Ep. 94: Teen Love & Snapchat

[Music] welcome to the teen Life podcast where we believe that teenagers are not a problem to be solved but we’re here to help you equip teenagers through the power of connection hey guys this is Chris Roby and over across from me on this Valentine’s Day is Carly Duke hello hello my favorite holiday is it really no it’s not it’s it’s um it’s met with a huge meh around the Ruby house um we feel like it’s one of those really made up holidays and um but I know a lot of people think this is a huge deal so I think it’s cute when

you’re like in elementary school like my little kids love it because they get the Valentines and they get to wear cute funny clothes and like that stuff is fun but I don’t know as you hit like even maybe even a teenager it comes with all this pressure I don’t know it’s not near as fun no you’re right my my first grader is pretty hyped about it and has been talking about it for weeks and so um um yeah it’s a big deal for I guess Elementary age but also I do I do believe that in in teenage uh and teenage land this is uh this is still a

subjective even if it’s celebrated ironically um it is still something to be talked about I feel like it has to just be like celebrated with candy and cheesy stuffed animals and what’s something cheap I can buy or it’s met with um yeah I’m not going to get a girlfriend yet because that means I have to do something for Valentine’s so we’ll wait after oh yeah yeah and I just wonder if it’s kind of a filler holiday I mean there’s not there’s not much going on this time of year it’s kind of February is the August of winter and so there’s

just not much happening so let’s let’s cram this in but I do like I said I do believe this is something that um if nothing else is just kind of celebrated for fun but it also is a great opportunity to bring up the topic of relationships especially teenage relationships and uh and what does love look like for an adolescent yeah I think we’ve had I know last year me and Tobin talked about Valentine’s Day and then I also think me and you Chris have had a conversation about dating for teenagers and like kind of how you can go about that we talked about dating at school even but I kind of wanted to tackle this bigger idea of like is Teen Love real mm-hmm like I think you hear teenagers say I love you or that they’re in love and I think as adults it’s easy to be like you have no idea what you’re talking about yeah it’s easy to blow that off yeah and so I wanted to have a conversation about that because I think it’s worth talking about but I also don’t think that it’s worth like just dismissing teenagers either if you think back to like when you were a teenager those feelings were real even if they didn’t end up staying long-term Maybe yeah I think a lot about you know getting a little bit older and you know you know when I go back to being younger and you know and having you know a body that doesn’t break down as easy and um all those kinds of things but I also think about those years of being a teenager and having being slow so clueless when it came to relationships and so insecure and um just what a source of stress that was um and uh but also you know because when you’re that age as an adolescent you’re you know coming into your own and figuring yourself out but also figures out yourself in the context of relationships and what is what is a romantic relationship look like do I you know so from a societal standpoint am I obligated um you know how deep does this go and how can just how truly confusing it can be when you don’t really have a lot of frame of reference of what that looks like when you get in your 20s and 30s if you’re you know still in that dating pool you have more years of experience to lean on but for teenagers this is brand new right and can be really really confusing and so worth the conversation as a helper well and I think even the conversation of like is it love or is it lust can come into play for teenagers because they maybe haven’t had either before and it’s real easy I feel like in the beginning to get those confused of lust obviously is a more physical attraction but it tends to be more fleeting where love is typically more of an emotional connection like deep care for another person and obviously teenagers have loved friends or have loved family members but when you’re bringing in this other person it’s real easy sometimes to get caught up in the like I really like them this is fun this is new I must love them right um and not kind of see the difference I did of course caress you know I’m coming with some stats I won’t do too many but according to a report from the CDC marriages that occur at the age of 18 or younger have a 10 probability of breaking up after just one year and then that likelihood increases to 29 after five years so like in comparison to um a little bit older marriages like eight between the ages of 20 to 25 which is still pretty young six percent of those get a divorce after one year and 17 end up like ending their marriage after five years so the probability of ending in a divorce is a little higher if you get married in your teenage years but that also I don’t know when I see that said I’m like that’s not too bad I mean it seems like this should be higher yeah and so I think that’s interesting now the same report also said that the average study romantic relationship in high school lasts six months for a 16 year old and about a year for 17 to 18 year olds and so you can kind of see that these relationships they’re not necessarily always fleeting but they’re still not lasting like two three four five years but I know lots of people who met when they were in middle school or high school and got married and are still together and have a family and I can’t see and I think that’s how when stats like this I hit us differently because I’m I’m kind of the opposite I don’t actually have a lot of friends who met in their high school years who who stuck together or if they did um ended up staying together for the long term and so so you you I know like in my experience when I hear about like a a high school