How do you get children to thrive in today’s world where social media is so inescapable and potentially so harmful?

Can rules and prohibitions help? Well, yes and no.

On the one hand, rules are crucial, an essential tool to fight the venal, pseudo-idealistic baloney about community and democracy that social media companies fling at us in order to hang on to their business models of the more users, the merrier.

On the other hand, thriving requires something more than rules. To thrive, kids need greater amounts of healthy chaos. They also need time for contemplation.

Rules alone are better at making children more resilient by exposing them to healthy doses of chaos than they are at encouraging a more contemplative life.

Rules are about do’s and don’ts. 

Contemplation is more subtle. It’s about squishier stuff that’s more aspirational and less thou-shall-not, like independent thinking and an ability to move back and forth from your surroundings and yourself.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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What Today’s Kids Face

Adolescents have become more isolated from the outside world, more risk-averse, and less willing to take chances. They have become less resilient and more dependent. Social media is a big enabler of this tendency. 

The usual way we think about chaos, certainly the helicopter parent way, stresses danger and confusion, something to be avoided and protected against. “It’s a jungle out there.” Keep kids out of that jungle.

But keeping children out of that jungle means that they don’t develop the skills they will need when they get older.

Shelter from the storm, or as the Rolling Stones put it,

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

Life is chaotic, which is another way of saying life is complicated, challenging, but also exciting and rewarding as you learn the do’s and don’ts of managing the outside world.

The shelter of being alone in your room texting and spending hours of time on TikTok is false shelter.

To examine this, consider psychologist Jean Twenge’s recent book, “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media and Gaming from Taking Over Their Lives.”

Twenge’s rules are a solid combination of research and her experiences with her own kids. The rules are evidence-based and explained in clear, precise ways that are easy to understand. 

They definitely have a “you can do this” tone, combining warnings for parents with confidence-building. As in, “Here’s why you need to do this. Here is how. Now get on the stick and do it!”

But like self-help books generally, her do’s and don’ts are skeletal. They are formulas to get a parent started. It’s easy to get bogged down in the do’s and don’ts and not think about the more aspirational, squishy, contemplative side of thriving.

Solitude, deep thinking, and introspection is one part of your life. Engagement — facing the chaos — is the other.

There’s more to the child-raising adventure than just rules. In fact, between the lines of these rules, Twenge offhandedly mentions the many enriching experiences like music and dance lessons, cultural exchanges, traveling abroad, involvement in school projects, and plenty of frank parent-kid conversations that her children have had.

“Give your kids real-world freedom,” she writes. Something deeper needs to happen in addition to rules. Something about a combination of engagement with the outside world and independent thought.

The kind of contemplation I’m talking about involves deeper thinking, and solitude. It’s respite from the outside world, but not an escape.

The other side is engaging with the outside world and engaging with the community. A strong inner life as well as a strong outer one.

The “10 Rules” may have been a gateway for Twenge’s children to manage chaos, but her kids also have gone well outside this gate. They also learned the importance of thinking for themselves.

The sort of contemplation I’m talking about is also very much engaged with the outside community, but at the same time requires a very rich inner life.

Solitude, deep thinking and introspection is one part of your life. Engagement — facing the chaos — is the other. The ability and confidence to both engage and disengage.

A Regular Kid Achieves Something Special

Too abstract for you? Let’s talk about a child and her butterflies.

Kaylee Timm is a 12-year-old girl from West Allis, Wisconsin, who raises monarch butterflies, then bands and releases them to migrate for the winter in Mexico.

Monarchs are endangered. Raising and banding is the most effective way to save the species.

It’s a tedious process that needs a long-term commitment. Kaylee got interested when she was 7 and gradually moved from hunting for eggs to raising her own in her kitchen and developing a garden of insect-friendly plants.

Her family supports her; the neighbors are fascinated and proud. But she works alone. It’s her thing.

She’s not a savant or protégé. Social media isn’t involved. She’s not a part of any adult organization –think youth baseball or soccer — teaching her the right and proper way.

She’s simply an adolescent doing her own thing with appreciation from her parents, neighbors and butterfly aficionados.

She wears braces with orange and black bands to match the monarchs.

Kaylee is a role model for preteen contemplation not because she’s a superstar but because she is like an ordinary kid who’s managed to thrive in the very scary, oppressive world of social media.

We need to fight against social media’s oppressiveness and imperialism, but as Kaylee’s story indicates, that involves much more than do’s and don’ts.