The Nerve to Believe in Our Kids

The Huffington Post:

Last night my teenage daughter and I watched a thriller called Nerve, a new movie starring Emma Roberts and Dave Franco. Nerve portrays a world where young people chase after instafame by completing dares while a virtual audience watches. It also explores themes such as loss of privacy on social media and with games like Pokemon Go, and it shows how the online crowd veiled in anonymity can bring out bile, hate and shame.

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The movie eerily echoed the implications of research that my colleague Patricia Greenfield and I conducted at UCLA; these studies indicated that fame obsession had become part of the sociocultural environment of adolescents. And indeed, my daughter loved the film; it spoke to her in a way that resonated with her experience. But her passion for the narrative wasn’t the story of the high-tech game that made players famous as they broadcast their risky behavior. Rather, she identified deeply with the young heroine, a teenage girl, who was grappling with the transition to adulthood as she contemplated leaving home to follow her passions. In short, the classic coming-of-age story.

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post