I Can't Keep Up Anymore

Social media, social norms, and what kids do to belong.

Hello there! This is My Pen in the Air: a newsletter from the desk of an unexpected novelist filled with inspired endeavors and monthly updates on the creative life. Every post is free for all readers, but should you wish to further support my work, you can do so for less than one mocha a month! // Join me here:

When it’s just the kids and I in my car, we do this thing: me behind the wheel, the boys in the back, my daughter in passenger. She plays DJ, flipping between our preferred radio stations that span decades from 60s to early aughts. We usually find the good stuff there, the jams we can all agree on. She knows to turn up the volume when Prince plays.

Occasionally, we wander over to what qualifies as Top 40, mystified that almost every time, the same song is playing. When we’re in the mood for something new, she plugs in my glitchy USB cord and pulls up favorite albums or skips around to individual tracks, taking requests.

This is why, every now and then, something like the Chicky Nuggie song by Baby Yoda ends up in my Spotify algorithm. But my car is at least often three quarters full of mirth. I’ll take shared laughter about a ridiculous song over fighting any day of the week.

When we get in the car from being apart, they like to rapid fire download the goings-on of wherever it was they were. Tutorial. Youth group. Playdates or birthday parties. It’s equal parts informing, venting, processing, and counseling.

Our “windshield time” is sacred, if not sometimes, a lot.

---

One recent Sunday evening, between Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover” and the beginning notes of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” my middle son, who is ten, asks, “Mom, what does ‘rizz’ mean?”

I try to keep him from seeing me roll my eyes in the rearview mirror. Not at him, of course, but just at (gestures generally around) it all. I did the same when I learned that Oxford University Press had deemed it their Word of the Year in 2023.

“Why do you ask?” I reply.

“Brendon¹ asked if I knew what it meant. And I didn’t. And all the other guys were like ‘You don’t know what ‘rizz’ means?!’” I watch him slump a little in his seat. “That didn’t feel good.”

“I’m sorry, bud.” I sit quietly in the discomfort of not being able to fix it.

He’s recently joined the ranks of our daughter in this awkward neighborhood called Social Problems Mom Can’t Fix, on the specific street named Especially When You Don’t, Nor Will You Anytime Soon, Have a Smartphone.

I imagine a group of rising 5th grade boys in children’s church, many with phones in hand, huddled around our son, mocking him for not knowing what his mom thinks is an absurd word. Except what if he’s not supposed to think it’s absurd in order to fit in. What if I’m making it harder for them to belong?

“But wait, isn’t Brendon in 6th now? Why was he there?” I ask. It was Promotion Sunday, when all the kids move up to their next grade in church activities. I think for just a brief moment, maybe if Brendon hadn’t been there, none of this… except, I know this is just the beginning. (If I had a dollar for the number of times I’ve heard “Bruh” said in our house, the last year…)

“He didn’t feel like going to main service, I guess. I don’t know,” he says, annoyed.

I go on to explain what the word means, but not without taking the opportunity to make an etymological detour through its roots. Backwards, bit by bit, to charisma, whose use, at one time, was primarily in spiritual circles to denote favor and divine gifts. The singular Charis, to its plural Charites: Graces, figures of importance in Greek mythology. You know, really enlightening Mom kind of stuff.

“Wow,” our daughter says, “I bet most people don’t even know that.”

“I bet they don’t,” I say, noticing the smile on her brother’s face. I feel proud of placing what I hope is an invisible feather in their caps. Knowledge. Meaning. Context beyond the here and now, the passing away words used like badges to make kids feel lesser or better than.

Not that there isn’t enough of that, already.

---

Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year was “authentic,” which feels almost laughable. What is it, even, to be authentic, these days? “Authenticity” is now the key to social media influence — and yet? How can this generation know who they are and what they like when it’s not just the kids around them, but the kids everywhere online and the algorithm that feeds them deciding This, Not That?

Trends have always come and gone and been used to determine not just what is in or out, but whom. In the 90s, though, when I navigated my kids’ current ages, trends were far more local: long-distance runoff from magazines you could toss out and televisions you could turn off.

Insidious, maybe at times, but far less so than what lives in that which kids — and many adults — reach for so many seconds of the day. Back then, trends took the kind of time unheard of today. Now, they’re tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’s big thing, remixed again and again until we’ve forgotten what the original even was.

The “conformity engine”² of social media, which has created an addictive cocktail that plays into this age’s sensitivity to both conformist and prestige biases, means you don’t even have to be influenced, firsthand, by the media, to be impacted by it.

---

Once, in seventh grade, I was ruthlessly teased by one of the most popular girls in my school because I’d worn a short-sleeved, mock turtleneck, black, ribbed shirt with rainbow stripes across the chest that I bought from Ross: Dress for Less. I’d walked across a busy, four-lane road by my house to the strip mall to buy, with my own money, what turned out to be a knock-off of some popular brand I’ve long-forgotten. I loved that shirt, and that day, I tried not to hate her.

“How’d you know it was from Ross if you hadn’t been shopping there in the first place?” I asked back: wide, blinking eyes her only response. I can’t remember her name, but I remember how she tried to make me feel. Off-brand. Less than. Small.

Some of the forgetting comes with the territory of moving every year of middle school. Sixth grade. Seventh grade. Eighth grade. Each year, the rent went up and a new lease was signed on the opposite side of a very large city. The implications of this part of my story only lately have held meaning for our oldest, in middle school. The shifts, not just in where I lived, but in friendships, schools, and the overall vibes of each area.

