Coming of Age Online: Helping Kids Navigate the Digital World

So many teens are addicted to phones and social media. How can parents and educators help kids thrive in a digital world with unwritten rules, uncertain effects, and endless changes?

Devorah Heitner wrote her latest book, Growing Up in Public, to help adults better play that role. I sat down with her to discuss strategies for maximizing the benefits and mitigating the risks. We also talked about whether legislation around social media is a good idea and how all this technology should or shouldn’t be used in schools. As many of you know, this is a hot topic—an an important one. People have strong hot takes on both sides. Devorah takes a realistic and practical path into the conversation that I appreciated and enjoyed learning from.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are passionate about building a world in which all individuals can develop their full human potential and live a life of purpose. To help us do that today, we have the noted author Devorah Heitner, who is the author of the new book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. Not her first book, but this is a really important one and an important moment in time where we are starting to see both the negative and positive impacts of social media. Devorah, welcome to the Future of Education. I think no one does it better than you at helping articulate, really both sides of this complicated world into which our young people are entering. So first, thank you for writing the book and welcome.

Devorah Heitner:

Thank you. Yeah, I'm living in this world and talking to young people every day. And if anything, I think I started over a decade ago with slightly more technology, rose-colored glasses, and now I'm more like in bifocals, but that sort of befits my age, I guess.

Michael Horn:

No, I like it. I like it. I mean, as you mentioned, it's not your first book. You had Screenwise as well. Talk to me about your journey into this topic, and how you've progressed. I like that analogy from rose-tinted glasses to bifocals. But just tell the audience about your own journey into this.

Devorah’s Journey to the Work

Devorah Heitner:

I was a college professor and very connected still to higher ed. But when I was teaching college, I had my students, I had written my master's paper on Sesame Street, and I taught classes on kids media culture, and I had my 18 to 22-year-old undergrads doing research about kids and media in the community. And they would interview third graders. In our case, I was teaching in an affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had kids interview my students, interview third graders in a working-class suburb and in their own, where the school was, which was Lake Forest in Illinois. So it was very different. What they got was that third graders are using tech in really interesting ways that were very different from their own use. And that was less than a generation. These kids could have been their siblings. A nine-year-old could be a sibling to an 18-year-old.They're certainly not a full generation apart. So that was eye-opening to me. Then I became a parent in 2009 and really witnessed a moral panic around smartphones, touch screens, tablets, and schools using tech more in k twelve and how's that going? Colleges deciding if they're going to ban cell phones in the classroom. All these conversations about, is tech killing our kids. Is it helping our kids? Is it doing both and trying to really understand what is the experience of being a young person and then an emerging adult with all of this and with growing up in public, I'm really curious about especially the pressures on young people's identities, like, how do you figure out who you are when so many people are looking at you?

The benefits and drawbacks of social media 

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Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's such an interesting question because even at that age, they're trying out identities, right, and figuring it out for themselves, let alone, as you say, growing up in public, showing it in a very public-facing way. As you describe in the book, this world of social media, is obviously a big, scary place in many ways, but it also has the potential to be beneficial for kids to express themselves or find those communities. So I'd love you to just go deeper on sort of both sides of this if you will. What's the good and what's the bad? Because we're hearing a lot about that right now in the more mainstream media.

Devorah Heitner:

