0:00:01 – Announcer

You are listening to the National University Podcast.

0:00:01 – Kimberly King

Hello I’m Kimberly King. Welcome to the National University Podcast, where we offer a holistic approach to student support, well-being and success- the whole human education. We put passion into practice by offering accessible, achievable higher education to lifelong learners. Today we are discussing social media and relationships, and it’s been such an interesting conversation. But, according to Bloom Health and Wellness, there are some practical tips on how to manage social media in relationships by setting clear boundaries, being mindful of how you portray your relationship online, addressing conflicts offline, practice empathy and understanding and really taking breaks from social media and getting some face-to-face time. All of this we’re going to be covering on today’s show, so stay with us. On today’s episode, we’re discussing social media and relationships. Joining us is National University’s Chairman of the Department of Marriage and Family Sciences, Dr. Mark White.

Mark was raised in Auburn, Washington, and currently lives in Vernal, Utah. He received his MFT graduate training at BYU and Kansas State University. Before coming to National. He taught in the MFT programs at Auburn University, Kansas State University. Before coming to National, he taught in the MFT programs at Auburn University, Kansas State University and East Carolina University. Before the pandemic, he operated the Vernal Center for Couples and Families, and he continues to provide occasional supervision and supervision mentoring, but has not yet decided whether to open an online or physical clinical practice. And we welcome Mark to the podcast. How are you?

0:01:48 – Mark White

I’m doing well, thanks. How are you?

0:01:49 – Kimberly King

Great. Thank you. What an interesting background you have. Why don’t you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today’s show topic?

0:02:00 – Mark White

Certainly, my father was a social worker and I never wanted to do what he did. But when I got to college and had some volunteer experiences, I discovered that I wanted to be a therapist and I was able to teach during my master’s program and at the end of that I discovered I’m not sure I’m ready to go into full-time clinical practice, I want to get a PhD, and discovered that I’m a person who thrives on variety, so I love being able to do practice and research and teach, and that led to a career in academia and I feel there’s just plenty of challenges in the country and one more therapist can hopefully catch a few starfish and throw them back into the water.

0:02:50 – Kimberly King

I love it. That is true, you’re in at a very relevant time in the world, but, boy, I think what’s up is down and what’s down is up right In this crazy world we live in. So thank you for what you’re doing Today. Actually, we’re talking about social media and relationships, and what a rich topic this is. So why do we need to have a conversation about social media and relationships?

0:03:16 – Mark White

I think we’re all in the middle of an experiment right now. About 20 years ago, only 5 percent of US adults were on social media. Now it’s about 70 percent and if we think of the technological changes that have happened over the last 20-30 years, it’s just been exponential growth and we don’t know yet how it’s all going to play out. And it’s impacting people every day. It’s part of people’s- it’s infused into their lives. I think we need to talk about it.

0:03:55 – Kimberly King

Yeah, good point, right, especially one of the first percentages that you talked about what it used to be and now what it is. Seems like everybody’s on social media. So what is unique about the potential impact of social media on relationships?

0:04:12 – Mark White

So, if you think about you know, as long as there have been relationships, people have been able to connect with others, but it was typically people local or had to write letters or leave hieroglyphics or petroglyphs. Then we could call folks or we could visit. Now, in seconds, we can connect with anyone in the world. And across multiple platforms, we can access more material than we will ever be able to consume in our whole lives, and it’s the potential for true connections with other people and pseudo connections and dysfunctional and harmful connections has just exploded.

0:05:03 – Kimberly King

Right, and I think you might even be talking about boundaries coming up, but it seems like it’s kind of the wild wild west and we’re still in it as social media just expands and continues. In what ways does social media facilitate both pseudo connections and genuine community?

0:05:34 – Mark White

If you think about Facebook, for example, you can find a group for almost any disease you have, social cause, you want to be involved with work experience, you have military, other experience, hobbies, so we’re able to provide people with community almost instantly. This is, you know, I used to do some research with chronic illness. Chronic illness can be very isolating. People can feel like, how many other people have this and what’s it like? And the power of social media to connect people, to share their stories and their struggles and resources is truly a valuable resource. People who are isolated, people who are shut in, older adults can all access genuine community and the types of experiences people have. They can find other hobbyists. They can find people who, like I said, share their disease or condition. They can find other Veterans. They can find other people who suffered trauma in their childhood. Grandparents can stay connected to children and grandchildren who live at a distance. People can find mates. The amount of online dating and mate selection has just exploded and is now the most common way people get together. So there’s potential for real community, whatever the issue is. I live on a hobby farm and I’m part of the rabbit group and the goat group and several poultry groups and that’s the way we exchange or buy animals and we ask questions about how to handle things. Many of our students who are dealing with issues for their dissertation recruit from social media groups because people want to tell their story, whatever the situation is. So the community potential is great.

