The Digital Revolution & the Nature of Adolescent Passage

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The very essence of communication has changed. The various social media, 24/7 news cycles and the ubiquitous presence of smart phones keep us connected whether we want to participate or not. As families have become more comfortable with allowing their children to have cell phones, there seems to be an evolution in the nature of the dynamics of child development. The terrifying events of September 11, 2001, left an indelible, traumatic impact on the citizens of the United States. Parents were separated from their children in schools, and teachers were as terrified as the students. The world has since been plagued by terrorist activities at home and abroad. Domestically, we have experienced a rash of mass shootings at schools and in public spaces once considered safe. These events only furthered parental anxieties about being separated from their children and relinquishing them to the world away from home.

Enter the cell phone, offering parents a way to stay in touch and a sense of protective connectedness. The details of each child’s phone use are available to the parents. Now the child’s life has become an “open book” for parental surveillance. If kids stopped responding to phone calls and voice messages, parents learned the newest technology to keep communication (and surveillance) lines open. They know to whom the child speaks and when, and now with smart phones having GPS capabilities, even where! More communication goes on now via texting and apps like Instagram and What’s app. This expectation of frequent communication has now extended into the college years, when typically, children called home for more money, and visited to get the laundry done while they hung out with old high school friends.

Adolescence is a developmental phase that should allow the emerging young adult some private space to try out aspects of the self, outside of parental purview. It’s a time for parental distancing, for redefining one’s identity separate from parents. Friends become more important and parents may even feel a bit rejected and exploited. That is normal. It is all part of a healthy separation-individuation phase that is critical to the maturation process. It is a period of trial and error, failures and successes, personal, social and academic. It is a time for pushing the boundaries beyond parental limitations, for some degree of experimentation, exploring different relationships. It’s a time when tremendous experiential learning takes place.

In today’s world of parental over-involvement in extra-curricular activities children seem to not have ample time away from adults to do the quiet reflection that allows them to consolidate the complex learning that goes on in the adolescent years. The ever-present cell phone has now become an electronic tether to the ever-present parent. Parents hover electronically with solutions to everyday problems their children encounter. They coach and guide through every dilemma. This deprives children of the time and space needed to sort out issues and do some of their own problem solving. For each developmental stage our children navigate, the end result should be an internal sense of mastery that is reminiscent of the delight of learning to walk and talk, to feed oneself or to master potty training. Parents could not do those things for them. The parental job was to provide the nurturing environment and be joyful spectators to their children’s evolving development.

Recent college graduates can often have difficulty tackling projects with much initiative. Parents use phrases like “we have homework.” How many times I have counseled parents to get out of the business of being “homework policemen and women!” Their time for doing homework was over. Let children take on the responsibility of managing homework. A parent’s job is to provide support, not to get into the business of doing their children’s work. I was dismayed by the Sunday New York Times article in which the author states that she requires no chores from her children, whom she serves with unfettered abandon, even cleaning up after them. Children need to learn that they are part of a community called family within which they can make appropriate contributions. The family unit is the first community within which they live. It is the crucible within which they must learn to be grateful and giving ─ not just be takers! This can often create a sense of entitlement among young people, decreasing their desire and effectiveness when collaborating with others. One large organization has even considered including parents in the job interview ─ how infantilizing!

One parent I know, whose child was away at college, routinely texted asking for a status report. This constant intrusion into young people’s lives is really a boundary violation, and it does not keep our children any safer. Adolescents are risk takers: they are impulsive, seek instant gratification, lack mature judgment, feel invulnerable and tend to be highly narcissistic. It is a frightening time for parents, who become spectators to a developmental period over which they have limited control.

Unfortunately, bad things can, and do, happen. One can surely understand why feeling connected 24/7 helps to decrease parental anxiety. However, developmentally, adolescent brains are still undergoing maturational changes which do not resolve until the mid-twenties. They will, in spite of the electronic tethering, continue to do risky things. They will be exposed to the dark side of life…interpersonal violence, terrorism, vehicular accidents, excessive substance use, betrayal, premature deaths of friends, etc. Parents will never be able to recapture and maintain that protective function they once so fully experienced when their children were younger. But, unfortunately, by persisting with the electronic intrusion, what they would have compromised is their children’s ability to forge an independent path with the social skills and problem solving capacities so essential for becoming an adult who enjoys the earlier experience of mastery expressed so wonderfully by the proud toddler’s announcement, “I did it all by myself!”