Summary
Why do children sometimes say things online they would never say face to face?
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you’ll learn why social media can make behaviour escalate so quickly - and why it’s not simply about children being unkind.
Drawing on psychology and real-world school experience, we explain how social media and messaging apps remove the natural feedback that helps children regulate their behaviour - and why that’s important.
You’ll come away with a brain-based framework to understand online cruelty in children that you can share with staff and parents - and ideas for supporting children to slow down and make better choices on social media.
Important links:
Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources.php
Share this podcast with your friends:
Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
Have you ever read a message a child has written online and thought, "Where on earth did that come from?" A message that was genuinely cruel, or awful, or unkind, that's been directed to someone they know in school. And what's worse is, you know that same child in real life. They're kind, they're thoughtful, they're funny. And the gap between who they are and what they wrote can be genuinely shocking.
In today's episode, I'm going to explain why that happens and why social media doesn't actually create cruelty, but it does remove the guardrails that normally keep that kind of behaviour in check. Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and for over 20 years I've worked with schools supporting children who have difficulty with escalating behaviour and regulating their emotions. And this is one of those patterns that makes sense once you understand what's really going on in their brains in a nuanced way. Meaning by the end of the episode, you're going to have a clear, brain-based explanation about cruelty on social media you can use with staff and parents and students and have a better idea of what actually helps, rather than just reacting after the damage is done.
Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and this week I've mostly been thinking about who would win a fight between a squirrel and the concept of melancholy. Like, doing some really deep philosophical work on it, and then I got bored and had some Jack Daniels and played on my PlayStation. That's my week.
This week we're going to look at psychologically why kids and humans, really all humans, can be so cruel on social media and messaging apps, which is in the news a lot right now. And I'm going to leave you with some practical takeaways and strategies to use with the students that you work with.
Before I get to that, I'd just like to ask if you're finding this podcast helpful, do please spend just 30 seconds leaving me a rating or review. That tells the podcasting apps to share the show with other listeners, other teachers, other school leaders, and other parents who might find these strategies useful. It's the quickest and easiest way of supporting the show.
And if you're a school leader and there are ideas in today's episodes that you think would be helpful for your staff to hear, feel free to share excerpts of the show in your staff meetings to prompt discussion. We're more than happy for you to clip out parts and do that.
Okay, let's open our mouths as wide as possible and start chewing on the sandwich filling of today's topic, which is the way kids message and behave on social media. I've read messages online written by children that have made my stomach drop. Not because they were badly written, not because they were immature, but because they were just so cruel. And written by kids who normally are totally pleasant people. And that cruelness really didn't reflect who they were as human beings.
So the question I want to explore today isn't why are kids so horrible to each other online. It's this: what changes in kids' behaviour and the way they express themselves once they move onto a screen? And just so you know, I'm going to use the terms social media and messaging apps interchangeably here because what I'm going to say will apply to both, and it will also apply to contexts like PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, where kids are communicating with each other online while they play games.
We tend to talk about online behaviour in moral terms. We tend to say things like kids need to be kinder, or they should think before they post, or they need to understand the impact of their words on the other person. All of which, by the way, applies to adults when they're engaging on social media who are often terrible role models. And all of that is true. Those kids and those adults do need to be kinder. They do need to think before they post. They do need to think about the impact their words are going to have on the other person.
But that way of thinking isn't complete because it skips over something really important. The environment of social media matters. It doesn't just host that behaviour. It literally shapes it. It changes how we're likely to interact with each other. So in a nutshell, here's the core idea that's going to run all the way through this episode. It's not that social media makes kids cruel. As a technology, it's neutral in that respect. But what it does do is it removes the brakes that might hold them back from saying something unpleasant. And we're going to look at that from a brain-based psychological perspective.
So let me explain what I mean by that a little bit more. In our face-to-face interactions in the real world, our behaviour is constantly being regulated by the feedback that we're getting from other people. So if we're in a conversation and we say something and we see the other person's expression change, or the tone of their voice changes in response to our words, or maybe there's an awkward silence when we tell a joke and it doesn't quite work, or they take an ironic comment the wrong way, we know something has gone wrong.
And our brain responds to that feedback automatically. We have mirror neurons that mirror the emotions the other person is feeling. And we have social skills that can inform what's not gone right. We can infer the other person's response to our words. And as a result of all that information and all that feedback, we might want to then soften what we just said with a qualifying sentence, or to backtrack, or to say sorry, or to give more explanation, whatever is appropriate in that situation. We say something, then we get feedback in terms of the emotional impact of our words on the other person.