At the same time, the pseudo community piece is you know, we can look at our list of you know 500 Facebook friends, and how many of them do we really have a true relationship with? How many of them do we interact with routinely? How many of them do we share our true self with? Most of us, unless we’re incredibly introverted, have a pretty small circle of people that we would really consider friends, and we’ll talk more about this later.

But also people present the image they want on social media as well. So a lot of it’s not real, the interaction that we have. So the potential to genuinely connect with people is an incredible resource that’s just exploded. The potential to have a bunch of pseudo connections where we really don’t know them and we’re not real with them, and they’re not someone who we could turn to if we needed something, is also happening as well. And that kind of I think facilitates that kind of feeling of loneliness, like I have this connection to people but it’s not a real connection and I look at their posts and they have much happier lives than I do. What’s wrong with me, and I can’t share the struggles I have, and so it’s isolating when there’s potential to have real connections.

0:09:19 – Kimberly King

Boy, you nailed that and I want to ask you so many other things. I want to go back a moment, but I also want to follow up with what you’re talking about, especially the younger generation, where that’s how they’ve grown up. So they think whatever’s on social media is real and we should all aspire to be like that. So it’s an unrealistic, really expectation, I think. So it must be interesting teaching the different- you know, age groups. I would imagine you know, there’s a little bit of reality in my age group because we didn’t have that growing up and then I look at my kids and that’s all they know. So yeah, I think you have to have that honest conversation.

0:10:02 – Mark White

I have colleagues who have kids who don’t want to go to college because they’re going to be a YouTuber and they’re going to make lots of money. I have a niece who’s on YouTube and she probably makes $200 on a good month, so she’s never going to- that’s never going to be a viable substitute for any kind of gainful employment. And then the nature of relationships is just skewed by how people present on social media, right. Like you said, if that’s what you think is the norm, it’ll be interesting and challenging to see how that plays out over the next several decades when life happens.

0:10:49 – Kimberly King

Right, exactly, it’s a- this is a great class and, I think, a great service that you are offering this class, because, yeah, we do need to get real about that. What are the implications of the social component of social media and then the media element of social media?

0:11:06 – Mark White

We touched on this a bit ago, but the potential to connect with people all over the world is a real resource based on common interests, based on random events. Based on random events, you probably heard about that young man who saw a post about Thanksgiving dinner. I can’t remember how the mix-up happened being up this woman’s house for Thanksgiving. It was a mistake, and so she invited him in and they’ve had Thanksgiving together for several years since then. That’s the kind of fluke that social media can promote, and so it is social in that in every platform, you have the potential to interact with other people. And it’s also social in that somebody is managing those connections and those platforms, and so it’s not necessarily an unscripted or coincidental like who shows up in your feed is based on algorithms, and so even the social part of it is managed, but it does offer a way to connect, and I think that’s why it has potential for good.

The media part is that we could spend our entire day and sadly some people do on social media, because you could never consume all the media that’s there, and you can go from different type of media audio, video, songs, printed material. So you know the past, we would go into a library. We would check out a book or a magazine. We would sit down at television and watch a show, we turn on the radio. That was pretty much our media, or we could go to a book or a store and purchase something, but that was it. Now we have access to all the world’s knowledge and that media- some of it’s good, some of it’s hate speech and cruel and evil. Some of it’s just blatantly false and some of it is in terms of it is, if we make choices about what we do with our time, some of it is like eating junk food all day versus a healthy meal, if that makes sense.

0:13:40 – Kimberly King

Yeah, wow, I mean it is true, and I think you also said some people really just do scroll all day long and they just try to fill that cup, which can really leave you feeling empty because you’re just not really out there in the real world. I guess the character in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” Jacques opined the world is a stage. Brilliant sociologist, Irving Goffman, also spoke of front stage and backstage behavior. Can you clarify and talk about the both ways that social media capture front stage and backstage behavior?

