Just in Time For Halloween: What’s Really Sucking the Souls Out of Our Kids?

Monster Summer opened in theaters this month, a suspenseful film featuring Mel Gibson, Mason Thames, and Abby James Witherspoon, among others. The Sandlot meets Super Eight in this PG-13 thriller arriving just in time for Halloween. Monster Summer is a refreshing reminder that scary movies can still be as entertaining as ghost stories around campfires—they don’t have to be grotesque and inhumane, and they can even be soul-warming.

Set in Martha’s Vineyard, Monster Summer begins when Noah (Thames) notices strange happenings around the island, followed by the kids becoming expressionless shells of themselves. For me, what’s most scary about the film is how much it reminds me of real teens today. 

Those who aren’t into scary movies can avoid them. But few can escape the present-day reality of teens in our lives becoming zombies, trading the glint in their eye for a dull stare hyper-concerned with how they look to others. The pivotal coming-of-age season in kids’ lives has been hijacked by the relentless interconnectedness of the devices they’re attached to, painting unrealistic pictures of what it takes to be “relevant.” All it costs them is their sense of self.

Scary, indeed.

As it happens, there was another movie this year featuring a tween protagonist at risk of losing her sense of self. Not quite a scary movie, Disney’s sequel film with animated emotions, Inside Out 2 featured a climactic moment that made audiences in my theater gasp. Growing up, Riley’s life choices and motives wove a beautiful sense of self she strived to embody: “I am a good person.” But when Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui take over Riley’s brain, she becomes obsessed with perfectionism and what others think of her, losing her sense of self entirely. As a spikey new creation forms where her sense of self used to be, we hear a new cognition broadcast over the loudspeaker of her brain: “I am not . . . good enough.” 

I didn’t see that coming. In a heart-wrenching moment, the sweet, hopeful Riley was gone. As the words echoed over the big screen, I sat frozen in shock. 

And then I was shocked that I was shocked. 

As an editor at the first women’s magazine to not Photoshop women, for many years I have known about the life-sucking damage caused by impossible standards of perfectionism in media, whether about looks, accomplishments, relationships, or anything else. My colleagues and I work to fight back against real, life-threatening physical- and mental-health challenges facing girls and women today that detach their sense of self from their true worth and become the breeding ground for numerous social ills. 

This is all to say, it is not inconsequential when young people get the wind knocked out of them by the world. We can’t just stand by and watch. We need to be like Noah in Monster Summer and Joy in Inside Out and fight for young people’s souls.

As has been reported in these pages, we are in the midst of a mental-health epidemic. Growing numbers of young people are reporting depression and anxiety—mental illnesses that were once associated with the stress of carrying the weight of the world on one’s shoulders in adulthood. Researchers of a 2019 study at Johns Hopkins revealed that for adolescents who spend more than three hours online daily they are more likely to internalize problems, which exacerbates anxiety and depression. Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker stated in 2017, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” 

Well, now it’s becoming disturbingly clear…

Self-conscious nervousness common for middle school has become super-charged as young people consume unrealistic standards of beauty in the media all around them, which they try in vain to replicate. It’s no surprise, then, that their sense of body image and self-worth are at all-time lows. It’s so bad that the Surgeon General suggested a black box warning for social media due to its serious mental-health effects on young people. 

The pivotal coming-of-age season in kids’ lives has been hijacked by the relentless interconnectedness of the devices they’re attached to, painting unrealistic pictures of what it takes to be “relevant.” All it costs them is their sense of self.

Jonathan Haidt’s latest book Anxious Generation unveiled the harms of the combination of social media and smartphone technology in the hands of kids. Where social media started as a method of networking, it morphed into platforms where young people display themselves to be judged by the world. Mix that with middle-school emotions and brain development, and we have a disturbing cocktail that we’re serving our youth. What’s more, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, social media platforms like Instagram direct young people to objectifying content just minutes after they log on. A 2021 Wall Street Journal report found that teenagers “know what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.”

In addition, the New Yorker recently published a feature on doomscrolling and the teen-suicide crisis. Sharing the stories of parents who endured the unimaginable of losing their children to suicide concurrent with increased social-media use, Andrew Solomon writes, “they all wonder how we went from being a society where children below a certain age couldn’t see Jaws to one where they can watch all the porn they want—from one where you could check that your children weren’t ‘in with the wrong crowd’ to one where you cannot even see what virtual crowd your children are mingling with.” One father named Chris exclaims, “You’re not going to let your kid run around with a sharp knife? Then don’t let your kid onto these sites until they’re 18.”

Thanks to efforts led by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and others, lawmakers at the state and federal levels are finally taking notice and seeking measures to help parents better protect children online.

These are much-needed changes, and parents can certainly use the help. But there is more we can do at home. Just last year, IFS and Gallup jointly published a report on how parenting and self-control mediate the link between social media use and youth mental health. The conclusion was simple: teens with involved parents who monitor their time online and maintain close relationships with them are less likely to suffer from some of the negative mental health effects of social media use.

Which brings me to what is perhaps the scariest part of all this: when we look critically at how we got here and consider what changes we may need to make to reverse the damage, we begin to see where we’ve fallen short. How we adults are addicted to our phones and “phub” our loved ones. How for too long we have unfairly expected our kids to self-implement boundaries with technology that’s engineered to become their obsession. How we objectify and put down ourselves and others in numerous ways, affecting how young people view themselves. How we’ve let our hobbies and joys go to the wayside while worldly stresses take over. How we’ve gotten lazy in our faith, family time, and other areas of our lives that used to supply the greatest meaning. Many of us have forgotten how to model virtues that lead to happy living. The world will always supply something to fill the space. Now, we have much bigger messes to clean up.

Theater goers seeing Monster Summer will find a fall flick with the power of a summer blockbuster. For those of us who take our teens to see the film, it might also provide inspiration to make much-needed adjustments in our lives that can help save our kids from the real monsters in our midst.

Mary Rose Somarriba is editor-in-chief of Verily Magazine. Through uplifting, beautiful women’s media, Verily helps women feel more in touch with their best selves and live authentic lives. Subscribe and join our mission at verilymag.com.