Social Media Wellness

Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World

Ana Homayoun

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781506343075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Solutions for navigating an ever-changing social media world Today's students face a challenging paradox: the digital tools they need to complete their work are often the source of their biggest distractions. Students can quickly become overwhelmed trying to manage the daily confluence of online interactions with schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and family life. Written by noted author and educator Ana Homayoun, Social Media Wellness is the first book to successfully decode the new language of social media for parents and educators and provide pragmatic solutionsto help students:

• Manage distractions
• Focus and prioritize
• Improve time-management
• Become more organized and boost productivity
• Decrease stress and build empathy

With fresh insights and a solutions-oriented perspective, this crucial guide will help parents, educators and students work together to promote healthy socialization, effective self-regulation, and overall safety and wellness.

Tips From Teens On Promoting Social Media Wellness

"Ana Homayoun has written the very book I've yearned for, a must-read for teachers and parents. I have been recommending Ana's work for years, but Social Media Wellness is her best yet; a thorough, well-researched and eloquent resource for parents and teachers seeking guidance about how to help children navigate the treacherous, ever-changing waters of social media and the digital world."
—Jessica Lahey, Author of The Gift of Failure "This is the book I've been waiting for. Ana Homayoun gives concrete strategies for parents to talk with their teens without using judgment and fear as tools. This is a guidebook you can pick up at anytime, and which your teen can read, too. I'll be recommending it to everyone I know."
—Rachel Simmons, Author of The Curse of the Good Girl Read About Ana Homayoun in the news:

• NYTimes, The Secret Social Media Lives of Teenagers
• N YTImes, How to Help Kids Disrupt 'Bro Culture'
• Pacific Standard, Holier Than Thou IPO: Snapchat and Effective Parenting
• Parenttoolkit.com, Emojis, Streaks, Stories, and Scores: What Parents Need to Know About Snapchat

• Los Angeles Review of Books, Life and Death 2.0: When Your Grandmother Dies Online
  
  

• Chicago Tribune, Social Media Footprints are Nothing New, So What Were those Harvard Students Thinking?
  
  

• Today Show, 9 Tips to Help Teens Manage Their Social Media Footprint
  
  

• 5 Ways Parents Can Help Kids Balance Social Media with the Real World
  
  

1 Landscape What Today’s Social Media World Looks Like for Tweens and Teens

A few years ago, I was walking through the hallway of a middle school when Danielle stopped me. “You’re the lady who gave that presentation last week, aren’t you?” she asked me. Sitting on the floor of the school hallway, Danielle looked at me with knowing brown eyes. Her school uniform had an end-of-the day rumple to it, and her ash-blonde hair was pulled back loosely in a ponytail. It was a couple of weeks into the school year. I had given a presentation on back-to-school wellness to her and her middle school classmates the week before and had returned to give a corresponding talk to parents that evening.

“Your presentation was super helpful. A lot more than I thought it would be,” she volunteered. She quickly shared that she was in the seventh grade and was waiting for her mom to pick her up after school. Enjoying our conversation and curious to get her feedback, I asked what part of the presentation she found most useful.

“Well,” she started slowly, “all last year I had a profile on Ask.fm.¹ Lots of kids at my school are on it. Most nights, I would go into my room to do my homework, but I was really spending hours on Ask.fm. Have you used Ask.fm?”

I nodded.

She went on to reveal that she never told her parents about her profile on the site, because Ask.fm, like many social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, has a minimum age requirement of thirteen years.² (Some apps ask users to be eighteen.) As a sixth grader, she was twelve years old when she first created her Ask.fm account and wasn’t even supposed to be on the site.

“People posted mean things on my profile page,” she continued, her voice softening, “and I didn’t know who was saying what, and it stressed me out so much. Pretty soon, I couldn’t focus. It got hard to concentrate, and sometimes I would stay up late thinking about what people were saying. A lot of nights I had a hard time sleeping. But after your presentation, I realized I had choices on how I spent my time, and I wanted this year to be different—so I went home and deleted my Ask.fm account.”

