Hold on to your Kids provides practical advice as well as theoretical guidance, but the ultimate objective must be clear. Parents must act on the certain knowledge (having if necessary first made it true) that no-one loves their children as they do, no-one knows their children as they do, no-one has as much in common with their children as they do. Influences on your children from outside the home are inevitable, and many are positive. This can’t simply be left to chance, however: parents have got to know what is going on and be able to intervene when necessary.
Parenting is an imperfect science, and I am myself an extremely imperfect parent. This reality should not prevent us taking some obvious precautions, which a lot of parents today do not seem capable of doing. Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, reported this year that almost a quarter of 5–7 year-olds have a smartphone, and nearly 40% are using social media. Yes, rescuing one’s children from these statistics may not be as simple as taking a sledgehammer to a smartphone, but it is not impossible either.