0:14:20 – Mark White

Certainly. One of the things Goffman focused on is the presentation of self. So throughout our days, many of our interactions are internally scripted. We want to present ourselves to other people in a certain way co-workers, friends and family and then when we’re home, when we think we’re alone, then we do backstage behavior when we don’t think anybody’s watching, and then that’s when we can be real.

And you know, families have a lot of backstage behavior, obviously, and sometimes they’re fine with that, other times they’re not. You know, there’s a saying that when your first child goes to kindergarten it’s like opening a picture window into your house with no drapes. Kids talk and they essentially explain the backstage behavior that goes on in families. And so when we have, when people interact with us about backstage behavior, sometimes that’s uncomfortable. One of the ways I paid for undergrad was door-to-door sales and I remember knocking on this door in California about seven at night and this man was and his kids were watching TV and he was in his tighty whities and I knocked on the door and the kids came to open the door and he saw me and he was very angry because I interrupted his backstage behavior. That’s- you don’t open the front door- that’s not front stage behavior.

So on social media there is a ton of front stage behavior- we choose the posts, we choose the pictures, and you’ve probably seen those memes where they show what this it looked like and then they show what was behind the scenes, without the makeup, without the clothes, without the, you know, the Photoshop and everything. And so we’re exposed constantly to people’s front stage behavior and therefore we compare oftentimes our backstage behavior to other people’s frontstage behavior, and usually we feel lacking. Their relationships are better, they look better, they’re wealthier, and that kind of discrepancy can really eat on people and be painful. So so much of the choices you make and what to post are front stage behavior.

0:16:42 – Kimberly King

It’s such an interesting way to put it and I all I can think of when you’re talking about that- It is true we always are kind of drawn to you know what’s what’s out there, what everybody else’s life looks better, but also sort of like reality TV, which they want to say it’s like backstage behavior. But that’s not even backstage behavior because that’s reality TV, is all scripted so people want to get to that. But I know, I used to be on air with NBC and CBS here locally in San Diego and I remember when I was on the air and I was talking about whatever weather, traffic features, whatever the interview was, it was what I was saying about my family behind the scenes and that’s what people really connected with me on was what was going on in that backstage behavior. So I think that’s really interesting. I think we have an appetite for that, but some of it is staged too much, I think, for that on stage.

0:17:38 – Mark White

Definitely and in terms of some of the backstage, when people are real like when people tweet or share a post about the loss of a family member or a recent diagnosis or an unflattering family interaction, you do see backstage behavior and that’s in a normal way. You also see people be really ugly online and the amount of hate speech and cyberbullying and everything- in some ways, that’s backstage behavior and it’s backstage behavior that would have been censored or filtered in the past and now people have no hesitation putting it out there and so we encounter these. You know like Twitter now acts as a good example of that. Some just really vile, hurtful, angry tweets and they wound people and they contribute to mental health challenges and depression and suicidality- both ideation and actual carried out suicides. So there’s definitely a dark side to backstage behavior.

I’m sure we’ll talk more about infidelity in social media, but one of the things that happens when people are having an affair is that they share backstage moments with the other person, oftentimes their partner would not want them to share. They share details about their sexual relationship. They share details about the conflict they’re having. They share details about their finances, and so social media provides a vehicle for them, and this obviously predated social media, but an easy way to share backstage details about your partner and your personal family life that others wouldn’t consent to if they knew that it was going on.

0:19:48 – Kimberly King

That’s a good point. There’s just so many slippery slopes in here and, to really agree with what you were saying, people they’ll never, you know post something- typically not negative things that are going on in their lives or when they’re having a really bad day, and what you just said. Sometimes people take advantage of those and really take it to the next level when it’s that hate speech. So it’s wow, there’s. It really is a wild, wild west.

0:20:15 – Mark White

And if I say another thing about the front stage behavior is, if you’re an influencer, that’s your job is managing front stage behavior. My daughter used to be an influencer related to food and nutrition and that meant many meals a day were laid out on this whiteboard, placed in the light and pictures taken up and testing products and giving testimonials and not being able to just sit down and enjoy a meal, necessarily, and she didn’t do anything she felt you like went against her ethics, or that she didn’t believe in, but it stilted some of the obviously the normal routines of a family. And then the comparison piece comes in, which is a huge part of it. There’s, you know, thousands of other diet, lifestyle, food bloggers and influencers out there and you compare against their posts and eventually decided she decided this isn’t worth the kind of psychic cost.