Because every time it was different.

Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash

Starting over, again and again, had its costs, yes, but it also had its benefits.

I learned quickly not to hang my star on what didn’t last. Because I could see that what mattered in one place didn’t hold any weight in another. Mistakes or faux pas made were wiped clean with each turn of the academic year. I could be reinvented, again and again, in all my phases of interest exploration: grunge, skater girl, hip hop, athlete, emo. In eighth grade, I encountered a faith that helped me separate my identity from my interests, that made the ground feel more steady under my moving feet, the sky more expansive.

These were all adjustments and integrations made in small ways, based on my curiosities, with little financial and social expense, old friends and very few enemies left behind to wonder what might have become of me. And in this, no one could ever say “I prefer the old you,” like was recently said to a dear friend’s tween daughter by the girl who was supposed to be her bestie.

It’s crushing, these limitations tweens and teens place on each other, and so many parents are moving the world and draining the bank to keep their kids on the In, Not Out. To become and to look and dress like everyone else, when, isn’t our job to help them become more fully themselves?

Not to mention, the standard is constantly changing at a rate unheard of. Right now, someone’s creating a fifteen second video in front of a ring light perpetuating the popularity of the next big: water bottle, dance routine, skincare, makeup, jewelry, shorts, shoes, or slang these kids will use to determine their own and others’ worth.

I’ve not been willing to buy into it, just like I wasn’t then, at least not at full price. The thrift stores are stocked with things kids once had to have, until someone else told them the other thing was slay. Or not slay. Apparently, that’s out. In six months, it’ll be something else entirely, because nothing slows down when the pipeline is online.

---

We all sing along to Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes.”

“What about ‘yacht’?” He asks, the song fading out and a commercial coming on.

“Yacht? Like the boat?” I say, thinking for just a moment he’s referring to the genre of music we’ve just listened to.

“No — gee-yot.” He emphasizes the hard G sound, and I’m honestly stumped. He follows with a quieter, hesitant, “I think it means something like a butt? But Brendon wouldn’t say. He asked if I knew what that word meant, too.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a butt!” My eight year-old chimes in, apparently privy to their conversation.

“What was this, Slang Trivia Night, at church?” I ask aloud, barely hiding my real frustration behind my mock annoyance.

He laughs, and says, “No, it was after church was over. He was testing me.”

Meanwhile, lightbulbs go off in the passenger seat beside me, and she turns the volume almost entirely down. “Oh my goodness, those boys at my game awhile back! The ones we thought were saying we had big yachts, like we were rich girls or something! That’s what they were saying?!”

I’m stunned and then fuming, as we pull into the driveway.

She continues, “That’s what Cassie was saying at the lake the other day, after community group, and I didn’t get it.” (A few days later she’ll hear some boys yell it at a male character on the screen at her youth group movie night, which is all the more perplexing to her.)

This one, I have to look up, fumbling with phonetic guesses, until I land on the word with the fixed G and Y and an indeterminate number of As and Ts. I can’t stop at what it means, I have to know where it came from, and once I do, all I can think is how many of these kids use words stripped of any meaning that matters, just to belong.

---

The kids unfold, out of the car, grabbing their things as they go, and I sit still, the ignition still on. My fuming slowly gives way to a sadness, I realize, no longer for my son being singled out or my daughter essentially being catcalled, but for the kids who feel they must do the singling, the angling, the purchasing, and the positioning to feel secure.

And for the parents who feel helpless to make it different, because going a different way requires the path of more resistance. And more resistance is hard. It’s uncomfortable. But so is the other way, I’d argue; you just look and talk like everyone else while feeling unsettled inside.

It’s the reason I’ll try to teach our kids what words mean and maybe why certain ones are better to use than others. Why I’ll always encourage punctuation and capitalization and standby for translation when they navigate written communication with their friends on the iPad that makes literally zero sense to them. (ikr?!) Why we’ll listen to music from all the decades on shuffle or whole vinyl records and cassettes from start to finish. Why I’ll say “you’re more than welcome to buy that for yourself, if it matters that much” when they’re curious about the product du jour, the one their friends don’t stop talking about — this week. Why we’ll pop by thrift store and they’ll marvel at the price differences between retail, today, and last year, used. Why I’ll be there, when they’re left out or put down because they didn’t know or didn’t have, not to fix it with things but with empathy, understanding, and wisdom, I hope. Why I’ll ask them not to other the people that do have, do strive, do - sometimes unknowingly - harm, but maybe seek to grasp what’s motivating them, to see the person beneath the trends.

---

It’s quiet enough with the kids out of the car, that I can finally hear what’s playing on the radio. My smile comes easy, then, the timing just right and a little more than coincidental. It’s a message I’ll tell them, again and again.

Let your words be anything but empty / Why don't you tell them the truth?

I don’t want to see you be like everyone else.

I wanna see you be brave.

1. Any names used are fictional!

2. The second chapter of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is, without a doubt, my most highlighted of the entire book. Here’s just a couple:

“Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining.”

“Children are born with two innate learning programs that help them to acquire their local culture. Conformist bias motivates them to copy whatever seems to be most common. Prestige bias motivates them to copy whoever seems to be the most accomplished and prestigious. Social media platforms, which are engineered for engagement, hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community while locking children’s eyes onto influencers of questionable value.”