Tweens & Teens: Social media’s impact on girls

Between the two of us, Shannon and I both have multiple teenagers now. So we’re reading everything we can get our hands on about teens and how to navigate those tricky waters. If you have a teen girl, you may want to find this book at the library, bookstore or download the e-book version. It’s called American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers.

I recently saw an interview with the book’s author on a talk show, and some of the information she shared is downright disturbing. It made me want to try to convince my daughter to skip social media completely when she gets her own phone one day.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the book’s description about kids coming to age now: “It means coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism and a sometimes self-undermining notion of feminist empowerment; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills.”

Yikes! Written by an award-winning journalist who is also a mother to a daughter, the book has earned a 4 1/2 star rating on Amazon and was called “an ice-cold, important wake-up call” by Kirkus Reviews.

If you’ve read other books on the teen years that you think would be helpful to moms, let us know about them! We’d love to swap tips on the best research and insights about how to guide kids through the tween and teen years.