Through the Looking Glass

Just last weekend, my teen daughter and I went out of town to spend a girls’ weekend with dear friends. Here were two moms celebrating decades of friendship, secure in their sense of self but relishing time together. And here were two 14-year-old girls who have known each other since birth, gradually coming into their own, curious to see what the world has to offer. Yet too much of the weekend was spent putting limits on technology and prying phones out of teenage hands. On Sunday morning, as we lazed around and I saw both girls buried in their phones, I realized: it is virtually impossible for today’s children to develop a self-identity divorced from what they see reflected back at them by screens. 

I thought about the development of my own self-identity. Looking at a screen had very little to do with it. When I was growing up, every now and then my dad would sit us all down for a slide show. Often this would be after we’d gotten home from a vacation. He’d set up his Kodak carousel of slides to project onto the living room wall, and after dark we’d turn the lights out and hear the distinctive click, click, click as my dad worked his way through the ring of slides, pausing on each one so that we could absorb the details and relive the captured moment. Inevitably, there would be much whooping and hollering as we stumbled across a few funny, candid moments that had been caught on camera - snapshots we didn’t know existed until days or weeks later, when the film was developed.

I loved those slide show nights. They were a treat, something to be greeted with anticipatory glee. Only family and the occasional close friend were there to watch. These slide shows were ephemeral, in their way - the image was projected, and then it disappeared from the living room wall back into its little Kodak square, stored in a neatly labeled box. The impression that was left on me, after seeing myself in quick bursts on the living room wall, was of a happy, smiling, adventurous girl, often somewhat dirty and suntanned from a week in Tahoe or Wyoming or the Outer Banks.

Very little of my self-identity came from looking at myself in these slide shows, or in any of the pictures of me my parents kept around the house. I remember my 7th grade school picture. It was pretty bad. I was wearing an oversized striped blue rugby jersey, there was a weird braid in the front of my very red hair, and I hadn’t had braces yet to fix my protruding two front teeth. But whatever anyone else said about it…came and went. It wasn’t written down anywhere. Certainly not saved in electronic posterity.

And not much of my self-identity came from comparing myself to teen idols, either. Yes, there were movies and TV shows with child actors in them - but when the TV was off or the movie was over, those images were gone. Yes, there was Seventeen magazine, but I didn’t have a palm-sized copy of it that I carried with me everywhere. Yes, there were cool kids at school that I compared myself to, but I didn’t have pictures and videos of them that came home with me in my pocket. And since there was no social media, there was no such thing as a social media influencer. 

My self-identity came, in large part, through my relationships with people - real, actual people whom I interacted with on a face-to-face basis. My self-identity was also shaped by my experiences: spending summers searching for fossils in the Badlands of Wyoming had a profound effect on how I view myself (I’m a badass rockstar, all puns intended.) Of course, the environment in which I was raised shaped my self-identity as well: a milieu emphasizing service, faith, and liberal politics.

Obviously, these same factors still affect the development of self-identity in today’s children. Interpersonal relationships, lived experiences, and home environment are still critical in helping to shape one’s sense of self. But there’s a massively different factor affecting today’s children. From infancy, we begin taking photos and videos of our children. And from infancy, we are immediately showing our children these images of themselves. Our children are growing up seeing themselves reflected back by a screen. How is this affecting their sense of self?

We know that children can recognize themselves from a very young age. The aptly-named mirror test, or mirror-mark test, has proven that babies can recognize themselves at between 18-24 months of age. This is an experiment in which babies have a dab of makeup surreptitiously placed on their head or face. When presented with a mirror, children from the age of approximately 18 months are able to use their reflection to locate the offending smudge and wipe it away. This demonstrates their sense of self - they recognize that the reflection in the mirror is in fact them, but that the mark isn’t an accurate representation of them, that the mark is disconcerting and they want it gone, and that they have the autonomy to wipe the mark away. All typical, developmentally appropriate behaviors for a budding 2-year-old. (An important note: serious doubts have been raised regarding the cultural validity of the mirror-mark test; it is now believed that the 18-24 mo. age marker applies primarily to children in Western cultures.)

Using similar methodology, more recent research has investigated at what age children begin to recognize themselves in videos and photographs. In this case, researchers secretly placed a sticker on the head of their young subjects. The researchers found that children around age three will recognize themselves in video while slightly older children, ages three and a half to four, will recognize themselves in still photographs. 