0:21:30 – Kimberly King

Right, and I would imagine as a family member, if you’re all sitting around the table, you all have to wait. Okay, you have to post and we have to yeah, you kind of have to get used to it.

0:21:35 – Mark White

I’ve been there when we pause so that she could lay it out. On the this, what you know, she bought this perfect piece of tile. Lay it out get a picture taken, so I totally get that.

0:21:54 – Kimberly King

Yeah, yeah, I know, I, I, my son, does that when he sits down with his girlfriend and they’re like, wait, hold on, we have to take the perfect picture. And he’s not an influencer by any means, but it looks good on social media, I guess. So, anyway, that’s, yeah, welcome to their world. Right? In what ways is social media a zero sum game, like a pie, that when there are only eight pieces. And then when? Is it not like a pie?

0:22:20 – Mark White

So let’s talk about the pie part of it, and this is that’s largely for me the time investment and the emotional energy investment. We all have 24 hours a day and we all have a certain number of that 24 is when we could be with significant others. In many instances, the amount of time we spend on social media cuts into the amount of time that we can have with others. It is pie- If you’ve got five hours after work and you spend three hours doom scrolling, then you have that many hours fewer to spend with family members, and that’s the same whether it’s tennis or running or reading or playing solitaire. But I think what social media adds is the instancy of your ability to do that. All you have to do is pick up your phone and you watch couples in a restaurant, and oftentimes one or both of them are on their phone.

I’ve had clients where the phone was always around. It went to bed with them, it was in the bathroom with them, and so just from a finite time piece, that’s the piece of pie, that’s gone. Also, the energy leave 30 minutes of X, just feeling kind of down and cranky and upset at things. Then that’s going to impact others. But it also can be a shared activity. Or who share things on Instagram and Facebook? Who connect with family members? Who share pictures? We’ll talk later about the kind of Brangelina posts or Facebook accounts where each couple has a shared account versus individuals.

But social media can be a way that, when you both invested it together, that’s not piloting. You’re building the relationship while engaging as well, and I think plenty of people do that effectively. That’s a way, throughout the day, they can stay connected to each other and it’s a way they can communicate how they’re thinking about each other, and it also is a front stage behavior. The type of posts that you share communicates to others. This is our relationship. This is the nature of who we are.

What we do we’re an item. We do these things together are what we do. We’re an item. We do these things together. And I think that when you go back and see those, like my wife and I hike a lot together and we usually post, you know, pictures of those hikes. So every day you get a new memory in Facebook. Many of those are from those hikes and so looking at a hike sending that post to each other, you know that’s a way that using social media to build a relationship, to stay connected, is not a zero-sum game. It brings us together the time invested.

0:25:52 – Kimberly King

And that’s a good point, I think any shared activity as husband and wife or as a partner, I mean that’s that is, I think, an end game or an end goal in that regard. So that that’s a good point, that you can do your social media together. And I’m almost was thinking in the very beginning when you were answering the question about how we bring our you know phones with us whether we’re at dinner or wherever we go. In my era it was like just sitting in front of the TV, so that was kind of pacifying our time and, you know, excluding conversations by just turning on the TV. But now it’s our phones, you know so different.

And yeah, we’re in that next generation. This is great information and right now we just need to take a quick break, but more in just a moment. Don’t go anywhere. We will be right back. And now back to our interview with National University’s Chairman of the Department of Marriage and Family Sciences, Mark White, and it’s been an interesting conversation so far. We’re talking about social media and relationships, and so, Mark, in what ways can social media be especially toxic to couples?

0:26:59 – Mark White

Great question, part of what we’ve talked about in terms of time, but another key element is boundaries and rules. We’ve always been able to look up old flames, but that would be going to a class reunion or writing a letter looking at a phone book. And now we can have instant access by using social media to look up information on past individuals. And there’s even a term in some of the research on particularly, it started with college students, but it’s going beyond that. It’s called back burner relationships that many people keep connecting through social media with a few people, I once said it was an average of seven, that could be a future mate if things don’t work out with their current relationship.