And those feelings we experience in our bodies as a result of our actions, well, they act like a brake on our behaviour. They slow us down because if we do say something awful to the person in front of us, we get to see the damage we have done in real life. We experience it. We feel the other person's pain. And that probably makes us feel bad about what we've done. We feel guilty. We can see the impact on their feelings. That gives us a real reason not to be unkind to other people.
Now, think about what happens online. When you send a message, let's say an unkind message, there's no eye contact. There's no facial expression showing the other person's pain. So internally, you write the message, you drop your bomb, but then you don't get that immediate emotional response from seeing the other person. So your empathy doesn't get a chance to kick in because the other person, they're not present. You can't see the damage you've done to them.
So when a child types something angry or sarcastic or cutting or just cruel, their brain then doesn't have to cope with the emotional consequences of doing that in the moment. So they don't experience the negative side of being unpleasant. Not because they're bad people or because morally they're lacking in some sense, but because the medium itself, the feedback, has been taken away. And that's the thing that normally helps all of us regulate what we say to other people. You no longer feel bad for saying bad things because there are no negative consequences for you.
Just quickly, as an aside, if you're working with children who find social interactions difficult more generally, not just online, we've put together a free resource that might help called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. It's a resource that helps you link classroom behaviour, which might include misreading social cues with underlying causes like ADHD or trauma or autism. Plus, it comes with a set of fact sheets on a range of conditions, including practical strategies you can use to support your kids in the classroom. Its purpose is not to turn us as teachers or educators into paediatricians. It's not for us to try and make a diagnosis. But often as educators, we're the people that start to join the dots between pupil behaviour and underlying needs. And this guide is designed to help you join those dots more quickly so you can get the right professionals involved. We can kick off early intervention, and we can support our kids more effectively. You can download it for free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. You'll see it at the top of the page, or I will put a direct link in the show notes, and then you can tap straight through and download your very own free copy.
Anyway, back to the point. Saying something bad and not having to experience the damage. Just think for a moment about how that impacts on children and young people whose emotional and social regulation systems are still developing. And don't forget they develop into the early 20s when their impulse control is still developing, meaning their ability to pause and reflect and repair conversations that have gone wrong is still developing. They're going to be much less able to regulate their behaviour on messaging apps. Adults, to a greater extent, are more able to visualise the harm that their words are going to cause when they hit the send button. But with kids and teenagers, less so.
And then with those less developed social skills and emotional skills and regulation skills, what we do is we hand them social media apps that are designed for speed, designed for instant gratification, instant reaction, that actively amplify negative posts and comments because it keeps people on the app, because they're more likely to read and pay attention to them than good news stories. So what's the result? They have an impulse to say something bad because someone's upset them in their class. They write it, they send it, they post it. There's no pause, and there's no reflection.
There's an old piece of advice I think's relevant here that often I think gets attributed to historical figures like George Washington, but you'll see versions of this linked to different people. It goes something like this: If you're angry with someone, don't tell them to their face. Write them a letter. And in that letter, you say everything you want to say. You get out all your feelings. But what you don't do is you don't send the letter. When you've written it, you put it away in a drawer, and you leave it there for at least two days. And then when you come back to it, if sending that letter feels like a bad idea, tear it up.
What that advice really gets is this: that time creates a space for you to regulate your thoughts and emotions and get some perspective on the thing that's upset you. The delay, the two days, allows the thinking part of your brain to catch up with the emotional part of your brain. Now, of course, we live in a world where no one really writes letters anymore. And I'm not saying that we should start, even if that means I've got no chance of getting that lucrative sponsorship deal with the post office I've been chasing. But think about what social media does in that context for the moment, right? It does the opposite of this. It kind of shortens. It compresses your time. So you feel the emotion. You type the message, you hit send, done, bomb dropped, damage done, and you never have to witness it. There's no calling-off period, no space for perspective, no opportunity for the brakes to kick in emotionally.
