Kids are more likely to turn to adults for help when it comes to experiences such as online harassment and cyberbullying than other risks and stressors they encounter online.
According to an in-depth study by Wisniwki et al. (2017), contrary to parents’ perceptions, teens only rarely tell their parents about risky online experiences such as: photos shared and later regretted or images used online without their consent, sexting or sexual solicitation online by a stranger, acquaintance, or friend; exposure to explicit pornographic content.
Teens who tell their parents what’s going on do so to get help – not to confide or share information.
Teens report that they avoid telling their parents because they think what happened was no big deal, or to avoid the negative experience of a lecture and restrictions (Wisniewski, et al., 2017).
Similarly, teens do not turn to adults when it comes to other common online stressors because they don’t expect that parents will understand and be empathic to their context.
Many adults are unaware of the other significant issues in the digital world that affect teens’ moods and states of mind moment to moment, challenging their ability to cope.
Common digital stressors that are a significant part of teen’s lives in which they do not turn to adults:
- Feeling barraged by the sheer number of messages as well as other digital demands. Kids can feel overwhelmed by text blasts, for example, through being included in group chats and various chat platforms. Many teens also experience ongoing pressure e.g., a sense of high social stakes and time commitment, to carefully maintain their digital profile/reputation and get “likes” on their posts, for example, Instagram.
- Feeling pressure to comply with sexting, often as proof of trust, or access to their account passwords (even from friends).
- FOMO – fear of missing out. Feeling left out when seeing photos of their friends posted in real-time looking like they’re having fun (though in talking to the teens in these photos, things aren’t always as fun as they appear).
Dr. Margolies’ tips:
- Be aware that teens are embedded in an online world and don’t diminish or devalue it.
- Show non-judgmental interest in having them teach you about something they are involved with digitally on their phones. This only works if you don’t have another agenda such as spying at the same time.
- Take their dilemmas and stressors online seriously.
- Do more listening than talking even if the solution or “right thing” seems obvious.
- When they seem receptive, offer help by thinking through things with them and letting teens take the lead in problem solving.
References:
- Learning and the Brain Conference: The Science of Character. (2015, Boston, MA).
- Thorn. (2024). Youth perspectives on online safety, 2023: An annual report of youth attitudes and experiences. Thorn. https://info.thorn.org/hubfs/Research/Thorn_23_YouthMonitoring_Report.pdf
- Weinstein, E. C. (2015, November). Social minds and social media: Teen digital stress and cyberbullying. Paper presented at the Learning and the Brain Conference: The Science of Character, Boston, MA.
- Wisniewski, P., Xu, H., Rosson, M. B., & Carroll, J. M. (2017). Parents just don’t understand: Why teens don’t talk to parents about their online risk experiences. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 523-540). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998236
