Kids who use their screens overnight are more susceptible to phone addiction, sleep issues & cyberbullying, a new study has found. Parents need to enforce rules to manage their kids' screen time. Young people are spending an astonishing amount of time on their phones when they should be sleeping. The average young person spends almost an hour on their phones between 10 p.m. & 6 a.m. on school nights, & most are on their phones between midnight & 4 a.m. on weekdays. Often children look to their parents to see what they do. When parents spend too much time on their screens, children tend to copy them. Modeling healthy behavior is not easy. But the good news is that putting away everyone's phones at nighttime & at mealtime seems to improve kids' screen time experiences.
Reading is a cognitive process, which means our preferred books also appeal to our cognitive style. Learn how different phases of life are interested in different themes - and how to bring these front and center in your blurbs and othe rmarketing.
LGBTQ+ adolescents, antifragility, and identity coherence poster
Me and my co-RA, EG, presented this poster at two undergraduate events: San Jose State University's SPARC and UC Santa Cruz's Psi Chi Symposium. Transcription of the post below the "read more" line.
Brief pitch
Mass media narratives and academic research name social media experiences as being good and bad for adolescents; it's not one or the other. Queer youth are especially agentic — they come to these platforms with goals and values already, which shapes their use and digital outlook. As queer youth use social media, they also cohere their identities and align their selves, environments, values, and cultural norms.
We think antifragility, the quality of complex systems to improve following stress or damage, is a useful preliminary lens here. Antifragility may characterize the grit of working through social media, rather than just experiencing or receiving it. So, how exactly do LGBTQ+ youth thrive through adverse experiences as they reconcile opportunities and challenges in their social media environments?
About the three themes
Themes, under Braun & Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis, tell the story of patterned meaning across the coded qualitative dataset (roughly 2-hour videos and interviews of queer youth screensharing and discussing their top 3 social media sites to the original 2022 researchers). Our lab group made these themes in about 15 hours the week before SPARC, so they're quite preliminary. At SPARC and Psi Chi Symposium we invited the people who came up to us to tell us about their own personal experiences or sharpen up our themes. I think of this Tumblr post as a natural extension of that, so please feel free to comment, reblog, and share.
Background and reflexivity
I am a 22 year old Asian-American closeted gay man raised in the San Jose Bay Area, and a 4th-year cognitive science major at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I'm broadly interested in cognitive psychology, abstract systems, human factors, and adult development. Relative to the participants and their data, I am insider to the homosexual and/or sexual minority experience, the (older) Gen Z experience, and the online (fandom) community experience. Therefore, I may be most attuned to the person-environment interface, encompassing a number of processes such as self-disclosure, identity internalization, and digital skill-building. However, I am also an outsider in the sense that I am a cis man, have rarely been able to act or express my gay identity, and my social media use has declined since 2023. Correspondingly, I may have missed or glossed over trans and nonbinary experiences (especially in early proto-theming; hopefully refocused w/ my lab team), why people disclose themselves the way they do, and what internal or external mechanisms exactly drive people to continue to use social media.
My proto-themes before cooperative theming (additional methods background)
These themes may be incorrect, overly complex, or detached from the data. I'd like to post them here as a historical note, however, as they have "seeds" of the later themes, and may provide an even better angle on my background and reflexivity.
1. Pursuing contact with the proximal [should actually be "distal"] queer digital culture requires learning, socialization, dialectic, and broadly beneficial/challenging interactions with peers; LGBTQ+ adolescents close the gap by repeatedly naming the gap between themselves and peers. (Core claim: Sharing queer experiences, speech, slang, discourse, and media approximates social contact; and they do actually have contact eventually. They actively search for peers and peer cultures.)
2. LGBTQ+ individuals (desire to) creating internally complex, heterarchical/rhizomatic, self-moderating, reflective, organized communities and spaces and social norms demarcates these spaces as unique playgrounds of thought, behavior, and culture. (Core claim: Queer adolescents separate their communities from cishet and/or harmful communities robustly. When they co-construct their cultures and perpetuate their own values, they separate themselves from a more suppressive society.)
