Three things you’ll notice when you see clearly
There is no longer a debate about whether substantial social media use causes mental-health problems in young people. Between 2014 and 2020, research confirmed this connection and other research did not.[1] In the last few years, carefully designed studies have confirmed not only a correlation between social media use and mental health, but a causal relationship. We also now know the relationship is dose-dependent, meaning the more time young people spend on social media, the greater the risk to their mental health. Importantly, not all adolescents are as susceptible to the pernicious effects of social media. In 2024, researchers found that “social media use was related to increased depression for adolescents with greater parental hostility, peer bullying, anxiety, reactivity to stressors, and lower parental media monitoring.”[2]
Our Shared Responsibility
Combining this recent scientific evidence[3] with old-fashioned common sense, any youth-serving organization that permits participants to use social media on its property is patently negligent. Young people do not need smartphones while at camp, school, or parks and rec programs. Kids have been flourishing at these steadily improving institutions for centuries,[4],[5] long before the ubiquitous smartphone became a distracting social retardant.
Any youth-serving organization that lets kids use their phones on-site has either drifted from its original mission to promote positive youth development or caved to market pressures. If potential clients prioritize superficial connections over substantive ones—if they favor friending over friendship—leaders will have to revert to what is tried and true. Community living, away from home, with a recreational premise, in a natural setting has a special power to promote positive youth development. This four-part special sauce of positive youth development may be strongest at overnight summer camps, but also exists at high-quality day camps, parks and rec programs, and other youth-serving organizations.
Skeptics decry, “How can we compete with the dopamine squirts offered by social media?” The answer is to open your eyes, not an app. If you’re reading this article, you’re part of a business that offers all types of durable competition, all types of compelling strategies to wean young participants off harmful social media, all types of fun ways to connect or reconnect them with healthy alternatives. The following are a few examples to get the creative gears turning:
Competitor #1: Noticing Beauty
Electronic technology once held the promise of giving us more free time. Yet a recent study of 1,062 U.S. adults reported that 87% of people are frequently interrupted by technology; 58% said technology blurred their work/life boundaries; 75% said they spend more than four hours each day doing non-work activities on devices; and 82% wished for a digital detox.[6]
If you’re not in the majority here, please teach your colleagues and your customers how to do what you do. For the rest of us, one of the solutions lies in the practice of noticing, a simple concept explained by the equally simple adage, Stop and smell the roses.[7] To notice beauty—whether it’s visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory—costs nothing. It merely requires downshifting from the frenetic pace of whatever one is doing and paying attention to the details of one thing. Just one. Beauty is all around us, wherever we are.
For example, at the camp where I served as waterfront director for nearly three decades, the kitchen was so close to the lake that swim lessons were frequently interrupted (in a good way) by glorious smells of bacon, grilled cheese, tacos, and other favorites being prepared. Campers and staff alike would pause to inhale, guess what the chef was cooking, and express gratitude for homemade food. One fan favorite, chicken patties, was so redolent that campers created an exuberant cheer to celebrate every time they caught a whiff of those patties. That sort of spontaneous, joyful behavior is the inspired byproduct of noticing.
Camp Belknap’s chicken patty cheer is a distant and primitive cousin of Antonio Vivaldi’s violin concerti, The Four Seasons. Nevertheless, they share a common origin: noticing. Vivaldi wrote his most famous programmatic music between 1718 and 1720 while living in Mantua, in northern Italy. At that time, the city of Mantua was surrounded by lakes on all sides (Lake Pajolo dried up a few decades after Vivaldi’s death in 1741, but three lakes remain). Today, as in the early 18th century, the city limits give way to gorgeous, hilly countryside. One can imagine the beauty of Vivaldi’s natural surroundings being among the inspirations for his compositions.
Some music scholars argue that Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons years before his three-year stint as choirmaster for the governor of Mantua, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt.[8] We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is these four concerti make explicit reference to flowing streams, singing birds, barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, thunderous storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties, frozen landscapes, ice-skating children, and warming winter fires.[9] Clearly, whether in northern Italy or around Venice, where he lived and composed most of his life, Vivaldi noticed nature’s beauty.
Fun fact: Vivaldi worked for 30 years as maestro di violino (chief violin teacher) and eventually maestro de’ concerti (music director) at Pio Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy), a combination convent/music school/orphanage in Venice. In spirit, if not substance, Vivaldi’s roles aren’t far removed from the paradigmatic guitar-playing camp counselor leading songs and inspiring young minds.
Appreciation of beauty doesn’t always inspire timeless art, but it always requires noticing. And noticing—by intentionally slowing down and actively attending to the details of what’s in front of us—is the opposite of aimlessly consuming the blips of heavily edited fluff we passively devour on social media.