“Wow,” I replied, both surprised and impressed by her decisiveness and courage to take action. “How do you feel?”

“I feel amazing,” she gushed, her face beaming with a huge smile. “It’s as though a big weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. In the last week, I’ve gotten my homework done a lot more quickly and have time to do whatever I want. I feel like this is going to be a great year.”

A few moments later, I ran into the principal and asked if she knew of Ask.fm or had ever used it. The principal gazed at me with a look of slight obliviousness and shook her head. A few hours later, I asked the three hundred parents in the audience how many were familiar with Ask.fm. Only two raised their hands. This discrepancy, I soon realized, was part of our new challenge for social media wellness.

——

I became a social media “expert” somewhat by accident. Like many adults in my mid-thirties, I came of age in a time of nascent social media opportunities. Even though I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I wasn’t that interested in the Internet as a high school student, and I only vaguely remember using my high school email address to trade five-line emails with a pen pal from the Midwest in a corresponding chemistry class. In 2001, I started an educational consulting firm with the goal of helping students with organization, time management, personal purpose, and overall wellness. Our main office is located in the heart of the Silicon Valley, but back then, there was no Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Musical.ly, Tumblr, YouTube, or WhatsApp.

About a decade ago, I noticed a shift in the way students managed their distractions and completed their work. At the time, they did most of their homework on worksheets or loose-leaf paper and then stored it all in hardback binders. Schools typically gave students written day planners to track assignments (whether or not those were used is another story altogether). My work was focused on helping students develop and manage their time so that they had more time for fun and rest, and the organizational system I developed became encapsulated in my first book, That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week. As a result of the success of that book, I began traveling to schools around the world, helping administrators, teachers, parents, and students promote academic success and personal wellness in the school and greater community.

Through my work, I’ve regularly seen students’ grade point averages (GPAs) improve from a 2.5 to a 3.6 within six months, and I’ve helped college students on academic probation improve to a B+ average simply by transforming when and how they do their work. In addition to the improvements in test scores and overall grades, I believe the most important indicators of success are our students’ increased confidence and engagement in their school and greater community. Once students design a system that works for them, they feel more in control of their lives and are excited to take healthy risks, try new activities, and get involved in a way they might not have before. They become purposeful, thoughtful, and resilient young leaders who are more likely to set audacious goals and improve their overall wellness with better sleep and nutrition habits. My work has always been about helping students dream big and make daily choices and develop habits around their own personal values. It is amazing to watch students go through this process, and positively influencing young people to make intelligent choices at such a pivotal time in their lives is extremely gratifying.

Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed first-hand the effects of technology and social media in the classroom and on young adults’ lives more generally. As more and more schools brought personal technology like computers and tablets into the classroom, I soon realized that all the traditional strategies we were employing were not enough. In the beginning, I noticed how the technological creep that was the online social world created another layer of distractions that needed to be addressed in my daily work with students. What began as a trickle of diversion—Facebook was first focused on college students, after all—quickly became a watershed of distraction (and disturbance) with the prolific abundance of iPhone and Android use and an explosion of instantly accessible free mobile apps.

I developed expertise around social media because I knew that doing so was a professional imperative. It created a crucial lifeline to help me reach students who were increasingly disconnected from adults who could—and should—provide guidance at a critical time in their social and emotional development. I began giving presentations to school faculty and parents on the new “language” of social media, because I realized that they were in need of a translator to thread the connection between the older generation’s pre–social media experiences and today’s younger generations’ way of living a life online.

Though students have long managed to find distractions anywhere and at any time, new social media innovations, especially anonymous and ephemeral social media apps and live-feed video, present new challenges for students and adults. Students who once identified food, daydreaming, pets, and siblings as major distractions are now far more likely to name certain social media apps or online websites. One of my high school seniors proclaimed that he spent the majority of his waking day on “the entire Internet,” and many of my other students admit doing the same. Another one of my students, a high school sophomore, recently listed her main distractions as the following:

1. Snapchat (x 100)
2. Instagram
3. Facebook
4. YouTube
5. Thinking about my life
6. Sleeping

Like many teens today, this young woman looks to online sites and mobile apps as a way to connect, communicate, and acquire new information. I will be the first to admit that technological innovation has improved all of our lives in many ways, and we all know that the story is nuanced and more complicated than technology being simply good or bad. Over the past decade, we—and by we I mean parents, educators, and students—have experienced a seismic shift in communication and interaction that we are only now beginning to understand and address. Much of the current work around students and technology addresses and highlights the challenges but doesn’t always provide crucially needed practical solutions.

