November 30, 2023
I don’t think most people would argue that parenting a middle schooler has ever been an easy task, but the advent of the smartphone and social media has certainly not made the task any easier. It is incredibly difficult to navigate these ubiquitous technologies as we try to balance teaching kids to self-regulate and providing time to socialize with concerns about screen time and internet safety.
One of the most common and difficult challenges to navigate is conflicts that arise as a result of conversations held over text or a social media platform. People have a hard time gauging tone and intent over text and social media, and as a result, conflicts can escalate quickly. Additionally, not being able to see someone else’s reactions to a statement can lead people to say things over text that they wouldn’t say in real life. In my experience (and in my experience with many, many middle schoolers), kids and adults tend to be much less kind when looking at words on a screen instead of looking at a human face.
We do a number of things to try to help our students navigate these challenges. All 6th graders take a Technology elective with Ms. Perez-Heydrich, which heavily focuses on digital citizenship and navigating these challenges. Additionally, we discuss this in depth in advisory. Our advisory curriculum has three themes: diversity, equity, and inclusion; empathy and bullying; and social skills and conflict resolution. Each year, we focus on a different theme; a major focus of our social skills and conflict resolution curriculum is on digital communication and social media.
This year, we also began working with The Social Institute, a platform that provides a gamified, online learning platform to empower students to navigate their social world — social media and technology — to fuel their health, happiness, and future success. Tomorrow, Ms. Villarreal and Ms. Perez-Heydrich will be hosting a Friday Coffee Talk to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of the digital world, as well as sharing what TDS is doing to incorporate technology in order to build empathy and digital citizenship via The Social Institute. We’d love to see you there!
I’ll leave you with a few simple pieces of advice that we give the kids about navigating these challenges:
- Remove yourself from a group chat that is causing conflict.
- Talk things out in person, not online.
- Tell a trusted adult what’s happening.
It’s easy to forget that middle schoolers are still children in many ways, and they struggle with navigating social situations even without the added challenge of digital communication. Though we can try to give them the tools they need to manage these situations at school, we really need the adults at home with them to help them implement these strategies in real-time. No matter how mature they may seem, they often need adults to help guide them (even though they would probably never admit it).