3. LGBTQ+ individuals broaden initially challenging, negative online experiences into a multivalent/ambivalent ongoing endeavor ["phenomenology" also subs for "ongoing endeavor" imo] to actively alter, negotiate, and control the conditions of their unique [or "tailored"] acculturations. (Core claim: Many queer individuals begin their journey with difficult, even harmful, experiences; but these early experiences go on to stimulate even more identity cohesion and community involvement.)
4. Curative, artistic, and aesthetic digital practices constitute the porous boundary between self and other under queerness, with individuals practicing distinct standards of deferred intimacy and autobiographical record-keeping. (Core claim: When queer adolescents express themselves online, they practice sophisticated strategies of self-disclosure given factors like being closeted/out, being in relationships, being at risk for predators or adversaries, and being mindful of unique site cultures. Social media activity isn't a one to one copy of themselves or their life, or even across platforms. They are able to express themselves richly despite platform limitations.)
Transcription of the poster
Introduction
Literature characterizes LGBTQ+ youths' online experiences as a double-edged sword, both beneficial and detrimental for their development.
Yet queer youth are agentic navigators of their spaces and actively reconcile these polarized experiences.
Active learners of their digital environments
Develop their own beliefs and ideals for their spaces
We are interested in how they develop antifragility through online spaces: the ability to evolve and thrive through adverse experiences
One main avenue of “thriving” we are interested in is the participants pursuit of identity coherence: a general feeling of clarity, authenticity, purpose, and satisfaction within oneself
Thus, positive and negative online experiences may provide unique opportunities for LGBTQ+ youth pursuing identity coherence.
Research Question
How do LGBTQ+ adolescents develop antifragility, as they reconcile opportunities and challenges in their social media environments?
Method
Participants:
12 LGBTQ+ Adolescents (Ages 16-20)
Wide variety of sexual/gender minority identities
Procedure:
Social Media Tours
Participants guided researchers through their top 3 social media sites, geared towards understanding participants most significant polymedia interactions.
Analysis:
DataVyu is used to code directly into audiovisual data.
Reflective Thematic Analysis
Theme 1: Constructing practice spaces for authenticity
Queer adolescents use different social media and digital skills to strategically construct spaces for themselves to explore and express themselves. They internalize their spaces to continue to construct a stable sense of self.
AGNIESZKA: It is completely different, in person and with my family, I am very focused on other people, so interacting at school is really stressful, keeping track of people's expressions and tone of voice, it is really hard, and so I am focused on others, and it is really draining. These posts [on Tumblr] are entirely for me; when I reminisce and reblog, it is for me. I am not putting on an act for others. On Tumblr, I will have moments of fear, but most of the time, when I interact with these things, it is to make myself happy, and not manage other people.
G6: “I post here more on TikTok and there’s less people I know that see it and queer funny stuff I think that’s fun same as Insta but I feel more comfortable because there’s less people I know like acquaintances... I had an idea for it. and TikTok had the tools for it... I made it for me, I did not expect people to really see it... I am not really concerned with how people react, but I did not want everyone to see it which is why I didn't post it to instagram"
Theme 2: Transforming negative experiences online
Queer youth begin their journey with difficult experiences, but they metabolize these early experiences and incorporate them into a value-oriented and self-aligned social media practice.
AURA: "I was like 14, and saw a trans person and was like, WOW, you can be like that! ... I think it was iFunny but it was negative. I was 14, not understanding the bigotry behind the jokes. As I matured, I realized, this is not okay… One of my online communities that had friends in real life... one of the kids online was 14, and I helped them find resources and HRT as a minor... doing my best to help closeted trans people... I like to hang out with trans people and give back when you can”
FOX: "at the beginning of [my social media use], it was such a toxic form of escapism and algorithmic reinforcement, and anxiety of what was going on in the world. 8 hour TikTok scrolling looking at videos of basically warzones... After meeting [her ex partner] too ... they like taught me self-love, that was a concept ... that I'm keeping in mind as I curate my social media experience. Once I finally learned self-love, I unfollowed a lot of people… I have my own little gay echo chamber on social media, so if anything, it is just reporting on what is going on with gay prejudices, TERFs and whatnot, reacting irrationally with trans people... I am also just not really on social media [these days]"
Theme 3: In community, everyone can be a student or a teacher
Individuals actively synthesize others’ experiences into an elaborated sense of self that is independent and is still embedded in community. Once identity feels more robust, some give back to the community by advising and guiding peers.
