A neighborhood friend of mine posted an article link from Time on Facebook.  The article is titled “The Secret Languages of Girls on Instagram”.  You can find the article at:

http://time.com/3559340/instagram-tween-girls/

This gist of this article is that teen girls are using Instagram as a ranking mechanism.  As girls post things the responses and the number of likes is used a status indicator.  It is judge popularity and it can have an emotional impact on girls as they are developing.

I get that.  But my first question whenever we start to point a finger at something is whether or not it has created the situation.  If it didn’t create it, did it exasperate it?  If it didn’t exasperate it, did it simply just allow it continue in a different fashion.

Instagram didn’t create this problem, that I know for sure.  Where you sit in the cafeteria.  Did you bring a lunch or was it a hot lunch?  What clothes/labels are you wearing?  Who you are talking to?  Who are you not talking to?  Whose locker did you stop at?  We have always had social cues on our popularity and there has always been a mystic art to interpret it.

Did Instagram, Facebook, or other online apps exasperate it?  It may feel that way but in the end I just think that it just changed what we or they look at.  One thing that it does do is is allow the information to travel to more people than actual in life events.  So something you were judged on by 10 people can now be judge by 100 people; that sounds bad but in the end you are still being judge.

I do believe these tools allowed this form of judging to continue.

So am I worried about this as much as being discussed in this article?  No.  My plan and how I raise my children is the same.  When they do something that is “judging”, I correct them.  When they talk to me about someone judging them, I explain why someone probably judged them and how it doesn’t really matter.

For example, my daughter and I worked on a art project this weekend.  We were given carte blanche to decorate it in any manner.  I sat down with my daughter and showed her how to draw some of it freehand on a digitizer tablet.  I showed her how to find snippets of items on the web and fetch, resize, print and cut them out.  Then we worked on actual drawing/coloring with art pencils.  The art piece was very funny looking but the point is we had fun and we learned a lot.

Now zoom forward to this past Monday and when my daughter came home she was upset.  A girl in her class was a bit rude and laughed at her work.  My daughter felt her artwork was now “funny” looking and she was embarrassed.  I had to sit there and explain to her why the image was “different” looking and to understand that our goals were to learn and have fun.  I then pointed out that this girl who judged her was simply ignorant.

Artwork in class or a picture on Instagram.  Same problem, different medium.