This story originally appeared in Children todayVox Bulletin about children, for everyone. Register here for future editions.
A few days ago, a group of teenagers prevented me from the term “dry text messages.”
It is anything that indicates “a change in the conversation environment,” Tanisha, 18, told me. Someone who usual texts in all limits can in lowercase. They could send a text message only shorts, or comments that do not invite an answer: an “Ender conversation”, as Joanne, 18, said. Dry text messages are the most common way in which children in school discover that someone is angry with them, Akshaya, also 18, told me.
I was talking to the three teenagers-co-organizations of the podcast Behind the screens – About something that appeared in an episode recently that intrigued me. They argued that phones, text messages and social networks could be easy for adolescents to avoid conflicts between them, providing them with numerous aggressive passive methods to show disapproval.
Adolescent comments caught my attention because adults generally think that phones are with confrontation among young people, not vice versa. An Ohio school district, for example, prohibited phones in schools on Conerns that students were using social networks to orchestrate fights.
But as much as text messages and social networks can amplify disputes between tens, they can also transform thesis disputes into something quieter, more confusing and, sometimes, more difficult to handle. “Technology creates subtle failures in communication,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard downtown for Digital Proving told me.
Behaviors such as leaving someone in reading, starting means in Snapchat or turning off the exchange of locations are “ambiguous signals,” said Weinstein. They could be innocent, or they could mean that the sender is really crazy, an uncertainty that has “worried, evil, second or only third that guess what they are mee.”
These ambiguities are not exclusive to adolescents, who did not send or received the dreaded “OK” text? But today’s preteen and adolescents have also grown tangled up with devices in a way that their other place did not. His training years have been marked by school blockages and closures, periods in which, as expressed by the podcast coanfrerion, Joanne, “the only type of interactions we could have had were a screen.” What happens when a machine to send ambiguous signals becomes an integral part of your social life?
Why the ambiguous text messages hurts
For answers, I turned to reporters for children from Scholastic, a group of 10 to 14 years that cover “news for children, children.” The young journalists went to work in their respects of respect and returned with the same observation of the Behind the screens Shared co-elbitations with me: phones definitely make it easy to ignore some you don’t want to talk to.
“Sometimes it is only so to leave some in reading or not respond immediately on the face of speaking with face to face,” a 13 -year -old told the reporter Scholastic Aiden. “I definitely avoid talking to some in person and simply showed that I was angry to silence them a bit. It is a bit petty, but it is also how many people deal with things now.”
“In real life you can’t fantastate someone,” reporter Scholastic Xander Dorsy told me in an email. “When sending text messages you could say” Oh, I will return. “It is much more uncomfortable to walk in real life.”
Teenagers can also express their disgust with someone by taking them out of their list of close friends on Instagram, or, a more extreme step, stops following them, said Akshaya. Online communication “makes it much easier to be passive-aggressive,” he explained.
But being at the receiving end of such passive aggression, whether a “dry” text or message or a message that hangs there on the screen without a response, children and experts agree: “You will trigger this spiral of anxious thought of what they live, and you start, and you? Weinstein told me.” “Do you hate me?” Do you think I’m an idiot? Did I say the wrong? “
When the meaning becomes clear, ambiguous signals can even be painful than a more direct confrontation, teenagers say. “They took me from a group chat and discovered that they were talking about me behind my back,” the same 13 -year -old boy told Aiden. “I felt confused and, as if it were worth a real explanation.”
“It hurts more than not only came to talk to me,” he added.
Telephones shape how children navigate conflict
Passive-aggressive telephone behavior is far from exclusive to children. But because they are in a development internship in which they are extremely sensitive to what their classmates are thinking and feeling about them, “they are more likely to analyze the ambiguous signals of the thesis,” said Weinstein.
Adolescence is also a time when conflict resolution skills are still developing, said Weinstein. We all need those skills because “life is full of conflicts,” said Darja Djordjevic, a psychiatrist who works with Stanford Brainstorm, a laboratory focused on mental health and digital well -being. Treating people who do not agree with us is a crucial part of growth.
Some fear that phones can interrupt that process. “We learn to discuss and fight productive in person,” Djordjevic said. Sending ambiguous signals about text or social networks could represent “a lost opportunity to confront things” in real life.
There is a lot of group among adults about phones that affect social skills in general, and although I do not always share that concern, I think it is reasonable to ask if new forms of communication will be manageable.
Older adolescents with whom I talked to relief of the Conerns thesis. Akshaya told me that when she and her friends were younger, “we would begin to eliminate ourselves from our followers if there was a big finger, or in drying and those things to avoid talking to each mind.” Now that they are about to graduate from high school, he thought: “I don’t see it so much.”
Children also pointed out that phones can sometimes help them resolve a conflict. Text messages “give me time to think before the answer and helps me express my thoughts more clearly,” a 12 -year -old boy told Aiden. “Sometimes it is less intimidating to start a difficult conversation through messages, and that can help us solve the problem later.”
Teenagers will also or show a text message to multiple friends before going to send, Tanisha told me. That way, “you are safer that this text will not be something bad or something, because you have the approach of other people.” (However, with job shopping texts, there is a risk that “your voice son will be lost,” he said).
And avoiding confrontation is not always sausage. If, for example, a child lives in a community or goes to a school where physical fights are common, “the bets of certain children or online conflicts are very different from a teenager who is in a context where all that,” said Mada Said’s. For some teenagers, ambiguous signals could be a way to stay safe.
Even so, like adolescents they may need tools to respond to great and strong projects such as bullying, they need help to deal with subtle failures that their phones also create. He begins with listening to young people about the role played by technology in their lives, said Weinstein.
Some characteristics of the application that may seem benign for adults (near Instagram friends or the exchange of locations come to mind) may feel very different for adolescents, Weinstein explained. “Then, often, adults lose or misunderstand aspects of what adolescents are experiencing behind their screens.”
The children with whom I talked also had advice for their classmates who dealt with dry text messages and other ambiguous telephone behaviors, much of them surprisingly of low technology. The 12 -year -old Scholastic Evy reporter recommends that they have done things in person whenever possible. “Having a real conversation with them and laughing with them, that makes it much better,” he said.
Power School, a company that causes software parents and teachers to use students’ qualifications, was pirate last year. Now several schools have received extortion notes that threaten to publish private data from students.
The FDA is moving to extract drops of recipe fluoride and market tablets. The HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has repeatedly criticized the mineral, but experts say that many of his statements are misleading, and those of dentists are worried that getting rid of the fluoride will increase the decomposition of children.
Amid the cultural wars surrounding the United States schools, politicians no longer talk about the real learning of children, writes Dana Goldstein in the New York Times.
My two children have been demanding repeated readings of Chloe and MaudeAn enlightened book about what to do when A) Your drawings are not realistic, b) Your friend tries to reinvent themselves and you are not sure you like it, oC) you are trying to fall in which a crack on the roof looks like a mouth.
Recently, a reader communicated to tell me that he received a Google email by notifying him that the company’s gemini applications would soon be avializable for children, allowing them to “create stories, songs and poetry” and “Get Hardwork.” The reader found Google’s email “unpleasant and disturbing,” he said, “as if they were saying that it is inevitable that children depend a lot on AI in the future, so here there is a guide on how to make young people begin.”
Next week, I will talk to the Vox Senior Technology correspondent, and Author of Easy Bulletin to use, Adam Clark Estes about the role of the children in the life of children. If you, like the reader above, have thoughts about how the children you know use (or not use) AI, or questions for me and Adam while we chat, let’s know in anna.north@vox.com.
]