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.
Image Courtesy: Maurizio Pesce 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 10 states, including New Jersey, 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 percent of girls 13-17 years old have an iPhone; 92 percent of teen girls are online through their iPhones daily. Twenty-four percent 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 1950s.
The second thing to note is that teens don't "date." Instead, it's "hooking-up", which is all about sex for its own sake. Considering that some studies show that 90 percent of boys and 60 percent 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. 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."
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.
Albert B. Kelly is mayor of Bridgeton. Contact him by phone at 856-455-3230 Ext. 200.
Send a letter to the editor of South Jersey Times at sjletters@njadvancemedia.com