How to break a child.
The first edition of this piece was published in January 2022. I was still substitute teaching at the time. Given further reporting on youth mental health since then, and a recent uptick in views on this piece, I thought it timely to revise, update, and give it a fresh share.
Kiddos are always struggling, but the current moment is particularly tough. This, unfortunately, seems to be one of few things a majority of anyone agrees on right now. Tell your teens you love them. Thanks for reading.
When Em was brought back to choir by an administrator to talk with me, I stepped out into the hallway to chat. She’d eloped — walked out of the classroom — after I got on her case about having her phone out and talking over me for several minutes straight.
I left a (hilarious) student up by the piano to attempt directing the choir while a backtrack to the song for rehearsal played. The students sang or hummed, their shy voices tinted with trepidation. The gist of the conversation between me and Em, standing just outside the classroom, was as follows:
Em: “I’m sorry for walking out of the classroom.”
Me: “Heard. Okay.”
Em: “Next time I’ll stay, and I’ll mind my own business.”
Me: “I can work with that. Cool. I know your heart and hope you know I never take it personally, and — “
Out of nowhere, in a seemingly typical interaction, I broke into tears. Because she’d walked out, Em hadn’t heard me tell the choir that I was leaving, that I’d taken a new job and would be moving to a different city. So I tried to tell Em. I’d taught her for three years, seen her grow for three years, laughed with her while also calling out her severe attachment to her phone and incessant Snapchatting for three years. So when I told her I was leaving — and she looked right in my eyes as it happened — I broke.
I have little authority to make definitive statements about “kids these days.” I am a former substitute teacher turned nonprofit employee — that is, I am not an educational researcher, licensed social worker, parent, pediatrician, or well-read rabbi. I am a man in his twenties hell-bent, apparently, on maintaining a yearly income below 40k. I have a degree in international politics but résumés fit more for the classroom or the bar. I haven’t gone back for my master’s degree. Nonetheless, I’ve determined that teens and young adults are the people I am built to work with, and I spend most of my waking hours around them.
I’m also a concerned citizen of what remains a powerful place: the (nominally, or so it feels at the moment) United States of America. I live in a country hell-bent on maintaining a few key constructs that are realities only so long as enough of us say they are. You know them for their place in our rhetoric: democracy, freedom, equal treatment, human rights, etc. We are a nation caught uncomfortably between our privileges and our failures — juxtapositions that show up visibly in our youth.
I am also a citizen of a connected, globalized world; above me is not only sky, but a billion WhatsApp messages flitting on wifi, corporate Zoom sessions, and 5G. We live in some level of technocracy. I am fortunate to have been raised and educated with a mindset that wants to comment and critique the world around me, like any citizen might and should, especially when they’re worried.
And lord, I’m worried.
I am worried about the social and political anxiety that seethes and festers in the annals of online media, then comes for teachers in the form of an angry kid. Our modern, digital society — and I’ll focus here on the U.S. since it’s a) the context I operate in, is b) still rich and powerful enough to drive global affairs, and c) is home to much of the tech innovation that’s landed in our kids’ hands, though this discussion certainly reverberates throughout the world — is screwing kids over. We are screwing kids over, which means we’re screwing ourselves. You know this: kids are quite literally the future. There is nothing cliche about it.
When I talked to Em about her behavior and started crying, it wasn’t because she walked out of class, and it actually wasn’t even because I was leaving for a new job. It was because Em’s getting handed — to put it plainly — a load of horse shit. Horse shit we made. It’s not her fault. I just don’t know how to fix it.
For much of recent material history, there was an overall belief that the future would be better. This belief was steadfast, as was the knowledge that it would be our kids, not us, that reaped its rewards. Regardless of the era’s major events — be it an industrial revolution, Civil War, unionizing, New Deal-ing, World War, civil rights, Nixon, proxy wars, assassinations, union-busting, Affording Care for All — the long game looked good for our kids. Progress was still there, still the perpetual myth that, with work and societal commitment, becomes reality over time. There was some sense of momentum, among enough people, to keep our eyes on the green light at the end of the dock.
As of the last ten to fifteen years, that’s no longer the case. That this shift coincides with recent, rapid changes in the “Information Age” shouldn’t surprise us.
The Information Age, defined loosely by the spread and speed of modern communications, has absolutely succeeded in its goal of increasing access to information. You’re likely reading this on your phone, or maybe your laptop. Boom. Mission accomplished. A good counter-argument to this piece will almost certainly include discussion on how this proliferation of technology has meant the proliferation of news, languages, dictionaries, banking, and art to the masses. It means separated families can send remittances in minutes rather than months. We knew immediately when Putin went all-in on Ukraine. That is a good thing.