In other words, it takes that unsent letter, what you are feeling in the moment, which might not reflect your true thoughts and feelings given time, and turns it into a public post. And then all the other kids do the same in reaction to that post. And once you see it that way, a lot of things start to make sense. Why pile-ons happen so quickly onto those messages? Why comments then get worse instead of the argument finding a resolution? Why children say things online they would never say face-to-face to another human being? And this is also why some of our usual responses don't work as well as we'd hoped in school. Things like, you know, assemblies about being kind online, posters about respectful communication, sanctions after the damage is done. Those things, they focus on the outcome. But what they don't address is how this is a fundamentally different way of communicating. And if we don't respond to that difference, that change, we end up asking children to show a level of self-control that the environment of those apps actively undermines.
So what does this mean for schools and for teachers and for school leaders? Well, first of all, it means we need to stop treating online cruelty as a morality or a character issue. Most of the time, actually, it's not. It's kids reacting in a place that strips away the brakes and the feedback. So the guardrails that would normally hold back their reactions have been removed. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be consequences for behaving badly online, trolling other people, abuse, that sort of thing. I'm not condoning that, but I think it does mean consequences on their own are unlikely to fix the problem by themselves.
Secondly, it means adult modelling matters more than we think. The way adults communicate online in emails, in group messages, in social media, in parental communications, that sets a tone. And as parents and as teachers, sharing examples of messages that we've seen and talking through what a good response would be for that, or what was going through a person's head when they wrote an unkind message, and how we think we got it wrong can be really powerful. Examples from real life. So I'm not suggesting that we take examples from students in class that have got them wrong, but we take samples from wider social media. And this sounds harsh, right? But in social media, if someone was happy to publicly post their vitriol, then let's take that as an opportunity to use it as a lesson to show our kids how not to do it and think through how to react in those situations for themselves in the future before they're writing that vitriol.
Thirdly, it means we need to teach the why, not just the rule. When children understand that online spaces remove that emotional feedback, they remove the emotional brakes, they stop us seeing the impact of our words. We talk them through what's happening because often, you know, they're very interested in how their brains work, and they're interested in psychology. When we explain the why behind what's happening, they're more likely then to pause before they post. You can say things like, "When you post online, your brain doesn't get the same signals it would in person. That makes it harder to stop yourself." And then you talk it through giving examples.
That's not excusing behaviour. That's explaining it. And that discussion then opens up the opportunity for them to give their thoughts about how to move things forward that are practical from their point of view when they're in that situation in the future. Fourthly, we need to help children reinsert that pause before they post. And no, I'm not saying they should write it in a letter and keep it in a drawer. But maybe we should encourage them to practice just habitually for everything, encouraging them to draft a reply and wait before posting it, normalising stepping away from something they've found provoking or triggering before they respond. And then add some context to this.
Talk them through and say, "Look, adults do this badly. Don't be like the adults." And let's reframe not replying yet as a strength, not a weakness. Another way of looking at this is we're teaching regulation skills for social media. And finally, it means recognising that we can't police the internet. Schools don't control devices, platforms, or algorithms. The law in the future looks like it may try to, but they're going to find their way around it.
Kids can use VPNs. They can access social media through fake accounts and fake date of births. But what we can do is help our students understand how those systems affect them personally and how the way they use those devices can be in line with the person that they want to be or are in misalignment with the person that they would like to be. And that's far more powerful tapping into their identity than pretending that we can just stop online behaviour altogether because the kids are going to be out there. They're going to be using those apps. So we need to get them ready for a world in the future as adults where they're interacting. So here's the question that I want to leave you with today.
If delay helps adults regulate anger, and we know that it does, what happens when children are given apps that are designed for speed and reward instant feedback rather than pausing and reflecting? Social media doesn't create cruelty exactly, but without seeing the damage your words have done on the other person's face and body language and through their voice, it makes cruelty far easier to engage in. In the moment, it feels consequence-free. That's not a moral failing on our children's part. That's a design problem with the apps. And maybe I'm being a bit idealistic here. I appreciate that.
But that makes our job as teachers and adults to help children see the flaws in that design and adapt to it, not just punish them when it goes wrong. If you found today's episode helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe to School Behaviour Secrets and leave a quick rating or review on your podcast app. It genuinely helps more teachers and school leaders find the podcast and keeps these conversations going. And if I've touched a raw nerve, maybe in a twist of irony, send me a blast on social media and tell me how naive and what a bad person I am. And if you're going to do that, I'd prefer it if you did it on X or Twitter as it was because I never look at that account anyway. Anyway, I hope you have a great week. And thank you for listening to School Behaviour Secrets.
I can't wait to see you next time. Bye for now.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
