Too young to know better

Last week a 12-year-old elementary school girl in Florida committed suicide after months of being viciously cyberbullied by a group of female classmates.  

Instantly, I thought of my younger sister and how my parents allowed her to get a smart phone.

We’re just as guilty as my younger sister’s generation for being on social media before we were ready. We didn’t know any better. We saw our older siblings who were the first real wave of social media users, and like any kid in middle school, we wanted be just like them.

Now we know better. We see the careers of politicians, athletes and members of our community become tarnished overnight by dumb things they put online. We see shows like “Catfish” and realize how ridiculous it is to waste time and energy on social media.

The problem is our younger siblings don’t.

I can’t blame parents for this one. Our parents have no idea what social media is for kids. They don’t know that the two don’t mix.

For years we have heard the rhetoric that we are the future of this country. Often we are reluctant to think we can have any effect, and most of the time we are probably right.

We can’t do a whole lot to fix the political and economic class system. We can’t end the budget deficit. And no matter how many African-American politicians we elect, we still can’t get rid of racists, no matter how hard we try.

However, when it comes to preventing our young siblings from getting on social media, this is an issue we can control.

The best memories in high school were hanging out with friends, having new adventures and spending summer daylight hours playing pick-up games of basketball and football.

The worst memories of high school were seeing pictures of “friends” at get-togethers you weren’t invited to, reading conversations on your news feed of two people talking crap about you, or worse, being a direct target of hateful and unreasonable cyberbullying.

We love our younger siblings more than life. As much as we’d love to beat up every cyberbully, we can’t.

The problem is, we’re not home to see them every day. We can’t be there to put an arm on their shoulder when they are crying in their pillow, wondering what must be wrong with them.

What we can do is speak up.

Talk to our parents and talk to our younger siblings, explain they are just not ready for the harms of social media because no one really ever is.

Tell them that no matter how uncool they think they’ll be if they don’t have an account, every “big kid” you know agrees that nothing is cooler than just being able to be a kid again.

— eygoldar@indiana.edu