But what if — what if — the costs now surpass the benefits?
Correlation is not causation, but I’ll be damned if “screen time” — the increasing amount of time we not just as a nation, but as a world, spend staring at a four or five-inch screen — is only correlated to our increasingly anxious, polarized, furious society. At a minimum it adds to our woes. At maximum, and more likely, it is the source of them.
There are some very blatant, well-reported examples of the latter. Think disinformation campaigns launched by foreign governments around election time, or the anti-vax martyrdom that was invigorated anew by the onset of Covid-19. Think viral videos, plastered with floating laughter emojis, of brawls in school hallways. These things are very obviously bad. But they are also the easiest to counteract. Fake news? Remove it. Misleading information? Flag it. Your kid’s laughing at Jeff getting his ass beat and sending it to thirty other people? Take their phone away for the night. (That this option isn’t utilized more is astounding.) These obviously bad outcomes of our addictions to technology, though, don’t worry me as much as the subtler ones.
The real damage being wrought — the damage that breaks me when I talk to the kids I work with and teach— lies in a massive confusion of access to information with use of information. To my eyes and ears, continued defenses of the Information Age as it exists now, in the form of Big Tech and its superconductors (sup, Zucks?) all depend on one broader argument: the user, not the technology being used, is responsible for what happens with the content they view and share. We develop technology that connects and entertains, they will say. We don’t set the bounds around it.
There are plenty of questionable ethics in that stance as it is, not to mention the other societal ills that continue under a similar premise. But that’s not what we’re exploring here. We are focused on the central fallacy: that end users know how to use information, how to set their own boundaries. That the average user truly thinks about what they see, hear, or read.
Increasingly, they don’t. And the problem for kids is that they quite literally can’t.
Kids can learn how to Google and use social media early in their lives, but they have to be taught how to qualify information and, from there, how to utilize it. Public education — an outgrowth of the same liberal ideals that birth a democracy in the modern era — is supposed to democratize the privileges that come with access to information, and it does this by teaching a society’s kids to read, write, multiply, divide, hypothesize, speak. The abilities taught in a comprehensive curriculum — together, they form the ability to think — have done much to advance our standard of living; a basic, liberal education (liberal as in an array of studies, not the political persuasion) means better job prospects, the ability to know truth from fiction, and, on an esoteric level, the chance to express the parts of oneself that constitute soul. Societally, being able to think means knowing what religious texts actually say rather than blindly trusting the clergy. It means knowing the ways laws affect your body and your neighborhood. It means knowing your rights. Learning to think well, in a way that affects your future positively, requires time and attention. And it has to be taught.
But people who are addicted to one thing cannot give time and attention to other things. Actually, addiction isn’t even necessary: more time spent on one activity literally means less spent on others. We all spend inane amounts of time on screens, but our kids are down the rabbit hole at the very moment their brains — that pink, fleshy, powerful glob that helps us communicate, empathize, and make decisions — are supposed to be experiencing the world in a way that teaches them to think. I can’t see my students’ prefrontal cortexes the way I see a viral video of a fight; I can’t write them up for brain underdevelopment. This is the subtler assault on the future that’s incrementally getting worse: with each year we as a society, but especially our youth, spend a few more minutes in front of a tiny, personal screen, which means a few less making eye contact, getting lost in the woods, highway cruising, reading comics. Going on walks.
Where does that trend end? 10 hours a day? 14? Every hour minus sleeping?
Admittedly, there is a qualitative gap in research here. We don’t know for sure what is being done during the increased screen time; video chatting with a distant cousin or watching a documentary is different than playing Among Us. But if what I see in the classroom is any indication — and the classroom is a good meter for this, because a society’s ills inevitably pour into the classroom—most of the kids with inane amounts of screen time aren’t watching history documentaries. (And even if they were, some of their parents would finally — all of a sudden! — discover parental controls if those films had anything to do with race or queerness.)
Students frequently joke to me about how late they’re up:
Student: “Man, I’m so tired, I stayed up ’til 3 last night!”
Me: “Doing what?”
Student: “Playing on my phone.”
They are playing games, Snapping snaps, Tikking Toks, forgetting to blink. And it’s our fault. We built these platforms for them. We put the candy on the table in a wide open, shiny jar, and they’re taking it in gobs.