Competitor #2: Nurturing Connections
Humans, like many other animals, are prewired to connect with other members of their species. The moment we’re born, the process of attachment that began in the womb begins to blossom. From that moment on, nearly every human instinctively behaves in ways that nurture connections. Behaviors such as crying, making eye contact, smiling, talking, and playing are obviously prosocial. When done with kind intentions, they draw two people closer. Paradoxically, many unkind behaviors, such as bullying, are also bids for attention, status, and, ultimately, connection.
High-quality youth-serving organizations serve many essential functions for positive development. Chief among them is building social skills, such as making friends, resolving conflicts, showing kindness, offering forgiveness, and learning to win with humility and lose with grace. Under the guise of having fun, we create socially immersive environments (e.g., camps, parks and rec programs, etc.) that naturally stir up social joy and social distress. This yields a steady source of teachable moments for older, more mature humans (you and your staff) to serve as guides in kids’ learning journeys. Of course, “the guise of having fun” is no false pretense. The fun we all have in our programs is what keeps us coming back for more and more learning.
Social media and other apps can also be fun, but it’s a type of superficial, transient fun that provides precious few teachable moments. It also relies heavily on the following three lies:
- Lie #1 is that the app produces authentic happiness. The studies I’ve cited in this article, combined with your own experiences, expose Lie #1. Rare is the app that delivers on its promise to improve our well-being.
- Lie #2 is that everyone else is better looking, more popular, more carefree, and more productive than you are. The fact that almost everyone portrays a carefully curated image of themselves, rather than their struggles, failures, and ugly moments, validates Lie #2. Our comparisons are based on the false pretense that the glimpses we catch of other people are an accurate representation of their humanity.
- Lie #3 is that friending is the same as friendship, that following is the same as belonging. This lie is so self-evident that it needs no additional proof, but our relentless hope obscures these differences every time we open an app.
If you rolled your eyes as you read the last paragraph, knowing all about these three lies, good for you. If you understand why most apps are pernicious, the challenge then becomes designing ways to nurture face-to-face connections among you, your staff, and the young people you serve.
Because so much has been written, in PRB+ and elsewhere, about programs and activities that nurture human connections, I have a fresh challenge to level up your game: Design programs and activities that nurture connections between humans and the natural world or that reveal connections among parts of the natural world. The research is incontrovertible: Time in nature improves our mental health and sharpens our cognition.[10]
What might these nature connections look like? Rather than having kids memorize the names of natural objects and earn awards for rote skill, teach them the why and the how of natural objects. For example, don’t stop at teaching campers that Lady Slipper is the nickname of this delicate pink flower. Teach them why it’s growing, where it’s growing, and how it’s connected to the surrounding ecosystem. This is where it gets interesting. So interesting, in fact, that memorizing names becomes unnecessary. Kids will learn the names of constellations, rocks and minerals, flora and fauna, but as part of connection narratives that are so fascinating, the names of the characters automatically become unforgettable.
To wit: Lady Slippers are a type of orchid, and, like most orchids, Lady Slipper seeds do not have a food supply inside them, as do the seeds of other plants. Fascinating, right? Lady Slippers start life with adversity. They rely on a particular fungus, mycorrhizal, to break into the seed and supply nutrients. It takes years, but eventually, the seed becomes a mature, flowering plant, at which point it starts feeding some of the carbohydrates it produces back to the fungus. Again, fascinating. And a perfect opportunity to throw down the day’s second 50-cent word: symbiosis. Ask the group for other examples of symbiosis they already know. Who doesn’t love the feeling of discovering they are smarter than they thought?
Next, it’s time for the third 50-cent word of the day: deciduous—a plant that sheds it leaves each year. Why do Lady Slippers typically grow under deciduous trees? Because the leaf litter makes the soil somewhat acidic. And moist, well-drained, lowish pH soil is the preferred habitat for—you guessed it—both mycorrhizal fungus and orchids. Plus, the leaves on deciduous trees shield both orchids and their fungi friends from direct sunlight. Ultraviolet rays kill most fungi spores, and direct sunlight scorches the delicate flowers of orchids. So, shade it is for these lifelong chums.
Nature abounds with fascinating relationships, so the only challenge left for a talented teacher is how to limit the size of the group exploring the forest. That and keeping the goal in sharp focus: You’re not preparing kids for a quiz bowl. You’re nurturing their connection to the natural world by showing them how parts of the natural world connect to one another.
Competitor #3: Reframing Imperfections
The unyielding but subtle messages baked into any app that promises to make your life easier or into any social media platform that promises genuine connections are the following: Your life is not easy enough. Your mood is not cheery enough. Your talents are not good enough. Your personality is not interesting enough. Your routine is not organized enough. Your work is not productive enough. Your knowledge is not profound enough. And you’re definitely not attractive enough. Of course, no one opens an app intending to lower one’s mood and sense of worth, but that’s what happens after regularly spending more than an hour per day engaged in recreational screen time.[11] At the core of this distress is the spotlight on our imperfections.
