Kids are more vulnerable to online threats that most adults realize.
It seems obvious that kids are more vulnerable than adults. However, it can be hard to understand just how vulnerable children are online. All humans are biased to process what they say. See a small kid and you think someone weak and vulnerable to physical attack. This need to keep kids physically safe has led to a rise of Safetyism where children are kept from taking any kind of physical risk anywhere. When I was a kid, I was kicked out of the house until dinner time or the street lights came on. I remember one time coming back into the house and my dad asked me if I was "in for the night." I shouted back, "No, I'm just grabbing a flashlight." His response? "Okay, son." Pictures of missing children on milk cartons, the distorted reporting of violence against children on the news (violent crime is less than 2% of all crime. Violent crime against children is less than 2% of all violent crime - making it less than 0.04% of crime, but reporting of violent crime against children makes up 40% of all crime reporting. This distorts violent crime against kids by a thousand times). Now some crimes, such as school shootings, necessarily create a threshold no one wants to cross. There should never be any. Zero. None. So it makes sense to do everything in our power to prevent those. However, that is not the kind of vulnerability I am talking about. I am talking about removing merry-go-rounds and removing every possible hazard from playgrounds until there is practically nothing left but cement and chalk. We can see dangers so we remove them.
But there is one place we can't see. Into the mind of a child. And it is in the way our children's brains develop that a very special kind of vulnerability exists.
Home Sapiens are unique in a variety of ways, not the least of which is because of how the brain develops. Fun fact. We are the only animal with a single species in its genus. All the other species of the hominid Homo died off (or were absorbed). Homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, and homo heidelbergensis all shared the planet with our direct ancestors, but for reasons we can only speculate, Homo Sapiens emerged as the sole surviving species. Perhaps because we are the only species, our brain development is also unique. Human brains quadruple in size after birth. The next closest animal for that kind of post-birth growth is the chimpanzee, which sees its brain double. While it has been argued by evolutionary biologists that humans are essentially born with the largest head that can fit through a birthing canal (any wider, and women would barely be able to run because their pelvis would be too wide), they also claim we are born premature. Human babies are nearly helpless. Almost all other mammals progress at a rapid pace, much faster than Sapiens. But having a big brain that increases in size four times is not the only feature that makes us unique.
Every other mammal goes from birth to reproductive age as fast as possible. When our neighbor's dog had puppies, their dog, a fully mature yellow lab, was three years old. Three! Three! Three-year-old humans have just finished mastering walking and running! They are still ten years away from entering puberty, which is practically the life of a Labrador. But why? Why does it take humans so long to mature fully? One reason may be that around age five, humans pause. They stop developing for almost seven years. From about age five to twelve, the elementary and early middle school years, human brains go through a very interesting transformation. At five years old, a human child will have a brain that is 90% of the size of their adult brain, but it will have more neural connections. Five-year-olds are literally little bundles of potential. Potential, but not skill.
But why do humans slow their development for seven years?
I will answer that question with the legend of Mughal Emperor Akbar from the 16th century CE in India. Once upon a time, Emperor Akbar and his advisors had a debate. They wanted to know what was the natural language of God. To answer this question, Akbar (allegedly) ordered that several infants be raised without speech of any kind. They would test the children once they reached 12 years old to see what language they spoke. They would be fed, bathed, cared for, but never spoken to. When the children finally reached the desired age, they were brought to the palace by their caretakers. Shockingly, none of the children could speak. More tragically, none of them learned to speak. They had lost the capacity to even learn language, and they never adjusted to living in society.
This popular story appears in multiple cultures and is known among linguists as The Forbidden Experiment. Linguists like this story because it demonstrates that language is taught, not innate. However, the myth implies something else. Obviously, kids learn to speak by five years old. However, there is a window in a child's life between 9 and about 14 when children have a highly specialized capacity to absorb not language but culture.
In the 1990s, a Japanese anthropologist named Yasuko Minoura studied the children of Japanese businessmen who had been transferred by their companies to live for a few years in California during the 1970s. Minoura wanted to know at what age America shaped the children's sense of self. She studied their feelings and their ways of interacting with friends, even after they returned to Japan. She found that children who spent the years between the ages 9 and 14 in California came to “feel American.”