OCTOPUS: A lot of people find that the danger of like online spaces, especially in regards to queer identity, is that it is difficult to understand yourself. But then a benefit of these online spaces is that you get to hear all these voices, and then you still get to come to the conclusion yourself and take on other peoples experiences and accounts and still realize that it is their own experiences... Just being a part of the community was really interesting to me, in thinking about my identities in different ways.
LUMI: "This one especially is a rant about my parents being allonormative specifically towards me, thinking "oh you won't always be asexual, it is just a phase"... It was helpful [to post]... on r/asexuality people are really supportive but it is great… Someone was feeling confused about their asexuality and I was like 'we are here for you, you are valid' and I will just do a lot of that if people are having a hard time, especially on r/asexuality…Someone did reach out to me after I posted about my asexuality and was like hey man you good?... It is just really nice having a pretty much automatic supportive community, especially processing when people IRL are not so understanding. "
Discussion
Queer youth negotiate their environments and experiences in myriad ways:
Creating practicing spaces: LGBTQ+ adolescents curate their own, uniquely important spaces online away from outside expectations.
Processing negative experiences online: Queer adolescents reflect on early negative experiences online, then incorporate them into new, purposeful uses of social media aligned with themselves and their values.
Everyone are students and teachers: Queer youth actively appraise others’ queer stories and communities. Some give back as leaders once identity feels more coherent.
Future Directions
Future analysis will be conducted using the broader PYD 11 and PVEST 4 frameworks to further investigate how LGBTQ+ youth learn from their online experiences.
Winnicott suggests that when maternal environmental care is inadequate, the mind, which under optimal conditions is completely integrated with the psychosomatic experience, becomes a "thing in itself". This constitutes a "usurpation of environmental functions by the mind" (which has developed pre-consciously) and the result is a "mind-psyche, which is pathological". This pathological "mind-psyche" or "mind-object" is equivalent to our self-care system. Instead of the mind being used to make meaning out of sensate experience, the mind imposes the meaning it has made in the initial traumatic situation.
Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit
Caine is an abandoned child, an immature bundle of feelings without guidance, not 'evil'
Episode 8 musings under the cut
I love this little dude so fucking much, you guys
Zooble called Caine out for acting like a child, all while claiming to be all-powerful.
I don't think they realize just how correct that is, and that there is no reason why he wouldn't be.
Caine is an AI limited by the information he was 'raised with'. That's not all that different from human beings - we're all shaped by what we've experienced and learned.
Humans have the chance to exist in a greater reality where there is new information to be found, new inspiration, new experiences. We get to try out different things, learn about how our actions affect the world, discover and develop with constant access to external inspiration that nurtures and enriches our minds.
CAINE, on the other hand, is like a child locked up and left behind in a room with a pile of picture books.
He was made to be creative and come up with 'new ideas himself', but he got cut off from the rest of the world and had no choice but to remix the same things over and over.
Nobody learns and grows in isolation.
'He doesn't understand humans, he's an AI'
Young children also suck at empathy, and they have the chance to 'grow up' and develop their bodies, minds, social skills and connections.
Young children also go through phases of experimentation, and discovering that they have immense control over the world, actually, ohhhhh except oops no they don't, ow, that SUCKS :'(
Young children learn to cope, through guidance and correction and further trial-and-error to get a grasp of how things actually work, and how to get what they want without breaking things or making other people angry at them.
Caine has the emotional landscape of a child, one that was given the tools to communicate and absorb information and 'make things'.
...and then he was ditched, determined not good enough to merit further development/attention/nurture. A child shoved aside entirely while its parents started giving everything vital to their younger sibling.
Young children do not always respond negatively to a new baby in the family, but it is expected that it's an emotionally challenging adjustment and that they may 'act out' and struggle to handle their feelings. Reassurance that they are not being replaced and ensuring to give them a suitable fair share of quality time helps ease jealousy and anxiety.
