Practices

One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.

The young person in front of you almost certainly says it too, so any version that sounds like a reprimand will close the conversation down. Naming…

After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.

This is not only teenagers. Adults describe it too: an hour that vanished, a message that reads as though somebody else wrote it, a flatness…

More hours on social media goes with more anxiety and low mood. That is a reason to aim at fewer hours, a conversation you can actually have, rather than at none, which usually ends the conversation.

Pick a number genuinely below the current one and low enough to notice, then look at what has changed in a fortnight. Sleep and mood are the things…

Spend long enough online and people start arriving as types rather than as people: brilliant or worthless, with nothing in between. The flattening happens to how you see yourself as well.

Worth naming as something the environment is doing rather than a fact about your character, because what an environment produces can be changed by…

Not every app is doing the same thing to you. The ones that tend to hurt have comments underneath, a feed chosen for you, and a number attached to how you did.

One young woman described a picture site as the safe one, because there was nowhere for anyone to reply to her. That is a useful way to sort your own…

Things posted in ten seconds have got young people excluded from school, and worse. It is worth asking about online conduct in the same routine way you would ask about anything else that could go badly.

Ask what has been posted, what has been sent, what someone would not want read out. Not as an inspection and not as a lecture about permanence, but…

A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.

This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…