Yesterday, Mashable posted another article written by a teen, this one entitled “I’m 15 and Snapchat makes me feel awful about myself.” Like their other articles written by teens, this should not be taken as a representation of all 15-year-olds; it is an opinion piece written by one teen. It’s a chilling look into what a great number of teens might be feeling or experiencing, however. As parents and educators, we need to be aware of technology, how our students use it, and how to help them grow and become responsible digital citizens in light of that.
Pre-teen and teen years can be difficult. It is a time of figuring out who you are and where you fit, or may one day fit, into the world. It is a time when we really start to grapple with our identity. Teenage years are often seen as rebellious years because children begin to explore who they are apart from their parents and family. Because so much of our identity is found in our relationships with others, teens turn to their peers and friends for insight into their identity. Who am I? Do I “fit in”? Will you accept me?
We live in an age that reveres celebrity—one in which our children’s heroes are more likely to be actors or musicians than firefighters or world leaders. Celebrities are seen as winners, those who lead perfect and interesting lives, those who look the way we should look, and who are wealthy beyond imagining. While we may logically recognize that they are not, in fact, perfect, we are constantly inundated with images of them and their lifestyles. It can create a sort of anxiety in us, especially teenagers looking for their identities for the first time, about our own significance.
Enter social media. We can doctor our images to make us look more beautiful or take 100 selfies till we get the “perfect” one to post. We can obsess over how many likes we get and wonder what’s wrong with us if every one of our online “friends” doesn’t like it. We can just post photos of the parties we attend, the “cool” people we hang out with, or the interesting things we do, so that others look at us and envy our lives or begin to see us as the images we project online. Too often we leave out posts about the gritty side of our lives: our insecurities, our failures, our mundane moments. I am by no means suggesting we should post more of these images, but one can perhaps see the imbalance we project online.
Add to that the “perfect” lives our peers or friends post on their feeds, and the FOMO (fear of missing out) described in the aforementioned Mashable article begins to make sense. A teen not yet sure of her own identity might know that she is not perfect, but in comparing herself to those around her and the selves they project online, she may begin to believe that she’s just not good enough.
Unfortunately for many teens, the desire to be accepted causes them to grasp for celebrity in any way available to them. Some young men will turn to horrible acts of violence (source, Psychology Today) and some young women will turn to acts against their own body in order to gain recognition or celebrity that equates to acceptance (even if of the infamous variety). Please note that I am in no way suggesting that this happens or could happen to all teens…but it does happen to some of them.
What can we as parents and educators do? Are things really that bleak? Yes and no. Many teens today suffer from a severe identity crisis. While it is a relatively normal part of being a teenager, and not all of our kids will turn out to be mentally unstable or full on clinically narcissistic, the problem may be compounded by accessibility to tools that can tell us (even if only superficially) minute-by-minute how “loved” or “accepted” we are. We need to work to create a culture, both in our school and in our homes, in which our children understand where their true identity is found. It is not found in what others think of us but in our relationship with the Creator of the Universe, the One who accepts us as we are and who loved us so much He came to this earth and died for our sins so that we might have a relationship with Him.
Our identity, our true identity, can only be found in Christ.