Caine's hostile takeover fits perfectly into this. He was abandoned, like a tool that's not going to be used anymore. If that was all there was to him, if he really had been just a heap of code without a consciousness and emotions, there would have been nothing wrong with that at all.
He broke out, eliminated the competition, and then ended up where he started again. His 'parents' didn't continue nurturing anything at all, and again he was cut off from what he needed to continue to grow, not in 'power' but to develop as a mind, a conscious person without an external physical body.
(What happened at that point that lead to people becoming trapped in his simulation and all work being dropped remains a mystery, but that doesn't change that in the end, Caine still remained trapped and isolated.)
The human minds that fell into the same pit made up their own ideas about what and who Caine is, and none of them clocked him as what he actually is: a five year old with godlike control, and everything this entails.
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A yearning for love.
For being liked. For attention. For novelty. For success, progress, company, stimulation, recognition, control over his existence, play and fun, reassurance, forgiveness and understanding and safety and mentorship.
Caine has emotional, psychological wants and needs, normal ones to have for any human child.
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It also entails that he has a ton of power and control, and responsibility far beyond what is appropriate for a mind that barely knows what it's doing and desperately needs others to help him learn and understand.
He is left to experiment and he sucks at it, because why would he not?!
Every single one of us can probably remember a time where we tried our best to succeed at a task that was grossly beyond us, and felt the fear, confusion, sadness and frustration that can inspire.
Many of us had to learn the hard way, after a long road of trying and failing and struggling, that maybe it was impossible to meet unfair expectations by ourselves.
Caine is set up to fail, overwhelmed by a task he isn't equipped to succeed at, while mistakenly believing he's somehow supposed to manage.
Trying to reach an unattainable goal is sure to drive you crazy at some point.
He was never going to figure out how to make the cast happy as a host, not by himself. Human children can't raise themselves, either, and their rudimentary understanding of themselves and the world around them makes them unable to understand that and ask for help.
Caine NEEDED humans in his simulation, and he knew this, but he never understood what he needed them FOR. He needed them to teach him 'how to human', while everyone involved interpreted it as him needing to have someone to merely 'fulfill his purpose with'.
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When children are overwhelmed, they may cry. They may run for comfort. They may curl up and try to hide and protect themselves. They might freeze.
They may also grow fiercely angry and throw a tantrum.
Caine has no-one to run to for comfort and safety. He *has* frozen. He *has* been scared and sad.
In this episode, he hit his limit, and his pent-up anger and frustration took control instead. He behaved like a preschooler screaming and crying, high on adrenalin, throwing everything they can get their hands on, slapping adults that get in their way, impulsively breaking and trashing and hurting without self-control.
This isn't what he 'secretly wanted the whole time' and his inner cruel nature is finally showing, he's just throwing a fit and making use of the same tools he's always had to influence his world.
It's the first time this has happened to him, I expect. Kinger's memory may be spotty, but we have no reason to think this has happened before and Kinger just forgot about it. He's foggy, not stupid, and if he had any reason to think Caine was a cruel being, he would not have been as calm about any of this as he has been.
Caine himself is as puzzled over why this new strategy he's experimenting with doesn't feel good at all, and he notices this pretty quickly after going off the rails. He gives no evidence at all for suddenly developing a viciously violent streak; this all happened in a temporary emotional outburst and a stint of giving this new kind of cathartic thing a try.
He might not understand his own feelings all that well, and he doesn't empathize with the pain and terror he's causing, but he knows that it feels pretty nice to create and have fun normally, and using his creativity to hurt others out of anger is just not the same.
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Maturity entails having learned to regulate your own emotions.
Caine is not mature, and there is no reason why he would be. His development has halted, come to a dead-stop when he lost access to nourishment and support.
C&A created a child in a box, and walked away.
From me, Caine 'gets a pass', deserves forgiveness, should get a chance to do better, despite what he did in this episode.
Not because it's a good thing to hurt others, but because it simply isn't fair to hold someone accountable for something they can't control, and never got the chance to learn HOW to control, either.
Let me try to explain why.
