| Parenting Today Is Different All the changes in our world since the computer was invented are amazing. I had no idea how much everyday life would change from my first computer. In particular, nobody told parents that smartphones were going to change everything, and now parents are sitting with problems that didn’t exist when they were growing up, with no one who’s been through it to ask. And smartphones are affecting teens’ mental health in significant ways. Here’s what we’re actually seeing in terms of the challenges. More on ways to manage in our next blog. The Phone in the Bedroom Maria’s daughter is thirteen. She’s a good student who is helpful at home and hasn’t presented any behavior concerns to her parents. Well, except at night, when Maria keeps finding her daughter still awake scrolling at midnight. Every time Maria walks in, the phone disappears under the pillow. She tried taking it at bedtime, but her daughter completely fell apart crying, genuinely distraught, like something important had been taken from her. Maria gave it back. She didn’t know what else to do. Here’s the thing. For this generation, the phone isn’t entertainment. It’s where their friendships live. The phone is their social life. Taking it away at night feels to a thirteen-year-old like being locked out of her own house. But it’s still a problem. Screens before bed wreck sleep, and teenagers already don’t get enough. The research connects poor sleep to depression, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation (Twenge et al., 2017). Maria knows all that. It still doesn’t make the conversation easier and her teen daughter doesn’t find any of that important or relevant to her. The Stranger Who Seemed Like a Friend Lena’s daughter was fourteen. A guy reached out on a gaming platform, said he was her age, he was funny, said all the right things. They messaged for weeks. He seemed to understand her in a way her real friends didn’t, or at least that’s how it felt to her. He made her feel special. She started sending photos, nothing out of the ordinary at first, but the requests kept coming and she kept saying yes, and by the time she realized she was in trouble she was way too embarrassed to tell anyone. She was sending photos that he convinced her were normal, and they were more and more compromising. Lena found out months later when her daughter’s whole personality changed. The person her daughter had been talking to was actually 27. What he did is called grooming. It’s effective because it doesn’t feel dangerous to your teen. The teen usually feels like they are finally being understood. These guys are patient, spending weeks or months building trust before they ask for anything. Kids don’t tell their parents partly because they’ve often been specifically told not to, and often they don’t want to lose that sense of specialness. Things to watch for: a kid who suddenly guards her phone like it’s classified, stops hanging out with her regular friends, starts getting gifts or money you can’t account for, or gets really upset if she can’t check her phone. Any of those alone might be nothing, but all of them together is a conversation worth having (Wolak et al., 2008). When the Cruelty Comes From Kids She Knew Sophie moved to a new school in October, and by November she had a friend group. Things seemed okay at first, but then the texts stopped. She started getting left out when her friends got together and they began ignoring her during lunch and free periods. . Girls she thought were her friends walked past her in the hallway, ignoring her. What had happened was a thread. Someone had made screenshots of Sophie’s posts, clipped and twisted to make her look bad, with commentary piling up underneath. By the time she found it there were over forty responses. Some of it was genuinely vile.Her mom Karen only figured it out when Sophie stopped eating and wanted to stay in her room more and more, finding excuses to not go to school. When Karen finally got her talking, Sophie begged her not to do anything. She was sure that an adult getting involved would make it ten times worse. And she wasn’t wrong to worry about that. Online retaliation can spread to hundreds of people in an hour. Studies show cyberbullying does more psychological damage than in-person bullying, and the reason makes sense: it doesn’t stop when school is out (Kowalski et al., 2014). It’s in the kid’s room, on the device next to her pillow, and everywhere she goes and reaches a really big group of people quickly. The Group Chat David found the group chat by accident when his son left his phone on the counter. A message came through, and David saw it before he thought about whether he should look. What he saw was twelve and thirteen year olds sending things he souldn’t have seen at that age, including a photo of a girl from their class that she clearly hadn’t consented to share. His son hadn’t sent anything, but he also hadn’t said a word about any of it. David sat on it for two days because every option felt bad. If he told his son he’d read the message his son would lose trust in him. He could say nothing but the issue was too important to just let it go. If he went to the school to report it, he could maybe torch his son’s social life and make his son the object of rejection. Mean kids aren’t new, but we used to be able to get away from them. You went home and got a break, and the mean kids didn’t have the power to reach such a large audience. Now it’s always on, and parents usually find out too late. And even then its difficult to do anything about it that is effective. The Kid Who Already Googled It Priya’s daughter is eleven. She came home from school and announced she probably had ADHD, because she’d looked it up on AI. She was pretty much right, but Priya hadn’t said anything to her yet. She’d only been talking to the school privately, and her daughter had overheard a phone call, gone down a rabbit hole online, and arrived at her own conclusion. Kids have access to everything now. Their diagnoses, their medications, their parents’ concerns, whatever you’ve been searching. Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes it’s a ten-year-old who’s read twelve articles about a condition she doesn’t fully understand and is now scared. Parents aren’t the information gatekeepers anymore. Most are still working out what to do with that. And Then There’s the Pressure to Do It All Right Every parenting choice now comes with a referendum. There are experts everywhere online about screen time, diet, discipline, school, extracurriculars. Often the experts disagree, and there is social media feed full of parents who look like they’ve figured it out. Gentle parenting, attachment parenting, free-range parenting, authoritative parenting all have their advocates and critics. Most of these frameworks share the same quiet implication: if your kid’s struggling, something you did caused it. Kids are shaped by their biology, their friendships, their schools, their neighborhoods, and yeah, their parents. Parents are one factor among many. Treating yourself as the only variable doesn’t lead to better parenting. It mostly leads to more anxiety. What We’ve Seen Actually Help Consistency matters more than perfection. Kids need to know the adults around them won’t collapse or explode when things get hard, so being steady through your kid’s distress, which doesn’t mean fixing it, is more reassuring than it sounds. When a kid’s behavior makes no sense, it’s almost always communication of some kind. The nine-year-old who cries every morning is telling you he’s overwhelmed. Listen to your child’s behavior. Take your own needs seriously. Parenting is tough. Therapy, a parent support group, an honest conversation with someone who’s been through something similar help you be that steady rock for your kids. Parental controls have their place, but the most protective thing you can do is make sure your kid genuinely believes she can come to you with something awful. You might not be calm about it, but you won’t fall apart and you won’t abandon her. That trust gets built in regular moments, long before anything goes wrong. DBT Center Houston offers parent coaching and family therapy. If you’re in the middle of any of this and could use some support call our office or email us at administration@dbtcenter.com References Chavira, D. A., Garland, A. F., Daley, S., & Hough, R. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on school avoidance and mental health in youth. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 60(2), 112-119. Kowalski, R. M., Giumetti, G. W., Schroeder, A. N., & Lattanner, M. R. (2014). Bullying in the digital age: A critical review and meta-analysis of cyberbullying research among youth. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 1073-1137. Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2017). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3-17. Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K. J., & Ybarra, M. L. (2008). Online predators and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention. American Psychologist, 63(2), 111-128. DBT Center Houston | houstondbtcenter.com | This blog is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for psychotherapy. |
The Challenges of Parenting in a High Tech World