I think there's tremendous potential for young people to find and keep and deepen community online. I talked to a lot of young people who had found connections with friends on Discord and via other spaces. In the old days, it was Tumblr. Kids are good at making use of digital communities to learn things. If you even look at the sort of college forums, college confidential, it's a lot of young people informing young people about, like, well, there's a lot of drinking on this campus, or if you don't want to be in a fraternity, this might not be the place for you. And that use of digital community, whether it's information seeking, whether it's supporting a new identity, maybe if kids are coming out as LGBTQ plus, if kids are trying to figure out their mental health issues, there's a lot of good information on there and a lot of community and a lot of support, and there's just a lot of opportunity to have fun. So my own kid is a pretty avid player of a couple of games. He would kind of resist, I think, the identity of a gamer because it's not his full thing, and he doesn't want to see himself that way. But there's a couple of games he really enjoys, and he and his friends are able to play, for example, sometimes for just an hour after homework on a weeknight, which is not a time where I would want my 14-year-old going out necessarily and where kids really aren't right. Maybe if the other kids were out, I might be okay with it, actually, but we don't live in a world, at least in my community, where kids are out very much, especially during the week, and they're not hanging out in person. So this is a way for them to hang out and a way for them to connect and check in and say hi and have something fun to do that's strategic, that's intellectual. It's interesting. So I think we sometimes dismiss these forms of community because it's where the kids are. It wasn't like our experience. I did hang out with my friends in person a lot more than many kids in this generation are doing. We kind of feel bad for our kids because they don't have that. But online it can be really positive for them. I think the downsides are some of the ones that have been brought up in the hearings, but I especially worry about comparison kids comparing themselves with others. And you can really quantify your response on social media. Any of us can see how many followers we have, how many likes a post gets, and it's so easy to compare that with others. Adolescents are wired to be figuring out who they are through some of those comparisons. But there's a degree to which social media, I think, turns up that dial and can be maybe too intense or even worse maybe, than comparing with peers is comparing with sort of not real people comparing with influencers or someone who's been airbrushed or had surgery to look the way they do. So from a body image perspective, for example, that can be problematic.

How parents can help kids navigate social media 

Michael Horn:

Yeah and terrifying for parents. Let's start with them before we go to the legal landscape, if you will, and schools. Just for parents, what's your advice for how their kids can start to get the good of social media with not the bad? Do you think that there's an age at which they should or shouldn't be on these platforms? How do you help parents navigate this world?

Devorah Heitner:

Parents want to be thoughtful even when their kids are not on social media and don't have phones, about our own use and how we communicate. A lot of the challenge right now is that we are thumbing out our lives in front of our kids and that they're not hearing us on the phone make communication decisions. They're not hearing us realize maybe, oh, when I scroll, maybe I don't feel good. So I'm going to take a break. So we actually need to talk more with them about our own experiences of using social media, even if they laugh at us. Like my kid, I remember when the first time I experienced some sort of platform anxiety when my TEDx, this is many years ago, was shared on Upworthy, and I started noticing more views and I kept coming back to check. And of course, that's a very short-lived pleasure as any of us with any kind of experience online for our work. It's like, oh, this is fun. But it doesn't lead because you can have 4000 followers and then someone has 40,000, and then if you get to 40,000, someone else has 400,000. There's no place where you can get to with building those kinds of numbers where you're like, oh, okay, I'm good. There's enough. And certainly for those of us publishing books, there's no place where my publisher will be like, okay, Devorah, you're good.

Michael Horn:

You don't have to stop selling books. You're fine.

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, you're all good here. So I think that sense of chasing clout, which we make fun of teenagers for something adults do, and so if we can notice that, for example, about ourselves and laugh, and my kid was laughing at me, but I was kind of like, okay, well, I can laugh with you at myself because this is kind of funny and silly and ridiculous, if we can kind of just be open to those conversations, be open to the conversations about, wait, who do we want to be in contact with in these apps? Why do you think Snapchat has streaks? Why do you think they have a map that shows you where all your friends are? Is this in everyone's interest to have this information? Is this even safe to be sharing this information? Just getting kids I think tapping, especially with adolescents, into that natural skepticism that they have so that they feel like winning is using the tools and not being used by the tools. That's what we all want when we're using digital tools. It's like, I want to use LinkedIn, but I don't want to be used by LinkedIn. I want to use TikTok, but I don't TikTok, sort of using me. Right. And it's tricky because, to a certain degree, we are the product in all these sorts of free apps. But it's like consumer ed. It's like teaching kids to notice that, oh if a gallon of milk is $5 and half a gallon of milk is $4, then a gallon is a better deal. Like, how do I feel when I scroll Instagram? If it's making me feel bad, I probably want to take a break. Maybe I don't need to completely quit because my friends are DMing me there. But maybe I don't want to be spending mindless time scrolling. Maybe I want to set a timer on myself. TikTok was the most frequently quit app of all the apps I interviewed interesting adolescents about because it was so immersive for them. Some of them just had to leave.

Legislation limiting use of social media and technology for kids

Michael Horn:

That's so interesting. The intentionality you're speaking about there for the parents and then by translation to the young people using this makes a lot of sense. It reminds me, I realize, because we don't get a newspaper, I'm on the phone in the mornings at the breakfast table, reading news articles, and my kids have no idea what I'm doing on the phone. So it's occurred to me that when I was growing up, I saw my dad or mom, right, reading the paper, and therefore I got interested or reading the same articles. So just that opacity of the medium seems to me a very big barrier. Obviously, then, lawmakers are now getting into this. You've seen all sorts of proposed legislation, I think the most recent… I want to get to schools in a moment because obviously, that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking about. But the big one that's gotten attention most recently is a law that would require parent permission before teenagers effectively were allowed to use social media. What do you make of proposals like this?

Devorah Heitner:

I think it's really tricky. I like the idea of more awareness. I want the companies to be much more responsive to complaints, and I understand why everyone's so fed up, so I just want to put that out there. I understand why parents and educators feel frustrated with these mega companies that don't seem to be that responsive to the concerns of their users around mental health and haven't been as supportive of parents and caregivers and educators. That said, I don't think there's a way. I mean, this would be like saying that you have to be 18 before you're allowed to have a dime to put in a payphone. This is the medium that all people are using to communicate. And if you're putting roadblocks to that medium, what do you say to the kid who's trying to report abuse at home? Do they still have to go to that parent? What if the problem is your parents? We have to understand that not all kids even have parents. Some kids are in a legal never-never-land and they're in between foster homes. Does that kid just never get to be on Snapchat and communicate? What if they're on the debate team and everyone's communicating on Instagram or Discord, like, they can't join because they don't have a legal guardian.I just think there's a lot of problems with it. That said, of course, in an ideal scenario, every kid would have mentors and adults who care about them, who have their best interests in mind, who could support their entry into the complex world of social media. But we don't live in that world.

Michael Horn:

So we have to take that reality for what it is. So then I guess that translates into the next one, which is, as you know, a lot of countries and several localities have had these suggested, or in some cases enacted bans on having cell phones in schools, period. They have the yonder pouches where they require them to go in there and you're not allowed to use them during class time. What's your take on legislation there? Or is this sort of the case that it should be more managed at the school level? How do you think about those trade-offs?

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, I mean, I do think that every school knows its situation better, and I've really come around to understanding why schools are leaning into the bans much more. I mean, I talked to a group of school resource officers last summer, and they talked about rampant fights being broadcast, for example, on TikTok, where it was encouraging other kids to even come to the school to participate in violence. I get why if I'm running a school and I think there are kids who are going to get hurt or die because other kids are sharing this stuff, I would understand wanting to cut that off at the source and say, okay, if this is exacerbating the problem of fighting and even giving kids motivation to fight, what can we do to reduce that? At the same time, I think, again, every situation is different. There are many kids using their phones as assistive devices, both kids who are recorded as having differences in disabilities with a 504 and IEP, and kids who may have self-identified accommodations that they need that are helping them get through school, that maybe don't have a documented disability. There are kids who have been in unsafe situations at school that they've documented using their phone. So it's really difficult to say. And I know everyone wants the easy answer.

Michael Horn:

Everyone wants the magic bullet.