As a result, and for perhaps the first time since the onset of the Information Age and its poster child, public education, thinking as an act is on the decline. By nature of their being kids, this lack of thinking hurts youth the most. (I experience this from a Midwestern U.S., public schools perspective, but the same thing is happening in our Mexican-American borderlands, Asia, and South Africa.) No thinking means no processing the world around you, let alone your own thoughts and actions, and this leads to the things we keep hearing about: teacher exhaustion, increased behavior issues, unfulfilling home lives, and even children who’ve plain disappeared. The Surgeon General, typically a quiet post, was even compelled to put out an advisory regarding teen mental health.
Covid exacerbated these trends, but it did not cause them. Academic achievement had, for many kids, stalled or begun to falter before the pandemic. And the decline of teen mental health, contrary to some narratives tied to our currently visceral politics, began its concerning spike as far back as 2012. Michelle Goldberg, in a recent Times column, cited work from San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge on this point:
Technology, not politics, was what changed…around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon. As Twenge showed in [her book]“iGen,” in 2009, fewer than 60 percent of eighth-grade girls reported near-daily use of what were then called “social networking sites.” By 2014, more than 80 percent did.
If you’re not convinced it’s that bad, let the kids be a moment and consider what’s happening between you and me, right now: I’ve written a decently long article, with a read time between ten and fifteen minutes. Chances are you won’t finish it. But even getting this far means you’ve beat the odds. Christian Science Monitor, a news source I appreciate for its low levels of bias and thoughtful reporting, has followed suit of some other organizations and introduced two ways to read their articles: “deep read” or “quick read.” I don’t fault them for responding to the times, but…really? If you can’t finish this article, why should I expect the students I love to death, like Em, to complete a three-day research project replete with good sources and original thinking?
How in the world Mark Zuckerberg-and-associates can maintain a core belief that, on the whole, their creations are a net positive for society, or that government regulation is too late to the party, while my students go through visible and audible withdrawal every time I take their phone for a class period, I do not know. It’s a cold, far-removed brand of passing the buck that sounds like acknowledging a problem but looks like nothing’s changed. It’s effectually brutal. It’s infuriating.
The decline in thinking among adults doesn’t help. Kids might never develop the ability to think, and they are less likely to with the technology we’ve provided them, but at least they have the excuse that they grew into the problem; we set them up for failure. But what about the Karens? Many of the adults shouting at school boards and banning books are making it clear they never had thinking skills, either, or else they’ve lost them. Near my home city of Des Moines, parents upset about the presence of The Hate U Give, a novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, on the school library shelves have made very thoughtful legal arguments in a school board meeting after mentioning the book’s multiple uses of “f***”:
“It’s about the law and giving obscene things to children,” added Rodney Gilbert. “If I give this to my 15-year-old neighbor, I would be arrested.”
Similarly thoughtful arguments have now fermented and spilled into legislation targeting trans and LGBTQ+ youth, with little to no real interest in considering what constitutes gender, of what really manifests as someone’s masculine and/or feminine core. It might be one thing, despite my own feelings, if we were even trying to debate the source of one’s spirit and self; instead, we are being told to just throw the books in the fire and quit talking about it.
Never mind the oversimplification of obscenity law; never mind the reduction of life to simple anatomy. I cannot, in good faith, tell my students to take the world seriously if this brand of dialogue passes as “thinking.” I cannot tell them their failing grades will become a failed future so long as the spaces around them, peopled by adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties, discuss using their children as pawns in schemes to defund their own school district. (And I‘m not even beginning to dig into the racial and urban/suburban/rural layers of this thick, spoiling slice of cake.)
If broken adults are getting so much traction — Twitter, Facebook, and Parler make it easy to be loud — how can I be so mad at Em for breaking out of the classroom? For not wanting to learn how to think? What do I show her to convince her it’s worth it? Who do I show her?
It’s not all Rodney’s fault, though. I mean that. Increasingly, we know only how to communicate with each other through quips like his— quick, snappy, arrogant, or uninformed vittles of information that constitute “thought” for an increasing share of the global population. How many TikTok videos can a student scroll through in even ten minutes of free time — thirty? Forty? More? How many of the levers that exacerbate or temper inflation can a Senator fit in a tweet? You cannot know economics in a tweet; you cannot know the value of The Hate U Give by counting the number of times it says “f***.”