According to 2015 Pew Research data, 92 percent of teens go online every day, which comes as no surprise to people who work with teens (see Table 1.1).³ What’s disconcerting, however, is that 24 percent report being online constantly—their phones are mere inches away from their heads when they hit the pillow, and they think nothing of waking up in the middle of the night to check notifications and respond to messages.⁴ Girls are much more likely than boys to send and receive texts, and girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen send by far the most text messages, nearly 4,000 text messages on average per month, which works out to well over 100 text messages per day.⁵ (Those texting statistics are dwarfed quickly by the number of messages sent through messaging services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which, combined, have 60 billion messages sent through their systems each day.⁶) Twenty-five percent of American teenagers admit to being connected to a device within five minutes of waking up.⁷ The latest research suggests that teens between the ages of thirteen and eighteen spend about nine hours per day using some form of entertainment media, and tweens between the ages of eight and twelve use nearly six hours per day of entertainment media.⁸ This time does not include time spent online during school or while doing homework.⁹ And because so much of that time is spent on media multitasking, or using multiple forms of media at once (texting while listening to music, for instance), students can actually pack far more hours of actual use into that daily time.

Table 1.1

Note: For many teens, texting is the dominant way that they communicate on a daily basis with their friends. Along with texting, teens are incorporating a number of other devices, communication platforms, and online venues into their interactions with friends.

Source: Pew Research Center. (2015). More than half of teens text with friends daily. Retrieved April 7, 2016, from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/06/teens-technology-and-friendships/2015-08-06_teens-and-friendships_0-02/

What gets lost or overlooked in this shift toward technology is the importance of carving out and creating time for some of the most crucial elements for child and adolescent identity development—solitude for self-reflection, opportunity for greater self-awareness, and, quite simply, sleep.

In many communities today, it is commonplace for students to have a mobile phone at their disposal, ostensibly “for emergencies” and “just in case.” Given some of the horrific events of the past two decades—9/11; Hurricane Katrina; the school shooting in Newtown, CT; and other tragedies—it is understandable that many parents feel more comfortable if their children have a phone. At the same time, today’s tweens and teens are spending more time online and are shifting their personal efforts to maintaining and building an online presence. What gets lost or overlooked in this shift toward technology is the importance of carving out and creating time for some of the most crucial elements for child and adolescent identity development—solitude for self-reflection, opportunity for greater self-awareness, and, quite simply, sleep.

The New Language of Technology and Social Media

In the summer of 2014, I gave a presentation to a group of women on the impact of social media in our everyday lives. The women in the audience were between eighteen and forty-five years old, and most were active on some form of social media. At that time, Snapchat was still gaining momentum and popularity, and most of Snapchat’s primary user base was under twenty-five years old. When I mentioned Snapchat to the audience, the majority of women under twenty-five were readily familiar with the app and in many cases had downloaded it onto their mobile devices. Most of the older audience members, however, were unfamiliar and somewhat uninterested.