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, but there isn't one. I do think that when I walk into a cafeteria and I see kids just in their phones and not talking with one another, I do have concerns. I want kids and young people to be able to talk. I think especially when I see that in higher ed, frankly, because I do remember closing down the dining hall with my friends and getting kicked out. Having the dining hall closed and they were like, all right, you all have to leave now. We're just sitting around talking to each other. That easy communication is something that I think, especially in this sort of late pandemic, late stage pandemic is very tough. I don't know if I would have 4 hours of conversation to have, even though I'd love to see my college friends. But would we talk for 4 hours as easily now or am I too rusty after being home on Zoom for these many years and having all my conversations be focused and on the hour, the art of especially sort of untethered conversation may be something we're losing. So to come back to what schools should do, I do think for now it makes sense for schools to individually even experiment and notice what works. It is very hard to make these kinds of policy changes. So I understand again if a school doesn't want to just try it. But one thing some of the schools I've worked with closely have done, especially if it's a k twelve school, sometimes they'll have different policies at different levels and they'll notice, wow, our middle school students are getting a lot more done in study hall because they can't have their phones. And our upper school students don't seem to be getting anything done. And I've talked about can you share that research with the upper-school students and see what they want to do. There might be kids who would opt into a yonder patch bag even if they don't sort of, if not mandated, because it’s helping them focus. And that would be a different feeling than not being trusted by the adults to make your own decision.

The risks of parental oversharing on social media

Michael Horn:

That's super interesting because what you're pointing to throughout this is sort of the sense of agency that all individuals want to develop and a sense of mattering right in all of this and not dismissing that as you sort of make these well-intentioned rules at whatever level you ultimately do as a school, as a lawmaker or whatever it might be. I'm sort of curious. You have this other part in the book which relates to college, which I had not honestly thought about until I read it, but then it made all the sense in the world and I had this horrified reaction which was parents sharing their kid's college decisions in social media. It seems like parents are making a lot of faux paws themselves perhaps around sharing news that is not theirs, is the way I might say it. It occurred to me that I probably violate this I think I'm doing it less. I've sort of gone on a no kids on social media, but I'm sure I violated that when they were young as well. So I'm sort of curious how you think about that.

Devorah Heitner:

Well, all our families. I mean, I became a parent in 2009, so it was like right in that early Facebook years. So I also shared my kid a little bit and was not thinking as much about the future. Then as I started leaning into writing about privacy, and now I have a skeptical teenager who knows I write about privacy, so God help me if I share him now without permission, given that he knows what I do. But the college thing is such a good example because kids are sharing a lot with one another, and yet they're much more thoughtful about the audience they know. If my best friend applied early to Amherst, say, and I did, too, I know that's going to be a complex thing for us this year. And I also know the kids are confident their friendships can survive it. But they are more thoughtful about how to share that information and what to do with that information and how to process it and how to support one another, frankly, when denials happen, which is obviously so many of our kids experience and especially low these last dozen years, and I love them for that. I'm so impressed with how young people have found ways to communicate about this and have their own etiquette around it. And when their parents undermine that, it really is a problem. And it puts tremendous pressure on young people. Even talking about the visits puts a lot of pressure on young people then, because then Uncle John knows that you visited Madison and he went there and why didn't you decide to apply or whatever it is. All of that is really hard. So the less the better, I think, on that front. And taking a cue from the kids is really thinking about the audience and how people will feel.

Academic monitoring and comparison

Michael Horn:

It makes a ton of sense. And just having that sensitivity on all sides, as you're navigating this in the book, you also talk about how not just parents, but also schools have so many more tools to monitor children, often communicating behind their back. We know online grade books and all those things that have increased some of the helicopter parenting and other things of that nature. Just love your take at both levels. This is elementary school all the way through high school and even into college sometimes. What are the risks of these apps and what are the ones that give you concerns out there right now?

Devorah Heitner:

