“Do like the others” | The Press

Can a young person be fulfilled without a smartphone or social networks?

This question has been nagging Catherine Houle, from Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac, for quite some time. His eldest son, William, asks for a smartphone every day. But she hesitates. William, 13, does well at school, he has friends, he plays several sports, he does motocross, he already has a PlayStation… Why add to that a phone over which she would have little control?

William’s question is more down to earth. How do you convince your mother to give you one? “I’ve been asking for it for a year and a half,” summarizes William, a first-year secondary student. Every day at school, students must place their phones in a pocket at the front of the class. All the pockets are filled, except William’s. He feels isolated.

In March, American psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a striking text in the magazine The Atlantic, which had a lot of resonance in Quebec. He links the rise in anxiety and depression among young people to the omnipresence of smartphones in their lives. “Many parents give their child a phone because they don’t want him to feel left out,” wrote Jonathan Haidt.

This sentence well sums up Catherine’s dilemma, which is that of many parents when their child reaches the end of primary school or the beginning of secondary school.

Catherine Houle, 38, has difficulty understanding William’s need to have a smartphone to “do like the others”, she who was rather solitary as a teenager.

Coming from the field of communications, Emmanuelle Parent is well aware of the dynamics of young people on social networks: she wrote a doctoral thesis as well as an essay on the issue (Text, publish, scroll). She is the one we will meet first.

The appeal of social networks

In the UQAM pavilion in Laval where we met, Emmanuelle Parent faces William. On her left wrist, Emmanuelle wears a smart watch, and on the other forearm, a small tattoo. There’s something cool about her – William feels comfortable. It must be said that she is used to talking to teenagers. Emmanuelle Parent co-founded with Alexandre Champagne the organization CIEL, which promotes digital well-being in schools.

“Why is it important for you to have a phone?” », she asks him.

“When you don’t have a phone, you’re a little less part of the gang,” says William. If he had one, he explains, he could communicate with his friends on Snapchat, and he would post photos on social media from time to time. “Like when you go to the beach,” he says by way of example.

The need to belong is strong during adolescence, recalls Emmanuelle Parent. “When young people talk to us about social networks, they often tell us that they want to show that they are both different… and like everyone else,” she illustrates. There is a desire to conform (with the positives and negatives that entails), and – for those who publish – a desire to assert themselves.

Young people, she says, have a little “quilt” of social networks: they communicate with some of their friends on Instagram, with others on Snapchat, with still others on Messenger, etc.

“At your age, I spoke in the evening with my friends on a telephone plugged into the wall,” Catherine confides to William. “It’s the same thing,” Emmanuelle Parent explains to him. The young people talk to each other about what happened at school, send each other jokes, they act crazy, send each other flames…” William agrees. He once briefly had access to Snapchat on the iPad (before it broke). “I was at 43 days,” he said.

Emmanuelle explains to Catherine that Snapchat counts the number of consecutive days during which friends communicate with each other. Catherine doesn’t like the principle: “They are playing with my child,” she says. “It takes a second to send a snap, but it’s sure that it’s a mechanism to keep users coming back every day,” replies Emmanuelle, who pleads for greater regulation of platforms, even if it is not only to reduce these persuasive mechanisms and moderate harmful content.

Finally, young people use social networks to scroll, that is, watching content (often short videos) that targets the specific interests of each user. “It’s often what takes them the most time, and it’s more difficult to stop because the whole platform is designed to keep your attention,” explains Emmanuelle Parent.

For her, it’s a question of scale: “You don’t have to spend six hours in front of the screen. You can watch TikTok just a little bit, and that’s it,” she says. She says she met a 16-year-old girl in a workshop recently, who told her she had deleted TikTok from her phone… only to reinstall it a few minutes later. She didn’t know how else to occupy herself. She hadn’t learned it.

In his eyes, we must evaluate the young person’s overall portrait, and ensure that he develops other hobbies, that he sleeps well, that he eats well, that he moves. And the parent is the key to regulating screen time, even if it sometimes (or often) causes clashes. “It’s ungrateful for the parent, because they only see the bits of tension, and not necessarily the learning” generated by their supervision.

Mother of four children aged 13, 12, 8 and 1 year old, full-time truck driver, Catherine Houle says she doesn’t really have the time (nor the desire for that matter) to play smartphone police.

“There are resources, such as the Pause ton screen site,” advises Emmanuelle.

Visit the Pause your screen website