Just Dan Grant

Back in the day – say 20 years ago, give or take, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out where you stood in life. Success and popularity in high school was a tangible and measurable thing. If you could shoot a basketball or throw a football, you knew that you had that going for you. If your grades kept you on the honor roll or at the top of the class, you were made in the shade drinkin pink lemonade. Or maybe you were that kid and you set the fashion bar pretty high, had the right shoes, right brand, right haircut, right everything. Shoot, you could be the class clown, class jock, class nerd, or class president, and you knew where you stood.

Now I was never a big fan of the social totem pole – mostly because I was the squirrel at the bottom – but it was a real physical thing, right or wrong.

It seems to me though, that even if someone was at the bottom of the pile, or was in the middle trying to scramble to the top, that we didn’t struggle with the level of anxiety or depression that we see in teenagers today. Maybe I was just clueless and in my own world – still am at times – but teen suicide wasn’t a as common an occurrence as it is now. As I look around, meet with teens, and talk with parents, I am burdened with the weight of the social, emotional, and mental issues these teens are facing on a daily basis.

So what changed?

Things got better didn’t they? Technology is moving at light speed, we can communicate far better than ever, we have more friends than ever, can take better pictures on our smartphone than with a regular camera, we can get packages brought to our door the same day we order them, and we don’t even have to get in the car to go get fast-food anymore! It comes to us!

So why are our teens and kids depressed?!

Because they are trying to find real worth in an un-real world.

Think about it.

Social media and entertainment present societal and cultural norms to our youth at the speed of light, and as soon as they figure out what is acceptable and “lit“, it changes. Our fads back in the day could last for months or longer, and anyone had time to catch up to them, now, they last hours or days and Lord help you if you are an hour late to that party. And even if they catch the new norm in time, they find out it’s not even real, wether they admit it or not.

Take the “most interesting man in the world”. Remember him? The “stay thirsty my friends” guy. Yeah, I know it was a beer commercial, just hang with me. He was this amazing guy who did all these crazy things all over the world and mosquitos didn’t even bite him, so you should drink the drink he was drinking. I guess I was paying too much attention to those commercials. Probably why I read the article about him when I saw it. Turns out the guy they used for the commercials actually lives in New England, and he’s hardly gone anywhere or done anything. He really lives a boring life. Which, coincidentally, sounds preferable. But the point is, it’s not real.

Hardly any of it is. At least, not what our youth is getting sucked into.

There’s lots of people doing good things on social media and use it to advance good, healthy, encouraging causes. But, there’s a lot of social media and entertainment that contribute to a fantasy world that our youths try to live and excel in on a daily basis. They spend hours a day trying to find their worth, their acceptance, their popularity in ever changing, ever fickle standards that captivate and control them.

And then it happens. The system turns on them. Cyberbullies attack, friends unfollow, private messages are screenshot and distributed, they are used and abused, and left alone to process it all. Or their invisible activity becomes visible to authority and consequences sever their digital connection to the outside world. The unreal becomes very real and very heavy in an instant.

So what do we do to help them?

• Talk. I know that when you set up your teen’s social media, that you talked with them about the dangers of social media, knowing who was following them, keeping conversations and pictures clean, etc. That safety briefing aside, keep the conversation going. Ask them how things are going much like you would ask them how their day was at school. Reality is, many of them spend as much time on tech per day as they do in the classroom.
• Reinforce. Praise them when the opportunity presents itself. They need to know that real worth is not in the digital world, but in the physical world. And make sure they have a physical world to be a part of. Keep that family unit intact and interactive. Don’t let screens replace face to face family time.
• Protect. The dangers that social media and entertainment present are real and the damage they inflict can be extensive and long lasting. If you allow your teen unfiltered, unrestricted, and unsupervised access on smart devices, you are setting them up for failure. Odds are you don’t leave loaded guns in their rooms or encourage them to take the minivan around 695. If you don’t know how to protect them, Google it. Even the Internet knows how dangerous the Internet is.

Teens have it far better and far worse than we did. Let’s do everything we can to help them survive.