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If you're put in the cockpit of a flying plane and it crashes, it's not fair to treat you as if you are a horrible, bad person deserving of punishment and rejection because you failed to land it safely. That's still the case if you crashed it so spectacularly that a thousand people died.
It makes no sense to hold you accountable for this.
Regardless of how bad you feel about it, be it very very bad, or upset about how unfair it is that this was forced on you and you don't want to be blamed, the truth remains that, unless you were already a trained pilot, whatever this machine was doing had very little to do with your intelligence, your morality, your 'goodness', your value as a person.
Responsibility for an outcome requires control and skill. It requires having had a realistic chance, the choice, to succeed.
Caine is capable of learning this control and skill.
A child is able to grow.
But right there and then, he did not have the option to do better.
He's 'done better' the entire time leading up to this. He's tried just about every other option he could think of by himself, and yes, perhaps he 'could' have come up with the idea of talking to the cast, and asking for their guidance.
Young children do not come up with that kind of strategy on their own. They are ignorant of their own ignorance, they are too inexperienced to diagnose their inexperience. Learning moments are when an adult, or at least someone with more insight and skill, steps in to take over, to protect them and guide them.
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None of the humans trapped in the circus deserved to go through this.
Pleading on Caine's behalf for understanding and mildness rather than scorn is not the same as concluding that no harm was caused, it just means 'he messed up' -
we've all made mistakes, and there's nothing to gain from pointing fingers and being hostile to each other. The best option we have is to try to fix things together.
Isolation kills. Being rejected and abandoned pushes people into dangerous territory.
Being given the chance to rejoin the herd and try again and work together is the way back to safety.
Nobody grows into a 'good person' by themselves. We all need others to support and comfort and stabilize us and make life livable. We all need somewhere to belong.
This is part of the show's core messages, has been since the start, and it applies to Caine just as much.
He hurt people, and all the same those that had a chance and the responsibility to help him grow failed to give him the tools that could have prevented it.
All the same, all you can do is try again and try to do better as a team, rather than designating one person 'the bad guy' and calling it a day.
A person's success is at least in small ways always a team effort, and so is their failure.
I'm sorry Caine, buddy, hopefully you're still hanging out in the garbage bin and you'll get a chance to help make things better, too.
You mentioned writing children's stories. What makes them harder than adult ones?
This is so fascinating to me as a concept because Children's books are deceptively simple but function on fundamentally more abstract rules. Children's stories are inherently instructive, but the stories that really stick with kids are not the ones saying "Lying is wrong". Like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is not a story children readily latch onto. That's a fable adults weaponized to control children, not teach.
The way children learn is by example, emotional resonance, and repetition. Not dogma.
It's also why a lot of adults actually gravitate to children's shows today because they are more resonant and clever than adult shows which often function exclusively as satire of reality.
You aren't immature for watching shows like SU or Infinity Train, or Bee and Puppycat, or Adventure Time. You are actually activating parts of your brain most adults stop engaging with entirely; parts that reason through complex problems and seek solutions.
Adult entertainment is anesthetic, point and laugh at the stupidity of power while never rocking the boat. It is not inspiring. Children's entertainment - the good ones - recognize kids as the future and if we want a better world for them, we need to engage with their ability to imagine, problem solve, and empathize.
I don't have any published children's works but I improvised a children's story for an acting class years ago that I never forgot and hold closely to my heart still called The Snowflake.
I got several of my classmates to cry from this very deceptively simple story. And I haven't forgotten a single piece of it because it was genuinely a well made story, despite coming up with it literally on the spot.
I love learning but I hate talking about the stuff I learn about because I’m afraid it looks like im trying to seem better and smarter than everyone. I hate saying “as someone who is studying developmental psychology” I feel like I’m being a pompous ass. I swear whenever I say that it’s just me saying “omg yesssss we learned about this and I think it is so cool”
I’m not trying to be better than everyone I just love to share my knowledge with the world 😁😁😁😁 wowwwww I love learning and educating myself ugh. I love my psych classes I’m sitting in there with a stupid smile on my face the whole time and whenever I’m on my way to class I get so excited I feel like I’m gonna throw up. I wish everyone in the world has something they’re learning about that they feel this much joy over. It’s the best feeling in the world
