Those early mom blogs, the mothers were the main characters. And now with family influencing on Instagram and on YouTube, really the kids became the main character and they became the draw and the mothers kind of faded into the background.
The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying. OK, let's go back to that elephant in the room. Social media and smartphones also increased during this period. But here's the weird thing. In our longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health.
People ask me all the time: what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online? The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying.
My mother was like, no, my kids are going to college. And and you know, uh my brother went to Williams College, my sister went to Villanova, I went to Yale. So, you know, her vision of the family was the vision that determined our lives.
Scary stories sell They always have And the more often you hear something the more likely you are to believe that it's true And scary stories are really easy to sell to parents We are an anxious lot
In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there's another creature who tells a sweeter story.
I didn't want my kids to think that anything else was more important than them, not being in the streets, not women, not gambling, not hustling, not anything. I didn't want them to ever think that anything that I was doing was more important than them. And my father made me at times feel unimportant to him.
Correction without connection feels like rejection. Connection is what separates our work from our worth. It's about valuing people not just for what they do, but who they are.
Which means that puberty is the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media. For our ultra-social species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction in the real world, not by TikTok's algorithm.