So I think about this a lot because it used to come up in therapy. Number one is how much time do you spend? And if it’s a zero-sum time, then that’s less for your partner. The second is potential to have conversations and share backstage details with other people that your partner doesn’t consent to you sharing. There’s that comparison piece that’s deadly there. Looking at other people’s relationship, is it better? Is their partner more attractive? Are they having more fun? Do they have more money? I like their house. Why are their kids seemingly so well behaved when ours are hellions sometimes? I mean there’s just layers to the messages that you can take from other people’s front stage behavior and then apply it to your relationship and the easy access and the potential for deception I think are what can be the most toxic. It was more of a survey of divorce attorneys and now it gets cited as kind of gospel and I don’t know how much consistent data support, but one in three divorces is related to Facebook was the statistic.

And when you look at the research on Facebook and infidelity, for example, it’s often previous partners you’ve had a relationship but not always- it’s encountering someone else. You know, social media facilitates gambling. It facilitates pornography use. It facilitates a kind of obsession, potentially with hobbies. It contributes to mental health issues. So all of those can damage the relationship and impact, you know, one of the theories that’s really popular for couples is attachment theory that as children we bond to these caregivers who we could turn to when we are distressed. They provide us security and connection and that continues with us into adult romantic relationships. Our partner becomes a secure base for us. We turn to them when we’re distressed and we need comfort and connection and we develop a model in our heads. John Bowlby talked about the internal working model.

Bowlby is one of the attachment theorists- that through the history, drop by drop of interactions with the people close in your life, you get a sense of can people be trusted? Can I depend on other people? Am I worthy of care? Am I worthy of love? And social media can facilitate those things but it also can damage those things. One of the things that’s come out of the- There’s a therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy by Sue Johnson.

Looking at couples and employing attachment theory is that there could be attachment breaches or attachment injuries. When your partner, who’s your secure base you depend on, does something you know, obviously as serious as infidelity, but you know something more like why did you message your girlfriend from high school? Why did you share that I was sick last night and went to bed and we didn’t want to talk about it. Why did you pay this person money towards their medical bills without talking to me?

There’s a whole range of attachment injuries that can happen that are facilitated by social media and you know the potential for never physically being near another person but exchanging very intimate information, very private backstage material, sexting. I mean there’s just so many ways that we can damage the connection to each other by using these social connections to other people inappropriately.

0:32:20 – Kimberly King

Boy, yeah, you just opened up Pandora’s box and so many of those, and you’re right, literally that’s a slippery slope. And when you’re, yeah, there are boundaries. As you said, etiquette, yeah, we need to know what side to stay on there. And how can couples use social media then to enrich their relationship and how can they prevent or mitigate the potential harmful effects?

0:32:46 – Mark White

We can look at this two ways. One is preventative, and every couple has different rules and expectations about relationships, and we’re- for the sake of this, because if we open up to polyamory and consensual non-monogamy that you know, there there’s just that’s a whole, ‘nother discussion, but just a committed relationship where there’s some degree of perceived exclusivity. So too often couples don’t have these conversations until a breach happens. Everything hits the fan and they’re upset and wounded. And even before, obviously before social media, those same kind of conversations should be had like, can you go to dinner with somebody that you could be attracted to? Or lunch or breakfast I mean, just even those three meals can have different connotations. Does it matter if you dated or slept with this person when you have conversations with them? Can you what kind of like, do you play tennis with somebody that you could be attracted to? Or run with them? Or go to a concert, if I’m bored, I don’t want to go to that concert. I mean, those type of conversations every couple should have are especially pertinent to social media, because you can be in the same room with somebody and on your phone surreptitiously texting someone, or you can go in another room, or you can while you’re gone out of town or while your partner’s at work, you could be engaging in some sort of boundary breach.

Now, not every couple is going to have the same rules and it can be person specific or history of person specific. I don’t care if you talk to him, but you slept with him so you’re not talking to him, and this is where you know, do you have the individual social media accounts or the joint Brangelina account? Plenty of couples I see in Facebook do. Other people, that just feels like a little too sticky, a little too kind of gummy bear enmeshed. They have separate identities, they’re interdependent, but they also trust each other. And, for example, do you know your partner’s social media passwords, for example? Some couples insist on knowing the other person’s passwords, others don’t. That just feels like just a little too like mom’s looking over my shoulder. But would you be comfortable if you handed your phone to your partner and said look at all the IM messages, look at the Facebook posts, look at the things I’ve tweeted?