relationship um and I’m a few years older than you and so there’s there’s some of that at play um but it’s it is more rare for me at this point in my life to hear about that it’s almost like oh that’s really cool and I haven’t I haven’t heard about that you know those kind of things in a long time um and so yeah I think I think it all depends on our experience when we when we see stats like that right and I think I feel like we’ve talked about this in our other episodes too but teenage love I think can it’s as I said at the beginning it’s easy to dismiss it it’s easy to say there’s no way you love him or her it’s easy to try to get between that and be like no no dating in high school but I think we also have to see it as like can we turn this into a positive like how can we help teenagers learn through them trying to figure out what love is without being judgmental or without them feeling like I can’t talk to an adult about this because they’re just going to tell me it’s not real or they’re going to tell me I told you so when we break up and so kind of being open to that conversation so I had a few ideas the first one is even if they’re in a relationship like help them focus on what they can do to learn and work on themselves like even if it doesn’t work out every relationship can teach them something every relationship can teach them maybe what they don’t want maybe what they did like about that but it also can help them of like hey did you do something in that relationship that maybe caused it to fall apart and what could we do better next time or hey what were you like did you isolate yourself from your friends and let’s talk about that and what can we do moving forward yeah I think it goes upon probably the correct assumption that that relationship um unless it’s really really unique and really really special um probably isn’t going to be the most uh stable um with with adolescence there’s going to be some drama that wouldn’t exist otherwise and an older relationship um and just a lot of insecurities honestly um and so be able to to focus on what you can control um as an adolescent in the middle of a relationship that might not matter might not work out and it might not even be in the big scheme of things important if it does um to to say okay what how how am I going to be better no matter how this works out because relationships you know or that Proving Ground of who you are in a lot in a lot of ways and so as I had a lesson to be able to say what you know how can I get better through this even if it doesn’t work out I think it’s super super healthy right I think it’s also important to celebrate healthy connection it’s like obviously if you’re a parent and you have a teenager in your home make sure you have boundaries in place to protect them while they’re still in your home but it’s okay for them to explore that and be like hey this is a healthy relationship for you or this is something new and have lots of conversations about that I’ve I know I’ve said this before but I’m going to say it again because it’s worth repeating I just really feel like as a parent I know I don’t have a teenager yet but when my kids get there I would rather them date for the first time in my house than go off to college or go into the workforce and date for the first time and not have us around to kind of help guide them or ask questions or bounce stuff off of and so I just think there has to be a time to be like okay we’re going to celebrate this and we’re going to talk about this instead of making it feel icky or like they don’t want to talk to anyone about it yeah I think um if if that is a goal for you as a parent or a helper um that you address your own uh issues with with dating or your your own story before you go into this because so much of your own package can go into this um if you had unhealthy relationships or if you you know if High School dating really was a train wreck for you um is to be able to be mindful of that as you are reflecting upon those things with your with your teenager because in the midst of all this your responsibility still is to be the steady one and to be the one who uh can be dependent on to to be as objective as you can even though you’re probably not um and so just not just being aware of your own your own garbage I think is going to be huge with that because you know our last thing is that we want to encourage them to stay balanced and all of this and so if you’re not balanced as a helper if you’re coming in biased if you’re coming in with assumptions this is just going to crash and burn then it’s going to be hard for them to stay balanced as well and so encourage them to stay balanced through all this that it’s easy to dive headlong into what you feel like is you know the the the true love of your life um and just understand that that’s that’s the teenage perspective and they’ve not experienced anything else and so with that you know you as an adult knowing that there’s there’s healthy boundaries in all relationships and to stay balanced to make sure that they keep their friends um that they don’t um go isolated with this one individual and to make sure that they do have fun through all of it hmm for the trend this week Chris it is finally time to talk Snapchat again how long has it been seven years all right since me and Chris have talked about Snapchat on a podcast so I will link it we in the very early days of the Teen Life podcast it wasn’t even called the teen Life podcast at that time we did a full episode on Snapchat of like the history behind it and maybe some more details if you would like a more broad scope of what Snapchat is that’s probably a good place to start now obviously it was seven years ago so if you want to hear baby Chris and baby Carly talking on a podcast for one of the first times um I I’m not going to go back and listen to that because I don’t really need that kind of uh insecurity in my life but it is still on the internet I know it has I almost hesitate to put that link out there because that means people might listen to it but if you’re like I just still don’t understand Snapchat and I need more that