What countervailing forces could possibly be strong enough to compete with the insidious message that we are not enough? One force is mental toughness. That’s what anyone needs to persevere, to work hard, to learn from mistakes, and to use some of our shortcomings as motivation to improve. After all, a robust sense of self-worth comes largely from competence. Knowing we are good at being a friend, good at math, good at baking bread, good at training dogs, good at something, is a cornerstone of our overall well-being.
A less obvious force is acceptance, but not in the way most people think about it. Rather than accept our imperfections—in skills, character, or looks—as inherently bad, we need to teach ourselves and the young people with whom we work that perfect is not the standard by which we should judge ourselves. There are no perfect people, despite how apps make us feel. And without perfection, there are no imperfections, strictly speaking. Unfortunately, this type of logical, philosophical argument doesn’t make anyone feel better. If the force of acceptance stands a chance against the app-generated tidal wave of inferiority we feel, it needs more power.
If it’s too hard, at first, to accept our own differences, what if we start by accepting other people’s differences, even if some of those differences are flaws? Heck, some of those flaws are what other people are working to improve in themselves. And that commitment to personal growth is a monumental character strength. We should admire them, not deride them. Now we’re getting somewhere. If we can accept other people’s shortcomings, perhaps then we can accept our own. At the very least, we have a realistic, human standard by which we can gauge our own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s human nature to compare ourselves to other people. However, to make valid, healthy comparisons, we must know those people well; we must know something about their assets and shortcomings. We doom ourselves to depression if we mindlessly compare ourselves to fabricated facsimiles of other people, or if we take seriously all the not enough marketing messages that are sold to us on apps.
In practice, helping young people direct their instinct to compare toward real people, not images of people, isn’t difficult. It starts with carefully hiring, thoroughly training, and expertly supervising the staff. That process yields wonderful, realistic role models for young people to follow. Next, we must cultivate greater self-awareness of how we talk about ourselves and others.
Comments such as, “I suck at archery. I couldn’t hit a target if it was close enough to bite me.” or “Look at me, I’m a whale. I have to skip lunch.” or “I’m telling you, she’s just doing it for attention. Just ignore her.” or “Why is he wearing the same shirt he wore yesterday?” all contain an unfair comparison, learned by a young person whose instinct to compare was focused on an image, not an individual.
Redirecting other- and self-deprecatory judgments is easy. But when the redirection comes from accessible role models, it can change kids. Consider these possible replies to the quips above: “Sounds like your archery skills aren’t yet as good as some of your other skills. But like those other skills, you can get better with practice.” or “Everybody has times when they are unhappy with how they look. But we all need to fuel our bodies for an active day.” or “You don’t like how she’s behaving. I wonder whether you could show her how to make friends, instead of ignoring her.” or “I guess you’d have to ask him why he’s wearing the same shirt, if it’s important to you. Or maybe what someone is wearing isn’t all that important.” Each of these replies contains some empathy and a reframing of a distorted statement. (More on that technique in a future article.)
There you have it. Three powerful ways for your program to be an influential, countercultural vehicle for positive youth development: noticing beauty, nurturing connections, and reframing imperfections. Each is a free and reliable way to open young people’s eyes. And if seeing is believing, kids will eventually choose beauty, connection, and human flaws over any app, any day.
[1] Although there were more studies that validated a connection, bias exists to publish studies with findings, rather than null findings. Sometimes, this is called “the file drawer problem.”
[2] Dyer, W. J., Coyne, S. M., Gale, M., and Sheppard, J. A. (2024). Who's most at risk? A person-centered approach to understanding the long-term relationship between early social media use and later depression across adolescence. Journal of Adolescence, 97(7), 1555-1568.
[3] A frequently updated and thoughtfully annotated collection of scholarly articles on social media and mental health is publicly available here: https://www.thecoddling.com/better-mental-health.
[4] American Camp Association (ACA). (2005). Directions: Youth Development Outcomes of the Camp Experience. ACA Research Committee, 1, 1-24.
[5] Thurber, C.A., Scanlin, M., Scheuler, L., & Henderson, K. (2007). Youth development outcomes of the camp experience: Evidence for multidimensional growth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36, 241-254.
[6] Sixty AI. (2023). Survey of Time. https://media.sixty.app/sixty-ai-infographic.pdf [retrieved April 5, 2025].
[7] Humans have been pausing to notice the beauty around them for millennia, but golfer Walter Hagen’s autobiography, The Walter Hagen Story, may have generated the popular adage. Hagan wrote: “Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way.”
[8] Heller, K. (1997). Antonio Vivaldi, The Red Priest of Venice. Portland, Oregon: Amadesu Press.
[9] Everett, P. & Paul, E. (1996). Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[10] For a good summary of this research, see: Weir, K. (2020). Nurtured by nature. The APA Monitor, 51, 50-53.
[11] Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2017). A large-scale test of the Goldilocks hypothesis: Quantifying the relations between digital-screen use and the mental well-being of adolescents. Psychological Science, 28(2), 204–215.