Yes, I wrote a lot in the elementary school years about a behavior-monitoring app called Class Dojo not to pick on Class Dojo. They seem like nice people, but because there's something very insidious about monitoring behavior, and especially the sort of micro choices and experiences kids have with regulation, like raising your hand or speaking out of turn, that kind of stuff. The apps use a gamification of behavior modification that really concerns me. So that level of, like, you're competing for points, it's all externalized, extrinsic rewards, and it just tends to lean into rewarding the kids who are naturally more self-regulated, which broadly in elementary school is like girls versus boys, but even more so, like, some kids versus other kids, like neurotypical kids versus non neurotypical kids, kids who had breakfast versus kids who didn't get breakfast. There's all kinds of ways and reasons why some kids are consistently more self-regulated than others. And even those kids can become quite anxious. I interviewed several parents of, for example, very typically well-behaved neurotypical girls who were kind of like this, at the edge of their seat, stressing about these apps and worrying about losing points that one time they did call out without raising their hands. And instead of seeing that as like, wow, they must have been really enthusiastic about that answer, there's this denigration. So kids get really stressed about all of this. Then I would go in the book, I trace that all the way up through the app, the Grade Books, which we can come back to in a minute. But I want to talk about Naviance with you and the other ones, Maya learning and S-C-O-I-R which I don't even know how to say it. All the apps that kids or high school students use to quantify the data, put the recommendations together, and there's tremendous convenience to having that all in one place, especially that. Plus the common app, I think, is driving some of the sort of, I would say, over-application. But the much higher numbers. I mean, you're talking to someone who applied to three colleges and I live to tell the tale, and I have a PhD in everything, right? But the number of colleges, of course, are much higher. And it's because there's so much aggregate data. But the things that concern me a lot about Naviance are, first of all, Power School owns it. So you're taking the people who have your kids' grades, they have some of this behavior data, then they also own all the stuff they put into college. That's a lot of data about someone for 16,15 years of formal education, from age potentially four to 18. A lot of personal info in there. Suspensions, expulsions, behavior data, anything a counselor may have written down. A lot of that data is just in there. I don't like it being digital and being available, even if it doesn't all get shown, for example, to the college, that raises concerns. Then how do I feel, as a college applicant, getting to… seeing my dot on the app? And I've already looked at what Maya learning looks like for my son's school, and it's kind of crushing. You see your little dot on the app, and then you see where other dots are, and there's a line. So if you're looking at a specific university where students from your child's high school have applied, or they're looking at… and one of the things my editor wouldn't let me use in the book was an article. Now I'm going to have to link to it. In your show notes was an article from a kid at a prep school. We'll decide if we can use this, but my editor is like, it's too mean. A kid at a prep school in Chicago, where I live, writing about the first day they got access to Naviance and how people cried when they saw their chances on the chart. Yeah.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Devorah Heitner:

I mean, it was written in kind of a slightly sarcastic, slightly, you know, high school mean kind of way. So I think that's why my editor didn't like it, and I see why she didn't like it. But I thought, no, this is something people need to know, that people get on this app, and it makes them cry. I'm not saying, by the way, that we can protect kids from the realities of admission. I think people need to go in with their eyes open and also radically rethink what's so important about whatever ten or 20 name-brand schools they're so obsessed with. All of that is important. But I think there needs to be more sensitivity in how we handle that data as well. What we know, especially for students who don't have good access to counseling, is they can underreach because the data is so sobering that what you can see, and this was what was so interesting about the Dartmouth article in the New York Times the other day, is seeing with SATs, too, that with test-optional students, we're underreaching.

Alternatives to monitoring apps

Michael Horn:

Let's. There's so many different ways we can. No, this is great. This is great. I mean, if you're okay with including this, I'd love to keep it in. But it's so interesting, because, like, a Class Dojo, for example, I know those folks. Well, I know the teachers who use them that would say that's all well and good. I'm sure that's great in theory, but gosh, it really helps me keep the class in line and they're learning more and it's so helpful. What would you tell the teacher, I guess, around what they might do instead or how they might reframe the system, in effect, that you're talking about?

