About a year ago, the Associated Press ran an article profiling two teenagers who were bucking the social-media frenzy by consciously limiting their phone use. Since that time, teenagers without social media have only become more newsworthy. As of June of this year, fourteen states have enacted some form of statewide ban on the use of cellphones in classrooms, and the trend is for more states to get on the bandwagon.
What is it like for a teenager to do without most of the social media that their peers use? Reporter Jocelyn Gecker profiled two teenage girls: Gabriela Durham, who hopes to pursue a dancing career once she graduates from her Brooklyn high school, and Kate Bulkeley, who is a fifteen-year-old high schooler who is co-president of her Bible study club and has participated in a Model UN conference. She ran into a problem when the other conference participants wanted to exchange only Instagram addresses rather than phone numbers. And sometimes she relies on friends with Snapchat to tell her about important student government messages. But overall, she is glad her social-media use is as low as it is.
Kate's parents knew that their daughter's school had a cellphone ban, but it wasn't enforced. They were concerned about the bad publicity surrounding teens' use of social media, so when she became a freshman in high school they told her she couldn't use it. Fine with it at first, she found as a sophomore that she needed Instagram to coordinate after-school activities.
But the 15-year-old says she still only uses social media about two hours a week. This is far below the average weekly use by teens, which runs over 35 hours a week for half of today's teens, according to one study cited in the report. Kate simply sees most uses of social media as a waste of time, and prefers to use her time studying and encountering friends in the flesh, so to speak.
Gabriela Durham received a cellphone as soon as she was old enough to use public transportation in New York. This was much later than her peers, who have often been using their cellphones since early in elementary school. Her mother, Elena Romero, enforces a strict ban on social media until her daughters are 18. They have fallen off the wagon only once, secretly using TikTok for a few weeks until Romero found out about it.
As a dance major at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, Gabriela dances outside of school every day. Dancing and dance practice, plus commuting on the subway, take up time that she might otherwise use for social media. But she is scandalized by peers who say they log up to 60 hours or more of social-media use weekly, saying it's "insane."
Both girls admit there are inconveniences to not being on social media in high school. So much of what goes on socially happens online, and so they miss out on jokes, memes, rumors, and a lot of other things that people in the pre-cellphone days were familiar with from high school. But back then you didn't need advanced technology to be in the know.
These young women serve as test cases to prove that reasonably happy and fulfilling lives can be led by teenagers who nevertheless make minimal use of social media.
I think it's important to note, however, that both sets of parents began their restrictions by delaying the time when their children received a cellphone for the first time. As an educator, I long ago learned the lesson that it is much easier to start out with strict rules and then ease them gradually, than it is to begin with laxness and tighten up later.
Parents who have not laid any cellphone restrictions on their children and suddenly get convicted that they have to do something, may find it very difficult to remove privileges with social media that their children have grown accustomed to already. Education, whether in college or the nursery, is a long-term enterprise. So it behooves parents to give serious thought to how they will deal with cellphones long before their children start asking for one.
I am acquainted with a family of five who seem to have negotiated the cellphone issue pretty well so far. Their oldest child is fourteen. After she was homeschooled up to the age of twelve, her parents put her in a local Christian school for a year. But she came home complaining that "those other kids spend all their spare time on their phones!" and eventually moved her to a home-school cooperative, where cellphones are not in evidence. This shows that good habits can be ingrained in children to the extent that they embody virtuous attitudes themselves, even when placed in tempting situations.
This is what all parents want for their kids, I hope. All children are different, and in the same family one child is biddable and does everything she is told, while the other one raised in the same environment rebels against all strictures and cheats every chance he gets.
But the current trend of recognizing on an institutional scale that constant access to social media by teenagers does on balance more harm than good, is vastly encouraging to those parents out there who saw the dangers years ago and have been taking positive action ever since.
While there are still situations in which using aspects of social media are logistically necessary, the hope is that the same philosophy of delaying social-media use becomes generally acceptable in K-12 educational institutions, whether forced to change by state legislators, or guided from within by enlightened educators at all levels.
The damage has already been done to millions of children and teens, however. And my point about suddenly withdrawing social media from those who have made it an integral part of their lives is still valid. The results are likely to be comparable to Prohibition, which became effective in 1920 and only made alcohol-consumption problems worse.
But if the educational system is adapted to minimize social-media dependence at all levels, there is real hope that the current increases in teen depression and suicide can be reversed.
Sources: The article "Life as a teen without social media isn't easy. These families are navigating adolescence offline" by Jocelyn Gecker was dated June 5, 2024 and appeared at https://apnews.com/article/influenced-social-media-teens-mental-health-e32f82d46ea74b807c9099d61aec25d5. I also referred to data about state-adopted school cellphone bans at https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-us-states-school-phone-bans-2090411.
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