The Selfie Generation

During a time when social media is talked about daily in the news, Edrys Barkham, experienced tutor and former hsm, discusses the impact of these digital channels on children and offers some guidance on how to manage your child's screen time...

Our children are living in a time of radical social and technological change, and perhaps one of the most iconic symbols of this is the ‘selfie’. This is the image of ourselves that we present to the world using social media through our smart phones. Social media was designed to broaden and deepen connections between people, and make loneliness a thing of the past, but increasingly research is showing that it does the opposite and can actually make us feel more isolated and depressed the more time we spend using it.

Social media is having a major impact on how our children see themselves and live their lives and, as our adolescents are growing up better connected, there is a greater potential for them to be more depressed than previous generations.

Children who are ‘digital natives’ have always lived with social media, smart phones and electronic tablets. They have been called the ‘iGen’ by American psychologist, Jean Twenge, who considers them to be more compliant and less prepared for adulthood than any other generation. It was thought that access to social media and the world of information would make children grow up more quickly, but paradoxically it seems to be having the opposite effect and teenagers are in fact taking longer to grow up than ever before. This may be because they do not spend as much time with friends face-to-face as teens did 10 or 20 years ago. They are less likely to leave their home without their parents, meet up with friends or go to the shops or parties. They are less likely to do the things that adults do and children don’t: they are less likely to get their driving licence at 17 or 18 years, to drink alcohol, to have a paid job, or to have sex - childhood seems to have extended into adolescence.

There are benefits to growing up slowly and it has been a long-term trend in the Western world since the Victorian era. In evolutionary terms, a slow-life strategy for having fewer children means it is more likely that offspring survive because they can be nurtured more carefully, with a longer period for education. This means that children take longer to grow up because they are being more carefully protected for a longer and longer period of time.

How does social media affect sense of self?

Possibly the biggest negative effect of social media is that adolescents can spend even more time comparing themselves to increasing numbers of their peers. It is not surprising that our teenagers ‘see’ that their friends are leading more glamorous lives, having more fun and are better looking than they are. What they don’t seem to realise is that each photo displayed on their phones is carefully selected or even staged to present the perfect image. Their friends may have had a terrible day, but posted a picture of the one good thing that happened where they looked good and everyone around them looked happy. Social media is heavily curated so it doesn’t give anything like a real picture of other people’s lives, just the highlights of the good things. When adolescents believe that these images reflect real life then depression can develop as they aren’t able to reproduce this type of ‘reality’ in their own lives.

Despite there being a better understanding of how the brain works and greater insight into psychology than ever before, iGeners appear to be mentally fragile teenagers. They are the most physically safe and carefully protected generation, and they are exposed to fewer difficulties and they take fewer risks. And yet they report greater levels of anxiety, are more likely to self-harm and levels of depression are on the rise. Is there a connection, I wonder?

Increasingly schools are developing their social media policies to help their pupils understand how they negotiate the minefield of postings through their adolescence. Bryanston ensures that younger pupils have more controlled access to social media by limiting the times when they are allowed to use their electronic devices. Charging lockers ensure their phone and tablet are secure but inaccessible for most of the day and overnight. After classes, a wide range of activities mean that pupils have to talk to and work with each other face-to-face to solve problems and engage in the real world rather than virtual reality. As pupils get older they are given more access to their phones, but they also follow a programme of education about the benefits and dangers of social media. Social clubs, the café and house common rooms all give pupils the space to be with each other, to talk and to realise that no one really lives an ideal life. 

The weekly opportunity to speak openly and on a one-to-one basis with their tutor is strongly valued by pupils, and in the annual Pupil Voice feedback they always tell us how much they appreciate the advice and direction they receive from their tutor. Mobiles are not acceptable in the classroom and staff are themselves encouraged to model responsible behaviour with their own mobile devices and talk to the pupils about sensible use of social media.

However, children often see their parents posting on Instagram and Facebook, modelling in effect the behaviour they want their children to avoid. Allowing children to binge watch YouTube or Netflix is a temptation for parents as it enables them to “get things done”. Children often have unfettered use of mobile phones in the car for a peaceful journey, or to keep them amused, so that parents can talk to their friends at social events.

There is no doubt that parents and schools have a role to play in teaching children how to use social media, but the aim must be for adolescents to learn to use it responsibly and to be more astute about what they see posted.

Here are some simple rules to introduce when you give your child their first mobile phone:

• Establish when the child will have access to the phone and when they don’t
• Don’t allow the phone in the bedroom overnight
• There should be no use of the phone by any member of the family during meal times
• Talk to your child about the best way to communicate with their friends – you set the expectations rather than have your child learn from experience
• Model the behaviour you expect from your child through your own use of your phone.

Institutions

“Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes." Henry George

I have been in institutions for practically all of my adult life. Sounds worrying doesn’t it? I mean this in the best possible way. From Bryanston School to Birmingham University (then a brief period of ‘finding myself’) to Sandhurst, followed by a career in the British Army, to my PGCE and Loughborough Grammar School and finally back to Bryanston, in all of that I have worked as part of an institution. And yet I think that my time as a boy at Bryanston between 1982 and 1987 gave me a rather different view of institutions from many of my contemporaries that I think is even more valid when applied to the world today than it was then. Thankfully nobody ever tried to turn me into anything that resembled a typical Bryanstonian when I was at school (or an Old Bryanstonian when I left), and as a result I’m afraid that the whole idea of shared institutional values, this need for institutional conformity, leaves me rather cold.

My time in the British Army gave me an insight into perhaps the most closed and intense of all institutions - the Regimental Family. Now the 2nd Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment is a fine unit of fighting men and I totally ‘get’ the historic need for a deep sense of belonging in a fighting unit where your life depends upon those around you. The seams of ingrained identity run very deep from learning all five verses of the Lincolnshire Poacher (the Battalion’s nickname is The Poachers) to memorising battle honours and from the badges of identity to the fierce protection of and pride in the Queen’s Colour and Regimental Colour. And yet, as deep as my pride is at having served in The Poachers, I find the regular statements posted by my former soldiers on Facebook stating ‘Once a Poacher, always a Poacher!’ to be rather curious. I left the Army in 1998 and, having narrowly escaped having a Regimental crest tattooed on my backside, all I have left are good memories and some old uniforms that no longer fit. 

My time with The Poachers has given me some friends for life, some life-changing experiences and a deep affection for the Battalion, but I cannot say that it has changed my essence as a person. What it did do was encourage me to shed some of my teenage/early-20s immaturity and encourage me to approach life in a more disciplined and open way. I have moved on the better for, not defined by, my time in the Poachers and I think that this should be the aim of any educational institution also.

The issue of conformity versus creativity in schools is nothing new, and in many ways, it has been the least conformist pupils who have achieved the most in spite of the search for a collective identity. Whether it be the awkward Arthur Wellesley (future Duke of Wellington) failing to fit in with the routine of Eton life or Winston Churchill whose Harrow report opines: ‘He has no ambition. He is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other. He cannot be trusted to behave...He is so regular in his irregularity that I don’t know what to do with him!’, educational establishments have always struggled to enforce conformity on some of their pupils. Partly this is an eternal generational conflict, of course, but in respect of some British public schools there is something more - a tacit promise of a traditional identity that can be bought into and which subsequently gives access to a world of institutional connectivity. It promises to take a raw product and form it into a recognisable shape. Again, nothing new. In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte announced his educational policy stating that: ‘It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent upon the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment. Above all we must secure unity: we must be able to cast a whole generation in the same mould.’ Most would react against this form of centralised, state-controlled educational manipulation of children’s destinies yet is ‘..cast(ing) a whole generation in the same mould.’ really so different from what many schools promise to deliver on a smaller scale? 

Education for me should be about celebrating individuality rather than enforcing conformity. I do not apply this to school rules of course, which need to be consistent if they are to work, but to the expectations of what the children that we teach should be like. I understand that this is a counter cultural concept to broach as the search for a magic wand that will turn our children into something different is long-established.

I think that it is fair to say that in all bar a few professions people are no longer defined by the institutions that they previously attended. The ‘old school tie’ still carries influence in some quarters, but is slowly dying out as the light of fairness, social mobility and increased openness is shone on institutions of all types. All of this means that we cannot rely on ‘buying’ a package of educational identity, which will see us right in the wider world. Views abound about the innate personality traits of school alumni, but I think that this is massively overstated. After all, do we not want our children to ‘leave’ school and move out into the rest of the world to mix with, and work with, people of all backgrounds?

One thing that I have heard many times over the last three decades is of people’s experiences of meeting Old Bryanstonians. Almost universally they comment upon a rather pleasing lack of conformity, but they also all seem to agree upon their personality and confidence, whilst insisting that they are not ‘arrogant’. This, it seems to me, may be a product of the way in which a Bryanston education is delivered. Pupils are held accountable to their own standards and skills rather than that of a traditional set of institutional standards. If they are confident, then that confidence is built upon their own journey through school rather than having conformed to an expected stereotype and expecting an automatic kudos from simply having been a member of the tribe.

Stock self-evaluation of personality based purely upon belonging to a particular school, institution, region, race, star sign or other such nonsense is always bogus, I believe, and can be positively dangerous if it continues into adulthood. A school’s job is to enable, not to indoctrinate, and I think that we do children and parents an enormous disservice by leading them to expect otherwise in a constantly uncertain and changing world.