Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?
Lori and Avery Schott wondered about the right age for their three children to have smartphones. For their youngest, Annalee, they settled on thirteen. They’d held her back in school a year, because she was small for her age and struggled academically. She’d been adopted from a Russian orphanage when she was two, and they thought that she might possibly have mild fetal alcohol syndrome. “Anna was very literal,” Lori told me when I visited the family home. “If you said, ‘Go jump in a lake,’ she’d go, ‘Why would he jump in the lake?’ ”
When Anna was starting high school, the family moved from Minnesota to a ranch in eastern Colorado, and she seemed to thrive. She won prizes on the rodeo circuit, making friends easily. In her journal, she wrote that freshman year was “the best ever.” But in her sophomore year, Lori said, Anna became “distant and snarly and a little isolated from us.” She was constantly on her phone, which became a point of conflict. “I would make her put it upstairs at night,” Lori said. “She’d get angry at me.” Lori eventually peeked at Anna’s journal and was shocked by what she read. “It was like, ‘I’m not pretty. Nobody likes me. I don’t fit in,’ ” she recalled. Though Lori knew Anna would be furious at her for snooping, she confronted her. “We’re going to get you to talk to a counsellor,” she said. Lori searched in ever-widening circles to find a therapist with availability until she landed on someone in Boulder, more than two hours away. Anna resisted the idea, but once she started she was eager to keep going.
Nonetheless, the conflicts between Anna and her parents continued. “A lot of it had to do with our fights over that stupid phone,” Lori said. Anna’s phone access became contingent on chores or homework, and Lori sometimes even took the phone to work with her. “I mean, she couldn’t walk the horse to the barn without it,” Lori said. Lori understood that the phone had become a place where her daughter sought validation and community. “She’d post something, and she’d chirp, ‘Oh, I got ten likes,’ ” she recalled. Lori asked her daughters-in-law to keep an eye on Anna’s Instagram, but Anna must have realized, because she set up four secret accounts. And, though Lori forbade TikTok, Anna had figured out how to hide the app behind a misleading icon.
