Emilie Silverwood-Cope: Feeling bored, lonely and misunderstood is a teen rite of passage

He’s done the maths and thinks we need AI friends and he added (revealing who is the likely market) AI girlfriends.

“Is this going to replace real life connections?” he asks. “My answer to that is probably no. The reality is people don’t have the connection and feel more alone than they would like.”

Let’s park the idea that Mark Zuckerberg is a relationship expert (what next, Prince Andrew giving PR advice?) and focus on loneliness, friendships and our children. Annoyingly, Zuckerberg raises an important parenting issue.

UK children are experiencing higher rates of loneliness, with some studies indicating that around 45 per cent feel lonely ‘often or some of the time’. According to a recent report by the NSPCC more children are contacting Childline to talk about feeling lonely. Like their US counterparts, teenagers in the UK are spending less time IRL (in real life) with their peer group and more time online. Sharp minds reading this might see a cause and effect here.

Feeling bored, lonely, disconnected and misunderstood is a teen rite of passage. Back in my day (the 1980s) there was ‘nothing to do and nowhere to go’. Those complicated years between childhood and adulthood, when we were too old for the park and too young for the pub, meant we were often pretty lonely too. We had few choices, other than to write sad poetry or lie on our beds waiting for the Top 40. We were forced outside. We met in graveyards or on a bench (slim pickings in small towns), swapped mixtapes and waited for someone who may or may not have some cigarettes.

According to Stella O’Malley, child psychotherapist, and author of What your teen is trying to tell you, this behaviour is not only very normal but vital. She cautions “without this desire for adventure, teenagers would not be motivated to strike out on their own and would never leave their family of origin.” Teens need to be with their peers to learn who they are away from their annoying parents. They need to know how to make friends, fall out and repair those relationships. Perhaps most importantly they must be self-sufficient and maybe even develop the odd crush.

Giving children the freedom to do this can make parents queasy but as O’Malley goes on to say “the rise in ‘failure to launch’ among young adults is [why] risk-taking is needed”. Those young adults who’ve “failed to launch tend to stay in their bedroom well into adulthood, safe and mollycoddled”.

Lonely teens today can use their phones as a comfort blanket. Instead of their loneliness driving them outside to new friendships they can get a facsimile that works for them online. Validation and attention can come from posting and any teen who doesn’t want to (or isn’t allowed to) leave their house can get a version of a social life that works in the short term, sort of. It’s not just tech that’s to blame. Overprotective parenting, few places for children to hang out and the long tail of lockdown means lots of kids are not heading out alone. Don’t they sound like the types of people who would welcome an AI friend?

Zuckerberg’s comment is a red flag and us parents should take it seriously. If he’s got a business idea it’s because he knows there’s a growing need for it. The vaccine is letting our teens have more independence, freedom and encouraging time with their friends, and being away from us.

One last word on the happily-married father of three Zuckerberg. We are living in a two-tier technocracy. While it’s OK for our children to spend the best years of their lives having meaningless relationships with AI while Meta mines their data, I’d be willing to bet it’s not what he wants for his family.

Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.