This sensitive period affected whether a child could learn to speak like a native, and in fact, how they saw themselves. This experience lines up with what we see in human neural development. Children pause so they can absorb the culture they are growing up in. All of those many neural pathways they have built as five-year-olds start to narrow. This is called neural pruning. In other words, they go from clumsy, unskilled children to more skilled adolescents. The rapid changes in neural structure give some credibility to the outcome of the Forbidden Experiment. After a certain point, the brain's window to learn certain kinds of information is lost. It is in this window that children are exceptionally vulnerable. During this period of massive pruning and rewiring. They are primed to mimic the culture they spend the most time engaging in.
In an era where pre-teens are constantly on their phones, development psychologists are starting to see that children are being harmed by the unregulated, toxic culture created by many online communities, even ones that seem innocuous to adults. Ultimately, this is why our children are so much more vulnerable online than anyone thought. The largely ignored, never enforced thirteen-year-old age limit to create online accounts is laughably inadequate. We are letting trillion-dollar tech companies enter into contracts with our children? To do what? Give away their data, allow them to post images of themselves, and allow unmonitored contact from complete strangers? This is the world most preteens are absorbing. This is the culture that is shaping their sense of self.
Basically, in the middle of our children needing to develop the social, emotional, and cultural intelligence to become productive contributors to society, their attention is being sucked away into doomscrolls. Like the Forbidden Experiment, our children's brains are being shaped by content that is not in their best interest. Former Google Ethicist Tristan Harris, who has testified before Congress on how social media platforms manipulate user behavior to maximize engagement, often at the expense of users’ well-being. What we are only now just beginning to understand is not simply the users' well-being that is being undermined. When it comes to children, their long-term mental health is also being affected.
Where most adults have had their personality imprinted in a play-based childhood, the phone-based childhood that began with the arrival of the smartphone in the 2010s pushed aside community education. The impact has been widespread growth of anxiety, boredom, isolation, and fear among kids. What's more, these feelings persist into young adulthood. It takes 12 years for the brain to form its emotional core. Then it takes another 12 to complete the prefrontal cortex. Right in the middle of laying that emotional foundation, the same sensitive period that kids form a sense of who they are and what culture they are a part of, social media is disrupting our natural development pattern. Not all of these disruptions appear to be reversible.
Humans evolved as a species which raises its children socially. Children thrive when they have experiences which are face-to-face, with a few people, active (think embodied), synchronous (people play together, or take turns), non-judgmental (so kids can experiment), and have a high level of personal commitment (people stick around so they have reasons to work out problems). In contrast, this childhood environment is being shoved aside by digital domains that are remote (disembodied), asynchronous, extremely judgmental, inhabited by countless numbers of anonymous people, engaged in low-commitment activities (they come and go without rhyme or reason). What our children most need to grow is being replaced by what they least need. Only, it affects kids more than adults. Adults have already had their sense of identity and culture shaped. Not so with the kids. They are still open to being shaped in ways that adults are not.
To Summarize
Kids are more vulnerable than adults online for two reasons. First, their brains have not fully finished forming, so they do not have the executive functions to protect themselves from distraction. Second, their brains are in a state of constant cultural learning. Addictive online applications (social media and many free-to-play games) deliver exactly the opposite experience children need to develop social-emotional intelligence. Instead of a few high-quality, face-to-face connections where kids can learn and grow, they are being fed a steady diet of high-quantity, low-quality judgmental connections.
With new understanding, we need to rethink everything we know about screen time. Simply limiting access to screens is not only just about impossible, it is not enough. We need to do two things. First, start being intentional about making sure our children have access to the right kinds of experiences to spur their growth. Second, we need to start demanding our government and regulators for the same kinds of protections online that we get in the real world. Parents do not need to police bars, strip clubs, or dispensaries. The government does it, with stiff consequences for businesses that break that law. It is possible to achieve similar levels of protection online. We just have to try.