might be a good place to go but obviously some things have changed not like the overall goal of the app hasn’t changed and so so it’s still pretty relevant I think but that’s a good place to start but today we did want to take some time to talk about it because it is still popular and Chris even said before we recorded he was like I never would have guessed that this would still be around I mean it is hanging strong in the fact that teenagers are still on it all the time is fascinating to me so if you don’t know what Snapchat is welcome to the conversation surely you’ve heard of it by now Snapchat is a popular app it lets you take videos and pictures you can add filters you can add text effects and then you can send them to friends and the whole design is that it will disappear after you viewed it so unlike other social media platforms where stuff stays around on your feed this think like Instagram stories so you can post a Snapchat story that will disappear in 24 hours or you can send it to a friend and you can set a timer so it could disappear after 30 seconds or a minute and so once they open it they have that time to look at it and then it’ll go away and this feature of the disappearing pictures of media um before Snapchat um what’s like when Snapchat came around this is a big deal yeah um as I remember there’s a there’s a lot of a lot of research on it because you know stat snap on and make it seem like you know you you it’s just kind of disappears it’s like never happened and it lured people into doing some irresponsible things um and there’s a lot of anxiety about it becoming a sexting app which we’ll talk about in a second um but um this was this was pretty early on but now this is a little bit more built into other social media platforms but this was kind of the first to do that yeah and so if you are signing up all you need is a name an email address or phone number and your birth date you do have to be 13 to sign up but they don’t verify that so obviously a younger teenager who or a younger kid who has a phone and wants to put a different birthday in can get around that so that’s just something to know now to add friends you upload your contacts or you can search for people you know and so that’s kind of how people are finding each other you can send snaps to anyone on your friends list you can send it to a specific group so I know lots of people that have like a friend group that they just send snaps to each other all day or you can add it like I said to a story where it’s visible for 24 hours to anyone that you’re friends with instead of specific people now I figured Chris maybe it would help to do like some q a some like here are maybe some questions that parents might have or adults might have and then we could talk through them so the first one is does it really disappear all right that’s the big one yeah in theory yes like I said you set a time limit but friends can take screenshots of anything you send now you get notified of someone screenshots your snap on their phone however I did look into it and there are third-party apps that won’t trigger a notification um so if there is a teenager who really wants to get around that they can and I think that’s just where I know Chris even said this sometimes it gets the rap of being a sexting app but that is where it can be dangerous because teenagers might think well it’s just going to disappear it doesn’t matter and that’s not necessarily true well just in the digital world that’s not how things work and even if this workaround didn’t happen there’s a lot you can Google all kinds of uh uh of just kind of the technical side of how all this works how nothing really ever disappears it it transfers to a thousand different places before it technically disappears and so um it’s just if the idea is I can do whatever I want on here and then we’ll oversee it’s probably uh probably misguided my next question is what is snap map and what is snap Mac Harley this is gonna from here out I’m gonna be learning from you I love it so snap Matt is surely new since we recorded the original episode but this displays your location on a map in real time so if in theory only your Snapchat friends can see where you are if your friends have also opted into snapmat you can see where they are you can see where they were when they took snaps so that you’re saying geographically this is where geographically okay yes like this pinpoints your location think like find my friends in an app so you can pull up a map and see where all your friends are which for friends sounds fun but I don’t know for teenagers that just like always makes me nervous if people can find where you are and you can turn it off you can put it in ghost mode which allows you to see the map but people can’t see where you are so if you’re curious but don’t want people to know where you are I am going to highly highly recommend if your teenager has Snapchat to talk to them about this and encourage them to at least go into ghost mode um I just think I we’ll talk about this in a little bit but there obviously is a chance that someone could be their friend on Snapchat that they don’t know in real life and then they have access to their location at all times and so it’s just something to think about and something that seems really fun but could also be dangerous now what are snap streaks do you know what these are Chris I mean if it’s a streak I would imagine it was something consecutive order but I don’t know how often or yeah yeah so snap streak represents how many consecutive days friends have snapped each other so to get it like if me and Chris wanted a streak I would have to send one to Chris and he would have to send one back within 24 hours gotcha and so that’s how the snap streak continues you can you get special emojis when you hit certain streaks you get stats for how long the stat streak has lasted and it’s really fascinating because this competition aspect is what keeps teens coming back look I think this is one of the main reasons that Snapchat is so successful because teenagers will have this year-long snap streak and they’re not going to break