So - although I might have recognized myself in the mirror at age two, I wouldn’t have recognized myself in any of my father’s slide shows until almost age four. And even then, those bursts of recognition would have been brief, smiled about, laughed over in the company of my immediate family, and then stored away in a box.

But what about today’s child? With the stratospheric rise  in prevalence of the smartphone, our children are swaddled in images of themselves from infancy onward. And these are not fleeting images. These are pervasive images - pictures that are splashed across social media and wall calendars and Christmas cards and coffee mugs. How can our children possibly form a self-image divorced from the images they see of themselves reflected back at them?

Our children’s perceptions of themselves are inextricably tied to what they see on the screen. We know that science tells us that from age two, a baby knows that a mark on its face shouldn’t be there - and by age four, a toddler knows how to identify what’s marring a picture of herself. Think about how we’re reinforcing this. Children are growing up in a world in which we take a picture, look at it, and then identify what’s wrong with it and instruct them on how we want it to be done better. “Big smile!” we say. “Can you turn your head?” “You look mad in that photo. Try to look happy.” “Your hair’s in your face. Fix your hair.” “Oh, that doesn’t look good. Let’s try again.” “Be cute for Mommy!” 

What is this doing to them?

We already know they’re hardwired to want to remove the thing that’s marring their image. But now we’re constantly capturing them on photo and video and we’re constantly telling them to do it again, do it over, make it look nicer, let me take one more, that one’s not quite right. What’s more, children are being shown images of themselves, taken by their own parents, that have been edited and filtered. The message here is that what is being reflected back by the camera is not good enough. There might be something that can’t be removed by the child - not a trace of rouge, not a sticker, but maybe acne, or a scar, or a certain thickness of eyebrow - and the parent just edits it. In this case, the child is having their sense of self-identity usurped from them. They might recognize what is reflected back at them, but they no longer have autonomy over it.

Young people today, as they construct their identity, are faced with the impossible task of separating how they see themselves from how they are seen and/or how they want to be perceived on social media. When I was constructing my identity as a happy, introverted, adventurous young paleontologist, only tiny bits of this identity came from what I saw in the mirror or in tidbits gleaned from the occasional slide show. The vast majority came from my interactions IRL, my lived experiences outside of a screen with real people.

But now, technology and screens are so pervasive, in a way that was inconceivable just 15-20 years ago, that children and teens see images of themselves or peers constantly reflected back at them. From infancy, they see images instantly in the pictures and videos that their parents and babysitters take and then hold up for them to see. They see themselves on their parents’ social media accounts. Their images are manipulated, commented upon, widely distributed and even laughed at.

Few adults over the age of 30 grew up accustomed to seeing themselves on a screen. Perhaps some of us had parents who made liberal use of the camcorder. But we just watched those VHS tapes in their raw format. And certainly when we saw a photograph of ourselves, it was unedited. We never had someone take a photo of us, look at it, and then immediately tell us that they didn’t like it and we had to do it over again. Think of how much more competitive this has made parenting. And how much more competitive it is to be a child. This is the standard we expect people to live up to.

This is now ingrained in our children: the expectation or desire to pose just right; to jut their hip out, to flex their muscles, to flip their hair, to move the camera’s angle up or down. Because our children see their image instantly and expect instant feedback. And they don’t want any of that feedback to be negative. 

Is their self-identity now tied to what they see reflected back at them from the screen? Absolutely. 

Do they envision a self-identity that will garner them more likes? Quite possibly.

Are they striving to go viral? Oh, yes. (But only for the right reasons. A young person’s sense of identity can just as easily be negatively formed by what is reflected back at them online.)

These observations all exist within the context of a much bigger framework, one that includes conversations about children’s mental health, the rights and responsibilities of parents, and the relative value of technology. Nevertheless, one cannot help but be struck by the wildly different circumstances in which today’s children must struggle to define who they are. Young people today exist in a virtual hall of mirrors; every which way they turn they see some angle of themselves or others like them reflected back at them. How wildly disorienting that must feel! 

How does a young person today determine who they are, what feels authentic and true to them, absent the stylized and idealized images reflected back at them by screens everywhere?

It’s a troubling question and one for which I don’t have an answer. I’m left thinking of a quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:

“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

*N.B. My daughter does not have social media, for all of the reasons.