And one of the guidelines I used to talk about in therapy is if you have any hesitation or twitch about something, that’s probably a good reason. That’s probably data to you. Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have contacted that person. Maybe I need to stop this. And so, from the prevention side, have those conversations about what are our boundaries, who with whom on what platforms. You know, because there’s plenty of platforms. There are plenty of married people, for example, on dating sites, and sometimes their partners know, but usually they don’t, and that’s you know. For many is obviously a problem, so that’s to prevent it. The reactive then is when a breach happens, and that can be like we talked about earlier a minor breach, like did you like that picture of her in the bikini? Are you serious? All the way to, I’ve been meeting this person and having sex, or we’ve been sitting, you know, in the living room at night when you’re in bed and we’re chatting with each other naked.

You know there’s a whole, the number of potential breaches that can happen through social media are probably not unlimited, but there’s tons, and so after the fact then people start to scale back on those rules. What about you know about other platforms that we shouldn’t be on? Do you have any accounts on dating sites? Can I have your password? And often the conversation is different for the offending person versus the person who was offended. The rules probably ought to be the same, but the volumes obviously turn up a bit on the person who engaged in the breach. So, passwords, what platforms? Who can you contact? How do I know in the future?

Because after any kind of breach, trust, to varying degrees, is obliterated and it can take days, weeks, months, years to rebuild that trust and then anytime in that process, another breach happens. It’s not always back to zero, but it’s often back to step one or two. And so you know, over the years I’ve seen so many times the person who engaged in the breach has this righteous indignation I’m not doing anything, this resistance to any kind of scaled back rules, and that’s always dated to me. You’re not ready to really deal with the trauma and hurt this caused and you’re really not willing to do what it takes to rebuild this relationship. So, obviously, if you can have those rules in place and prevent a breach, that’s better. But life happens. Tons of breaches have already happened. What are you willing to do as an individual, as a couple, in managing your social media use to prevent these from happening again?

0:38:54 – Kimberly King

So and I have a question about that media and you really expose that on both sides what is, I guess? Do you have a good outcome for the most part by keeping with keeping couples together once they come out and they’re willing to make changes? Is that? I mean, that was just a personal question, just wondering. You know, with all of your therapy.

0:39:25 – Mark White

It’s a great question. It really depends how invested both of them are, how and one of the hard conversation to have at some point in about infidelity is, both people contributed to it in some way. But you can’t have that conversation with the person who is the victim for quite a while so they can say is there anything I could have done, not that excuse their behavior, but contributed to a situation where this happened. Now sometimes the ratio is 99 and 1. I mean, there’s just not, but other times, I don’t know, 50-50, but they had some role. And so if both people are willing to look at their part, if both people are willing to set reasonable rules and stick to them and forgive, rebuild trust, it definitely happens. But if any of those things don’t happen, then it’s the outcome, and sometimes that is the best outcome. This relationship has become so toxic that staying together is just not going to work.

0:40:39 – Kimberly King

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about this earlier too, and that is, what are some of the positive and negative aspects of social media for children and adolescents?

0:40:51 – Mark White

There’s a lot of debate about this right now. I think, and I put children and adolescents in there as a question I probably should have just left children out- I think most people agree there’s really no good role for children with social media. The amount of things they could be exposed to, the brain development, it’s just toxic and potentially harmful. So adolescence is where it gets challenging, because most adolescents have phones and are on social media and the concerns pertain to brain development.

The reward system, dopamine of the commentators on social media said it has “drugified” human relationships because likes, attention, so forth, produce a dopamine hit and then people get addicted to those. And when they don’t get those then they get depressed. And an increasing number of adolescent, particularly adolescent girls, have higher rates of depression and anxiety and often those are linked to social media. You know adolescence is kind of like “Lord of the Flies” anyway, but then when you put it into a platform where people can cyber bully, AI is going to bring you know it is bringing a whole ‘nother level of toxicity to this with. You know, face swapping on porn images and things like that. So adolescents, if you think about this developmentally, we know their job is to start to disconnect from their parents, connect to peers, start to form an identity of who they are, maybe rebel a little bit just to kind of see what that’s like. And they’re not ready for the dopamine hits from social media.

