"Raised in a Birdcage of Optimization"

Violent protection and the modern American teenager

I came across a Twitter thread recently from a user named @_tedks—we’ll refer to this user as “Ted” for the rest of this newsletter. I don’t know anything about this Twitter user, but the charts this user shared details of how modern children and teens are “raised in a birdcage of optimization.” Here’s what the user wrote in the first tweet of the thread, setting the stage for the charts to follow:

Zoomers, and late millennials, were raised in a birdcage of optimization. Their childhoods resembled job training, not adolescence. Parental surveillance, beginning far before but accelerated by smartphones, is the main driver.

Here are the charts the user shared, in order, with just a bit of commentary from me on each one, interspersed with the commentary Ted provided on Twitter.

First, this chart details the percentage of teens engaging in “adult activities.”

These are common teenage rites of passage, some of which should be encouraged and some of which obviously shouldn’t. Across the board, engagement in these rites of passage are down:

In one sense, sure, fewer teens drinking alcohol and having sex is relatively good news. But taken in conjunction with the other data points on this chart, and in the charts to follow, one has to ask, “But at what cost?”

If parental surveillance and the smartphone has dramatically decreased teenage alcohol use and sexual activity at the cost of increasing the rate of suicide and mental illness, is that a trade worth celebrating? Hardly.

Second, we see parental panic skyrocket across the second half of the 20th century.

Ted writes:

Over the 20th century, mass media reporting of child abductions spread the "stranger danger" concept. From the Lindenburg baby, to milk cartons, to satanic ritual abuse, this leads to a curtailment of freedom and an increase in parental surveillance.

And then Ted shares two images—the first is a map of how far four generations of people were allowed to walk from home:

Here we see the historical cultural undercurrent that, combined with the smartphone and increased opportunities for parental surveillance, have made it such that children in the 21st century are harbored and “protected” out of fear of what’s out there, perhaps without adequate concern for what could harm them when they are confined to their homes with the world in their pockets.

Next, the user turns to business and education, where college has seemingly become “required” for success.

Ted writes:

Firms became more rational, stopped training young workers, employing them for life, and supporting them into retirement. By "outsourcing" this training to the education sector, they could vastly increase their profits. College becomes mandatory, and the stakes rise for kids.

And shares the following chart, which depicts the difference between productivity growth and wage growth:

Productivity has outpaced wages since 1972, with a dramatic increase in the disparity in the 2000s. The chart above unfortunately stops before 2020, when I imagine the disparity grew even larger.

And then Ted continues, writing in another tweet:

So parents are constantly told:

- if you let your child out of your sight, they will be abducted, raped, and murdered, while the world watches

- If you let your child relax even a little, they will ruin their record, be rejected from college, and die poor, penniless, and alone

So, then, what happens?

Then, for the teen, death appears to be the only way to escape the pressure cooker.

This is a chart depicting suicide rates among teens over the latter part of the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st:

Ted writes, commenting on that chart:

If you are growing up under this regime, death is the only escape. You are driven to and from school and mandatory extracurriculars. You've been groomed for anxiety and subservience since your college-prep pre-k. But wait, what's that trough?

The trough, he theorizes (I think correctly), is the freedom provided by access to the internet in the earliest days of web 2.0. AOL, Myspace, and their social internet kin provided freedom from the suffocation that many young people were facing.

Ted continues:

As the Internet becomes more popular, kids become able to access digital "third spaces" without the risk of police being called on them for existing in public, and with plausible deniability to parents that Work is being done. AOL and Myspace are liberatory technologies.

Alas, all good things come to an end, and we see rates of suicide begin to skyrocket around the 2010 mark. This is when the previously-liberating social internet becomes more mainstream, and when it jumped from our computer screens and into our pockets.

Ted highlights how the smartphone makes parental surveillance easier:

Alas, all technology is dual-use. While early parental surveillance technology is crude and easy to subvert, as time goes on and devices become hardened, the cage tightens. A smartphone is the ideal surveillance platform for a concerned parent. Just look at the features!

Indeed. the birdcage door swung open with the advent of the social internet, and then it was slammed shut by the smartphone. On top of that, the liberating feelings provided by the earliest iterations of the social internet were supplanted by the suffocating environment of the social internet we have today.

A social internet that is able to be turned off and available at an arm’s length is substantially more healthy than one that is always on and ever-present in our pockets.

Freedom to Fail

I’m not a parent of a teen yet, but I have spent many years working with parents and teenagers in different student ministries.

Something I have become convinced of as I’ve learned in observation and conversation over the years is this: it is more important that I allow my children the freedom to fail and get hurt in my care than that I do everything I can to ever protect them from failing or getting hurt.

Whether from a skinned knee or a backstabbing friend, I would rather my two girls endure pain under my roof and in my care so that I can help them grow in resilience before they leave the nest and have to face the inevitable pain of life on their own. Especially if the alternative is to so desperately protect them from pain that they are weaker as a result.

I once heard someone say that the key to building resilience in children is to let them do dangerous things carefully. And I think that applies to kids of any age, really. Whether it’s a four-year-old climbing a rock wall at the playground or a 14-year-old using the internet, I think it’s important that we not raise our children in “birdcages of optimization” as our friend Ted so clearly described it.

this image was generated by DALL-E