This same sort of generational divide is currently happening with many students, educators, and parents. Over the past fifteen years, we have seen a remarkable shift in language and communication, and this shift has directly affected tween and teen wellness inside and outside of the classroom. Since I gave that talk in 2014, Snapchat has exploded in popularity, and new apps and messaging tools continue to change the way students interact, communicate, and consume content. In many ways, social media has created a new language of communication, and different generations are using and understanding the options differently. Students download and use new apps on a regular basis, and teachers, with all their other responsibilities, may not have the time or inclination to stay informed on all the latest social media trends. Recently, a teacher at a school I worked with was dumbfounded to learn that nearly all of her students were using a mobile app during class that she barely even knew existed. A head of school at a prestigious independent day school told me that he didn’t need to keep up with all the different social media trends because “everything will change in six months anyway.” Even when teens need their parents’ support and guidance, they are less likely to seek it if they think their parents won’t understand the problems they face, in particular with regard to their online activities. A 2015 study by Common Sense Media found that 25 percent of teens who are online think their parents are in the dark (knowing only “a little” or “nothing”) about their online activities. A slightly larger percentage (30 percent) think their parents are similarly uninformed about their use of social media.¹⁰ Even adults who want to stay involved and informed face a constant struggle to understand the new language of social media, which has new dialects and nuances evolving on a seemingly daily basis. Plus, in many ways, keeping up with all the changes is exhausting. Nancy Jo Sales, author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, traveled around the country documenting the social media habits of tween and teen girls, and revealed that after some days of researching, she would “have to sort of just sit for a while and take it all in.”¹¹

Over the past five to ten years, technology has utterly transformed the way students think, learn, communicate, and process information. In her recent TED talk, “We Are All Cyborgs Now” anthropologist Amber Case explores the long-lasting impact of being dependent on devices for our everyday functioning.¹² Students in today’s learning environments face the ultimate paradox: The same devices and tools they are required to use to complete much of their schoolwork also serve as their main sources of distraction from getting any of that work done. More and more schools encourage students to use laptops and tablets in the classroom. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, teachers at public schools reported that 69 percent of their students use computers during class most or some of the time. Internet connections were available for 93 percent of computers located in classrooms and for 96 percent of the computers brought into classrooms.¹³ Many independent schools and private schools throughout the United States and abroad have implemented one-to-one tablet or computer programs, or have similar programs in the works. More and more public and charter schools are doing the same—and with the price of a new Chromebook hovering around a few hundred dollars, it can be far cheaper to buy a Chromebook than to separately purchase all the textbooks it could potentially store. Regardless of whether or not a school has a one-to-one (or one-to-many) program in place, it is important to recognize that many schools are moving toward increasing the amount of educational technology in the classroom. Students spend at least some of their time online completing homework, and online socialization and distraction sneaks in and becomes a deterrent from completing work. How easy is it for students to block the Internet, when they need to use the Internet to complete their homework? Not so easy, as many of my students readily attest.

Early on, I realized that knowing the abbreviated language of texting and how to post Instagram photos or send Snaps gave me crucial credibility with students, and made them more open to listening to my recommendations and working with me to find pragmatic solutions. Students relax when they realize I am not against social media, and that I simply want to help them devise healthy ways of managing their work and life that are in accordance with their own vision of personal and academic success. In the end, my work is all about empowering students to align their daily behavioral choices with their goals and values. Through my work, I’ve personally developed greater empathy for our youngest generation’s struggles with technology and social media, because it didn’t take long for me to recognize how much time I could spend perusing my Instagram feed or doing “research” on the latest popular apps when I wanted to procrastinate. In the midst of my research, I found that my iPhone was filled with so many social media apps that it could have been mistaken for a teenager’s phone. I added flattering filters to photos, shared interesting articles, liked others’ check-ins at worldwide hotspots, and messaged friends and family internationally without affecting my data plan. All of those little moments of connection and communication quickly added up to a whole lot of time.

Regardless of their level of awareness around current social media trends, parents, teachers, and administrators are typically at a loss for how to support students because they do not fully appreciate the problem. And this is a significant issue, because 58 percent of teens say their parents are the biggest influence on what they believe is appropriate (and inappropriate) online.¹⁴ Although most adults over the age of forty can remember a time in their school days when they felt slighted or were stressed by sex, drugs, alcohol and/or social and romantic relationships, virtually none has a memory of being broken up with via text message two days before prom and having the whole school discover and discuss the breakup via multiple social media networks.

Social media shouldn’t be seen as strictly positive or negative. Instead, it should be addressed as a new language and cultural shift that provides d...