They’re not ready for the comparisons, they’re not ready for the bullying. They’re not ready for just the amount of toxic, evil garbage that they have access to in seconds. The brains just can’t handle that. And that’s where people have conversations about when do you, you know, when does your kid get a smartphone and or a phone? You know, start with a dumb phone, no social media, no email, no texting, just you call, and then when can they graduate to a smartphone? The other reality is that kind of like cybersecurity, is a constant battle, we develop a new resource that hackers develop way around it, a defense to go back and forth. It’s that way with parents and teens and social media. As soon as you put a blocker on their phone, as soon as you delete that app, they will find a way around it. And so, at one level, social media is no different than they’re experimenting with alcohol, with drugs, with sex, with other things. It’s about relationship, it’s about communication, it’s about building trust. It’s about boundaries, but I think what’s different about social media is sitting in their bedroom or on the bus on the way to school or at school, they can pursue those things and you have no control over that, realistically, as a parent.

And that’s where people are suggesting pretty high ages in adolescence to get a smartphone, and limitations of what platforms you know, like 13, 14, 15, 16. But let’s pause a minute and think about some of the positive things. There are connections to the community, to grandparents, to friends that can happen. You know, I mentioned earlier those animal-related groups. The rabbit group I’m on on Facebook was started by an adolescent and he makes money selling rabbits and he’s got bunches of them. I raised quail and I needed some more quail and I bought some from this person on social media. It turns out she’s an adolescent who lives around the block. She goes to the same church I do. That was a safe, perfectly normal act. She gets to sell quail. I’ve got quail eggs in a cooler right now I’m saving for her so she can hatch them when she gets back from vacation.

So, you can have those kind of interactions with the community, that’s safe and so forth, but at the same time you know so let’s put the boundary again about a positive aspect the same in adolescents around the community. Then people start catfishing that they’re, you know, a teenage boy, or sending hateful things, or, you know, extortion. I mean there’s just so many potentially toxic things that can happen, that the good can happen, but a lot of people are not convinced the good outweighs the bad. It’s kind of the do no harm philosophy before you do good.

0:46:15 – Kimberly King

Right and so interesting. A couple of things went through my mind and I, you know, you read about the ones that have created these social media platforms in Silicon Valley and whatnot, but they, they vow that their kids will never be on it, they’ll never give their kids a smartphone. And so you wonder well, wow, that says a lot. And then the other thing I was going to ask you about is you know how you talk about the Brangelina with- Can you do that with kids? Can you? Do you ever support that when they’re coming on as an adolescent to be on with family?

0:46:45 – Mark White

Definitely. That’s a great suggestion. Yeah, I haven’t seen as many family accounts as I have joint couple accounts, but that’s kind of like a training wheels approach to social media, because then I have control over every post you see, every message you send. So that could definitely be a way to getting some control back. Exactly.

0:47:10 – Kimberly King

Yeah, and I think too you talked about it really just setting those boundaries and having those conversations, like we did with our kids, with drinking, drugs and everything, and you really just have to present that and, you know, continue that line of communication. And now the added is the social media and then just the etiquette around having a smartphone and, yeah, that’s just something new. So this is kind of really goes along with my next question about how parents can best manage that role of social media in the lives of their children and adolescents. Keeping an eye on it, I guess, right.

0:47:45 – Mark White

Definitely, and I think part of it is modeling. You know, there’s a term that’s come up in the literature, technoference, and it came out of initially with research on couples where one person was so engaged with their phone that it damaged the relationship. But it’s also come out in research now with parents and children, where parents of kids are at the park and the kids are playing and they want the parent to play with them and the parent’s on their phone. And then one of the issues with smartphones in particular is sleep disruption, because kids are on their phone until wee hours of the morning. So one of the guidelines is no phones in the bedroom.

0:48:30 – Kimberly King

Yeah.

0:48:32 – Mark White

So everybody goes to bed, the phone goes in a box. At mealtimes, phone goes in a box. Well if you tell your kid that and then you know they can’t, they can’t sleep and they go in your bedroom and it’s 1 am and you’re on your phone, doom scrolling, um, that’s not gonna- You know that’s not gonna work.

So model what you say, set boundaries, and it really is in the relationship. We talked about this a bit earlier. You can’t just crack down on a kid and set all these rules on their phone if you haven’t been having, like you said, those conversations about sex and drugs and so forth. My dad had this rule If you ever want to try any substance, come to me and we’ll get it. So when I was 14, I’ve been on this camp out and this kid was just extolling the virtues of pot. So I came home, I sat my parents down, I said I think I want to try pot. I thought they were going to like backflip off the bed and when I, when I asked him about as an adult, neither one of them could remember that conversation.

