Required Reading
By Albert B. Kelly
If you get the chance to
read “American Girls- Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers” by Nancy
Jo Sales that came out recently, I recommend it, if for no other reason than
you’ll have a better appreciation of what our teen girls go through today on
their way to adulthood.
The older you are, the
more astounded you’ll be, that’s why this should be “required reading” for
parents and grandparents- not so much for the shock value- but because we have
to do a far better job raising teens and we can’t do that if we don’t know the
view from street level.
To find out, the author
spent a lot of time with girls (ages 13-19) in ten states (NY, NJ, VA, FL, CA,
AR, TX, IN, DE, and KY) to experience what their daily lives’ were like. We’re
talking everything from social media and peer pressure to boys, relationships, school,
and everything in between.
Truth be told, I can’t
believe how unimaginably hard their lives are and by “hard”, I’m not talking
physical hardship or even economic hardship although these exist; but about the
immense pressure- from boys, other girls, and even the voices inside their own
heads.
There’s misogyny to be
sure- the hatred of women as a sexually defined group. There’s also what we
know today as cyberbullying- something that leaves scars that often last a
lifetime or even leads to suicide.
At the center of this new
normal is social media and by social media, we’re not just talking Facebook and
Twitter, but apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Kik Messenger, Yeti, Yik Yak,
Tumblr, and Tinder to name a few.
The first thing to note is
that teens, especially girls, are tethered to social media through their
iPhones. According to the author’s research, 73% of girls 13-17 years old have
an iPhone; 92% of teen girls are online through their iPhones daily- 24% say
they are on social media 12 hours a day or more. Social media is to them what
sock hops were to teens in the 1950’s
The second thing to note
is that teens don’t “date”; instead its “hooking-up”, which is all about sex
for its own sake. Considering that some studies show that 90% of boys and 60%
of girls have viewed porn online before age eighteen, is it any wonder?
But there’s more. It’s an
everyday occurrence for many teen boys to ask teen girls for nude pics of
themselves. That’s bad enough, but more troubling is that too many girls feel compelled
to send them because if they don’t, they get labeled a certain way and shunned
by boys (and other girls).
Yet if they send nude pics,
you can bet they’ll be plastered all over social media and let the
“slut-shamming” begin. Another feature of teen life today is boys sending lewd
pics of their own anatomy to girls unsolicited. How a girl responds determines
how she’s perceived.
But this is just the tip
of iceberg; the book delves into girls’ daily lives, told in their own words
and it touches all demographic groups and all income levels with no exceptions.
Adults might dismiss peer
pressure all too easily, but everyone wants to belong somewhere- never more so
than in adolescence, when it’s all about figuring out where you fit in the
world. We pay a price when the currency for navigating adolescence for teen
girls today is nude pics.
While others may debate
what that price might be, I agree with the author that it comes down to turning
girls and women into objects and too many boys and men “predatory”.
Not for nothing, but 35%
of all internet traffic is porn and the number one search on these sites is for
“teen girls” and that’s separate from movies, music, TV. Mix in a generation of
girls without positive male role models (i.e., fathers) and is it any wonder
that some accept bad attention over no attention at all?
We have to do a better job
of raising boys to treat girls and women with respect and dignity. We have to
help our girls hold a positive self-image and how to deal when they get no
respect from others.
But we have to understand
the landscape as they live it. It’s why I’m establishing our own youth advisory
board to help me and other community leaders know the issues from their
perspective. As a father of girls, I think it’s worth the time.