How do young people become themselves in the age of social media?

The digital world has altered the experience of growing up in ways that can be easy to overlook because so much of it has become ordinary. The thoughts, appearances and experiences of other people are now available to children and young people with an immediacy that earlier generations did not encounter. A child can move through a stream of photographs, opinions and personal stories without ever having to leave their bedroom, taking in fragments of other people’s lives alongside their own, and gradually forming ideas about what other people are like and, inevitably, about what they themselves are like in comparison. This happens at a time when the question of who one is, is already becoming more important, as children begin to look beyond the family and towards the wider world in search of belonging, difference and recognition.

The developing self

Our sense of ourselves develops through being with other people, starting from the beginning of life, where a child depends upon the responses of those around them to make increasing sense of their own experience. When a feeling is noticed and responded to, the child gradually develops a sense that what is happening inside them can be understood and thought about, while at the same time discovering that they are a person in their own right, separate from the people they depend upon. These two experiences remain intertwined as development continues and a young person needs other people in order to discover themselves, yet also needs some confidence that what they experience internally belongs to them and can be trusted. Adolescence brings this into sharper focus because the opinions of peers acquire a particular emotional force. A young person is trying out different ways of being, watching how they are received, sometimes moving towards an emerging identity, sometimes retreating from it, and gradually finding a way of knowing themselves that does not depend entirely upon the response of the people around them.

How being seen by others influences identity and emotional development 

Social media enters this process at precisely the point when being seen by others can matter enormously. Perhaps a photograph can be shared or an aspect of one’s personality is displayed, and almost immediately there can be a response. For a young person who is still discovering what feels genuinely theirs, these responses can become absorbed into the experience of the self. The pleasure of being noticed can bring a sense of belonging, while a lack of response, or a response that feels rejecting, can acquire a significance that is difficult to hold in proportion. The scale is different from the relationships in which children have traditionally worked out who they are. The audience can be larger, less predictable and continuously present, so that the question of how one is being seen can remain in the background even when nobody is directly speaking to the child.

I think this becomes particularly important when we consider what happens to comparison. A young person looking at another person’s photograph is rarely being shown the whole of that person’s life, yet the image can still become part of the young person’s internal picture of what it means to be attractive, successful, sociable or happy. The difficulty lies partly in the absence of the ordinary context in which we encounter other people. We see the finished image without necessarily seeing the hesitation before it was taken, the disappointment that preceded the achievement, or the ordinary afternoon that contained none of the things worth posting. A young person can therefore find themselves comparing the complexity of their own experience with a version of somebody else’s life from which much of that complexity has disappeared.

Growing up, finding oneself and navigating the gaze of others 

What interests me therapeutically is what happens when these external images and responses begin to acquire authority inside a young person’s mind. A teenager might tell me that they know perfectly well that social media is curated, yet still feel inadequate when they look at what other people are doing. There can be a gap between what they know and what they experience emotionally, and it is often in that gap that the more interesting work begins. The question becomes less about whether the young person understands that an image has perhaps been edited and more about why that image has come to matter so much to them, and questions return us to something much older than social media. Children have always looked towards other people to find out who they are. They have watched their parents, compared themselves with siblings, noticed who was invited to parties and who was left out, and wondered what another person’s approval might say about their own worth. The digital world has given some of these experiences a different scale and persistence, but it has not created the underlying need to belong or to be recognised. What has changed is the extent to which the gaze of other people can follow a young person into the private spaces of their life, and how easily the responses of strangers or peers can become part of the way they think about themselves.

The digital world is also an inherent part of the world in which children are growing up, and it can provide genuine relationships, interests, and forms of expression that matter to them. What concerns me more is what happens to a young person’s capacity to remain in contact with their own experience when the opinions of others become so readily available, and the developing sense of self has to be able to take other people seriously without becoming wholly dependent upon their judgement. A child needs relationships in which someone is interested in who they are rather than merely in how they appear, and through being known in this way they gradually develop greater confidence in their own inner experience.

How children and young people discover who they are in a connected world 

When a young person brings into the room an experience of having felt judged, excluded or inadequate, I am interested not only in the event itself but in what has happened to their sense of themselves through it. Over time, and through the experience of the therapeutic relationship, they discover that another person can listen carefully to something they have found difficult to put into words, they may begin to experience their own thoughts and feelings differently. There is room to wonder about an experience without immediately measuring it against somebody else’s response, and room for the young person to discover that their internal world can be held in another person’s mind without being taken over by it. The task of growing up has always involved finding a way to become oneself in the presence of other people, and social media has made that task more visible, and in some respects more demanding, but it remains a deeply relational process.