it they’re going to continue to get on because now it’s competitive and I’ve even heard of and like saw when I was doing research sometimes they will give other people access to their account like for example if they’re going on a trip and we’ll have internet access for a week they might give a friend their login so that they can keep their snap streaks alive and so it’s a big enough deal that it becomes yeah it’s a brilliant way of driving engagement in your in your system is awarding emojis that no one else has and so right um no that’s brilliant and it’s uh it’s a really great um it’s a great way as a parent to know you know how how are these you know how is maybe some of the whys behind um why is our my teenager on this all the time um and uh you know a Snapchat there’s nothing inherently wrong about that I mean it’s once a day I mean it’s you know but it it it could it shows you how Innovative and creative these uh companies are of keeping engagement high on a daily basis user engagement highs that’s what they want right now my final question is and this is a big one is Snapchat safe okay so I will say Most teens use it to connect with their friends in a goofy innocent way most of your teens probably aren’t using this hopefully negatively but there are risky areas that you need to be aware of that they need to be aware of we’ve kind of mentioned some of them but this myth of Disappearing content kind of comes back to it was originally called the sexting app because pictures and videos would disappear many kids and stuff over Snapchat that they wouldn’t Post in other apps because they believe it’s safer and they think I won’t get caught even if someone looks at it it’s going to go away and they won’t have time to do anything about it and so that can be unsafe and scary because like I said there are ways to get around that and even ways to get around that that you wouldn’t know that someone took a screenshot of that and then could be sending it to other people right now another one that this kind of comes back to the streaks like we were talking about Chris it’s a huge time distraction so streaks notifications can draw teens into using the app and make it feel like they have to get on which can even sometimes I feel like lead to this pressure of like it’s not even fun anymore it’s just something I have to do every single day because it’s what I’ve always done and we’ll get to we’ll get to some of these you know the these pitfalls of the of this app um we’ll we’ll lead to some deeper questions just about social media and digital world in general which we’ll get to in a second but I think it’s these are these are really great points yeah and then finally safety and privacy it’s easy to add friends so you could add someone you don’t actually know or maybe someone you met online but don’t know in real life depending on your settings this app can collect a lot of data about you about your habits about what you’re doing outside the app they also work with a lot of third parties that share your data and so I know this is something that’s been talked about but a lot of times teenagers don’t think about that they’re the product we’ve talked about that on this podcast even but have conversations with them and I don’t know if I can get into all the questions that I mean there are a million questions you can ask your teenager about Snapchat but if your teen has Snapchat be asking questions if even things like hey do you believe Snapchat’s safer because the content disappears have you ever taken a screenshot of something or has someone take us taken a screenshot of something you’ve shared how did that make you feel I think it’s really interesting to have these conversations um even down to if you felt pressured to send something inappropriate through Snapchat and we’ll we’ll list all these questions in the notes as well some ways that you can engage your teenager on Snapchat for the tip Chris I do want to stay on Snapchat just a little bit longer because this is something that was sent to me um Kelly fan actually sent it to me and she saw it on Facebook and so I’ll post the original link if you want to go look at his post it came from an officer I believe but Snapchat has a secret Photo Vault that kids can use to hide pictures that they might not want adults to see so these could be sexually explicit they could be involving drugs partying stuff like that it could just be a really ugly picture of themselves so it doesn’t necessarily have to be all those things but it is worth having a conversation about looking into like I said I’ll post a link with more details but like when you get into the Snapchat application you can get into like in the bottom there’s a small icon that looks like two playing cards if you press that it’ll take you to their memory photos and that’s where you’ll see things like snaps camera rolls memories and then there’s a tab called my eyes only and so the my eyes only it if it pops up with a pin that means your child has been using it I believe don’t quote me on that because I suppose it could do that for anyone but that means that they’ve set up a PIN number and so you’d have to have their pin to get into that and then um once you do that you’ll see the photos that they have been hiding I think we’ve even talked about this there are lots of apps that do this this is not the only one but um you might just talk to your teenager about that or be like hey did you know that this was on there have you used it do you know anyone that uses it um just kind of asking questions and not pointing the blame yet but it could be an interesting find if you get on there and see it okay with that this podcast is a wrap if you enjoyed this podcast or the content in it uh subscribe to us make sure that you know every single week on Tuesdays the new episode drops year round follow us on social media all of our great Channels with great content which some of this you heard came straight from our social media content so follow us there uh text this episode to a friend if this is a helpful episode for you and 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