I think they probably repressed it but they said, okay, why do you want to pursue this? We talked about it. Where would you get it? Well, I could name some of the kids at church, some of the kids at school. Why don’t we just think about that? Let’s just table it, and if you still want to, we’ll do it. And a few weeks later I was at this event. They were passing around this skull-shaped bong. I said, nah, I’m good, and I never did.

But I knew I could go to them, and so kids have to know. If you know, because, for example, pornography and phones, the question is not have you ever seen this? How many times a day does that come across and what you do when you see it. If you’ve had an open conversation, you know a parent could say I did this search on this and this image came up. Uh, have those conversations, then build this rapport. But then you, you have obviously control over if they have a phone. Sometimes parents need help with- well, do they have to have a smartphone? No. Can you, you know, there are parental controls you can put on, but kids will always find a way around them.

0:50:47 – Kimberly King

Yeah, they will. And I think I love what you said about going to your parents. My husband and I just had that conversation. My husband was undercover narcotics, so that was a tough for me, for my kids, but we really talked about it. We had the football team over, the soccer team, and you know, my husband really took that moment to educate them and I think you know there’s that whole mystification of what goes on in the darkness, but it’s about bringing it to light and really bringing those conversations out there.

And I think what’s forgotten is social media, because that is what you’re talking about pornography, sexting and all of that and having affairs and all of that living in the darkness. But if you talk about it or if you go through a scenario with your kids and your family, I think that does wonders. At least, I think that’s what I’m hearing you say and I like that. As a society, in what ways might we think about the role of social media in US families? I mean so different, I would imagine too, in the United States versus the rest of the world. But as well as to juxtapose the responsibilities of government, communities, parents and individuals to manage it.

0:51:57 – Mark White

As you said, there’s so many levels to it, but I think conversations could be like. This is going to heat up with the election because the amount of disinformation that’s going to come out, the amount of AI generated. Now you can make any politician look like they said or did these things, and so and you know the social media companies oh, we’re trying to police that. We’re trying to police that. Again, it’s one of those arms races. They’ll never be able to keep up with it.

When you hear those stories about the people who have to screen for toxic content on social media. What a traumatic job- they’re seeing these images and they’ll never be able to keep up with them. So we have to have conversations about the kind of the good versus the benefit and the free speech versus. You know just the amount of vile hate speech, for example, that has tangible consequences, and how much like Utah just passed a law that you have to have, as you can’t have access to social media accounts until a certain age.

0:53:08 – Kimberly King

I think Florida just did too right. I said like 14 years old is what I just read.

0:53:12 – Mark White

Right. So how are we going to police that?

0:53:15 – Kimberly King

Right.

0:53:16 – Mark White

What’s the role of parents versus the role of government? So we’ve got disinformation, we’ve got cybersecurity threats you know the things that get opened up, the viruses and phishing. There’s so many levels that social media can’t promote community, promote connection. It can help people gain access, but it also opens the door to all these other difficulties. And do we just kind of throw up our hands and say let the market dictate that? But then there’s a sweet spot with, government needs to regulate and manage that, versus parents and their families need to regulate that. And I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m not sure it’s working right now the way it is.

0:54:05 – Kimberly King

Well, and just one last question, and I’m not sure if you know, in the United States are we still considered the wild, wild west? Do you know any percentages or what that looks like versus maybe China or Japan or anywhere in the world? In Italy, what does that look like, with the adolescents, maybe on the screen time, doom screaming, I don’t know.

0:54:26 – Mark White

That’s a good question. Um, it’s, you know, hours a day on US adolescents or on social media, like four to five, at least I. I don’t know yeah values for other countries and obviously you know China, for example countries, and obviously China for example countries that because they can regulate the pipeline coming in, they can censor all kinds of things and that raises other issues as well. So, but I think it’s safe to say we’re still the Wild West. How? Many other countries are, I’m not certain, but we are definitely the Wild West.

0:55:02 – Kimberly King

Yeah, wow, what an interesting conversation and I really appreciate what you do and all of the education that you know, as you’re trying to put boundaries around things. So thank you for sharing your knowledge and if you do want more information, you can visit National University’s website at nu.edu. And again, Mark, thank you so much for your time today. You’ve been listening to the National University Podcast. For updates on future or past guests. Visit us at nu.edu. You can also follow us on social media. Thanks for listening.