Devorah Heitner:

Yeah, I mean, I would lean into, because I don't presume to mentor k twelve teachers. Like, I do a lot of PD, specifically around social and emotional stuff and kids' digital milestones. So I presume to talk to teachers about that. But like classroom management, I would say lean into your other professional cohorts and your principal and other people who have good experience, lean into referrals and making sure that kids who are needing special ed actually get it. Because there's a tremendous, I think, underdiagnosis and undersupport in some schools where kids aren't getting. If you're really having trouble supporting a kid's behavior, maybe there's more going on. If none of the tricks you're trying are working, maybe they need more support. And those colleagues could also be helping you. But one of the things that I learned from a teacher and actually a principal in St. Vrain, Colorado, was she doesn't allow them to use Class Dojo. She said, if you feel like you need Class Dojo, come see me and I'll sit in your class. I'll help you… you know we'll work together. So I like that level of support. I think all teachers ideally need that. They need a principal who is willing to come and help them with classroom management and mentor them, but she sees it as a sign of, like, okay, you feel like you're drowning. What can I do to support you so that you don't have to do this? Because the short-term compliance is not leading to long-term better behavior and not leading to internalized self-regulation, and it can really harm kids.I mean, the extreme examples that I gave, and I know not every teacher uses class dojo in the same way. And I do want to acknowledge it has a translation feature that's clearly positive. If you need to speak to that parent in Urdu and you can do it through class dojo, I think that's a great use of that app. The problem is things like kids getting denied recess or there's a prize for all the kids who are well-behaved and the kids who already struggle. You have to figure a kid who's struggling to self-regulate is already having a terrible time at school. Already probably doesn't like school. Then you give a party to the other kids and make those kids watch. You're talking about potentially ending someone's education trajectory early.You're increasing the likelihood that they may drop out. You're harming their self-esteem in ways that are lasting. It's not worth it. Even if you get short-term compliance out of it. It's not worth it.

The effects of grading apps 

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. As we wrap up here, it strikes me that there's a consistent theme across a lot of this, which is that sort of a zero-sum world of comparison where one gets the prize, the other doesn't, even though we're trying to develop both or social media. That's true, too. I'm comparing my likes versus yours or whatever it is that ultimately that zero-sum view as opposed to a positive-sum view of like, hey, we're all trying to be the most unique version of our best selves because the system is so built around the former as opposed to the latter. All of these apps, in some ways, they may not have created the conditions, but they're perhaps turbocharging the negative parts of that. Is that a fair way to think about it?

Devorah Heitner:

I think so. I think the grading apps, which we didn't really get to, where parents can just check kids' grades, it also can undermine the relationship with teachers. I think that's really important. That three-way triangle of student, teacher, parent, all of those relationships can get strained when there's too much access to information that's too frequent. We don't want too little feedback in education, but grades shouldn't be the only feedback. And maybe, I think maybe aren't the best kind of feedback. That's a whole big conversation, and I kind of like, nibbled on that in the book, but I don't want to bite it totally off the but there's that. But then it's like, what's it going to do to the relationship with the teacher? Or a high school teacher might have 180 students a day, some may have more.So even just remembering in your email etiquette, as I try to remember to do, to always put my student's name and ID number, even though I think they probably know who I am because I'm that parent and they probably do know who I am, I still feel like, let me identify myself because this person has hundreds of students in a day and just thinking about do you want to be writing to them about that zero, or do you want to wait and see what happens? Do you want to let your kid self-advocate, and figure out what they need to do? Or has the grade just not been entered yet? You're starting a feedback loop of anxiety because of a grade that hasn't been entered. So this is why some schools are closing their grade books. This is why Challenge Success is recommending limited access to them. I've just talked to a bunch of schools that don't have them, and I think that's great. But many, many schools do. Most people who work at schools or have students in school are probably encountering online grades, and the pressure from the school to check my son's school will tell me, check Canva, check Canva. That's just one of their big messages.

Michael Horn:

No, it makes total sense. Look, we could go in a number of different directions and keep geeking out on this, but with respect to your time and the audiences, I can't recommend the book more. Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World. There it is. We will flash it up as well. I think it is a great resource, like I said at the beginning, to really get at the nuance in what has become a very polarized good-bad social media. Yes-no sort of conversation.And see, there are upsides and there are a lot of risks as well that we need to bear in mind. So thank you for helping us think through it. Thank you for helping schools think through it. Thank you for helping parents and students navigate their way in something that none of us have dealt with before.

Devorah Heitner:

Thank you.

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