We have more information at our fingertips than ever, but the average person cannot wield that power responsibly. The overarching tendency — you need only to look at your Twitter feed, Facebook group, or Snap count for proof — is to whittle conversations, emotions, and context down to efficient, dopamine-inducing shots of info. Our kids suffer the most, because they truly don’t have the brains to understand what’s going on. They see adults acting like children and determine that’s it, that’s what growing up looks and sounds like. Their emotional growth is stunted with each buzz of a pocket, and there is no incentive in front of them to behave any differently.
To be sure, the solution is not a total revocation of our screens. Cold turkey is hardly the most effective form of treating addiction. We would not want beneficial information — tsunami warnings, video proof of brutality and aggression, nearby urgent care clinics, the main points of a presidential address — to travel slowly the way it once did. These are the kinds of things we want to access quickly, and should. Some of them, like looking up the nearest UPS drop box, don’t require additional thought, which makes them a great use of massive accessibility to information.
We use our current tech sphere for these things. But we don’t use it for these to the extent we use it for instant gratification, stimulation, and to form banal social or political conclusions from the sunken depths of our couch cushions. Look around the restaurant waiting area, the school classroom, the living room: bright white screens, bloodshot eyes, heavy isolation. A quick-fire tweet into the echo chamber. Minimal connection, sometimes zero, zip, nada. Withdrawal symptoms. Broken adults, and — worse — broken kids, who inherit our crumbling castle.
Less use, of a higher quality, is a practical solution. But no one — not effectively, anyway — has a clue how to get there. The tools that come to my mind — read more! get outside! regulate!— don’t feel clever enough to meet the problem where it’s at. I just know what I believe: a better future requires knowing how to think. If that’s true, then we are being Zuckerberg-ed into illiterate swine. My students are being Zucked, and I Zucking hate it, because for god’s sakes, they’re just kids.
The typical counterargument to a piece like this, in which we remind ourselves we “just need time to adjust” and that history will chuckle at our trepidations the way we chuckle now at revolts against the telephone or the radio, is a lazy counterargument. It assumes what’s been true will stay true. It is still possible for this era of technology to be bad, even if the radio was good. We need to act like that’s possible and acknowledge it. We gathered around the radio as a family to listen to FDR; we do not gather as a family to tweet, scroll, and wear sparkling puppy ear filters. There’s a qualitative difference there that matters. You can draw a through line from the telegraph to the internet to the smartphone, for they built the bridges; they eliminated the physical space between me and Silvia from Sweden. But what’s come after that space was eliminated? Fledgling democracies. Mental health crises. My confused, anxious, angry students that feel “alone, together.” Change isn’t new, but our collective inability to think about, qualify, and respond to it is. In that way, we are regressing. It’s lazy, and it’s also criminal. It is an enabling of millions of addicts.
The benefits of access to information have been maxed out. They are currently outweighed by the costs of poor use. The timing of the January 6th riot, rising teen suicides, and disbelief in a better future is not an accident of correlation. It is the result of our ignorance, which is a symptom of our addiction. It is straight out of sixth grade social studies and science: cause-and-effect.
Em came back into choir after our conversation in the hallway. She sat down quietly, then, in a moment of relapse, started to murmur with a nearby peer when I started to rehearse. But she caught herself and stopped when I gave her the famed “teacher look.” A while later, she called a chatty group peers out for their disrespect.
Em — and she is a mirror of Me, and of you, because we were kids once and kids come into the world as we build it — is not hopeless. The emotional instincts are still there, buried away. It takes a very, very long time to rewire the brain. In my new role taking kids outdoors, I’ve seen these instincts rise again in our kiddos; in a kayak or a pair of boxing gloves, joy and intrigue and desire that lay dormant emerge anew. But what kind of a society are we if Em must be traumatized five, ten, twenty different ways before we allow those instincts to surface?
I couldn’t get myself together after breaking in the hallway. I tried to rehearse, hit a wall, and chose to just end the day early rather than lose my wits. It was the emotionally correct choice; it required time, thought, and strategy. It took thinking skills I learned when I was Em’s age and onward, when belief in a better future for the next generation still polled decently among portions of the American public and around the world. It’s also when the first iPhone was released.
It felt really good to cry, and I miss the hell out of all my kiddos in Des Moines. What keeps me up at night, though, isn’t that I left.
It’s that I know why I cried: I’m worried about the kids. But when Em cries, I’m not sure she knows why. And if she never learns to think through what’s in her head, she never will.
Originally published January 29, 2022 | Re-published March 31, 2023 | Iowa City, Iowa
