When I read over my 2024 columns, one theme came up repeatedly: Connection. Whether I was discussing the impact of technology and AI, loneliness and exclusion, or diminishing social opportunities, connection was the problem and the solution.
Don’t just take my word for it. A large study carried out this year by Eva Oberele and colleagues at British Columbia University, Canada, found that increased connectedness improved mental wellbeing and decreased connectedness reduced it.
The dominance of social media and the pandemic lockdowns have deprived many young people of the core aspects of how to ‘be’ with each other.
We are witnessing the first generation who have not grown up on the street, road, or green, and the social and emotional consequences are becoming apparent.
I’m in my 40s and remember that most of my adolescence was spent ‘hanging around’.
Whether sitting on a wall, on a green in a local estate, or in one of my friend’s houses, this phase was crucial to my development.
From sex to intimacy, alcohol, drugs, and responsibilities, the majority of my information came from these casual get-togethers.
There was no Google or YouTube to provide ‘answers’ to my life questions; there were only my friends.
And while their information was not always accurate, it was at a level that I could understand.
Many parents have become obsessed with seeing childhood and adolescence as an ‘apprenticeship for adulthood’ and what they do as investments.
This is a serious mistake, because it limits opportunities for children to do something simply ‘for the craic’. Adolescence is not an apprenticeship for adulthood; it is a time for experimenting, for playing, and for getting things wrong. But, most of all, it is about communal play, one of the most important vehicles for connection.
We have different relationships that will fulfil various needs. For example, adults might have some friends who are all about ‘fun’ and who will always make us laugh. However, they may not be the person you would call to come and get you if you ran out of petrol at 3am. They may have other friends or connections who would serve that purpose. These people may not always be the life and soul of the party, but they are loyal, dependable, and kind.
Young people often do not realise that we can have different types of connections in our lives. There seems to be a demand that our friends be all things to all people, which can leave them feeling disappointed, let down, or frustrated. They also need to realise that true friendship involves meeting each other in the real world and forming social bonds.
The era of technological communication has significantly skewed this concept of friendship, and the confusion around whether someone to whom I daily send a picture of the wall, but to whom I never actually speak, constitutes a friend. That is an issue for many young people.
I am not sure that many young people grasp what ‘friendship’ actually means. The multitude of ‘social’ platforms available to them means that their connections to others are complicated, confusing, and ever-changing.
Describing their network of friends can be convoluted, and even the concept of romantic relationships has many different ‘stages’. Currently, young people can be ‘seeing’ or ‘meeting someone’, but not ‘going out’ with them. This progression to ‘going out’ with someone, which involves a degree of exclusivity, happens months after the initial meeting. When young people described to me the ‘rules’ around these complex relationships, I found it utterly confusing, and when I questioned them, they did, too.
Almost all young people’s activities are now adult-led. In previous columns, I mentioned that attending extra-curricular activities is not a social experience.
I coach an under-15 soccer team and see how much time is spent doing drills and practising physical skills, not developing social fitness. If they talk or are messing during drills, they are often told to separate, because they disrupt the rest of the group. We need to provide young people with alternative opportunities to mess, have fun, and connect.
However, this must be done alongside a parallel process of teaching them how to engage with each other. Teaching young people about in-person storytelling and listening skills, and giving them opportunities outside the classroom, will help put these skills into practice.
Technology is changing our world, pushing us to become highly individualised. So much seems to be focused on the ‘I’, with little or no emphasis on the importance of ‘we’.
Personalised algorithms and personalised technologies discourage us from hanging around in real life. Whether it is suggesting music we listen to, providing entertainment, or shaping our world views, these roles have been contracted out to AI algorithms in place of friendships. We now have young people conversing with their Snapchat AI about topics previously discussed with real-life friends. Technology companies earn more money when we scroll on our phones or send images and messages to each other. So their programmes are designed to keep us physically apart, but digitally omnipresent.
We must step in and protect our children by facilitating opportunities for them to gather and be together in person. Many young people crave these opportunities. We are innately social creatures, who need and desire human connection. Creating a world where that does not happen, or is discouraged, will seriously disadvantage them. It will diminish their social and emotional fitness, leaving them lonely and dissatisfied.
Earlier this month, the state-of-the-nation findings commissioned by the Government revealed an increase of 10% of young people in Ireland who felt unhappy over the previous two years. We must look at what we are doing to promote connection to stop this graph from progressing upward.
Currently, young people tell me that if they gather in public spaces in groups of more than two people there is an assumption that they are up to no good or they are viewed as posing a risk of ‘anti-social behaviour’. Perhaps this is a hangover from the pandemic lockdowns, where young people were branded as ‘vectors of disease’.
As adults, we need to address this issue, because if we prohibit young people from gathering together, we are driving them online.
Communities need to offer opportunities for young people to gather. Opening a room on a Friday evening in a community hall or GAA club, and offering them a space to hang out; encouraging your young teenager to have friends over to your house; or simply trying to create an opportunity or space to ‘be together’ without judgement would be a start.
If we are going to do something to stop young people from migrating to a fully online existence, we need to come together and offer them a competing offline opportunity. By providing them with the space and opportunity to hang out, we will inadvertently encourage them to build relationships, which will pay dividends in terms of their social, emotional, and mental fitness.
The word ‘contactless’ has become part of our language, as it is often how we pay for something, but if it becomes a theme of our children’s lives, they will pay for it in so many other ways.
- Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist
