A recent survey states that the number of children and adolescents who make use of the Internet has tripled from 8 million in 1997 to 25 million currently. The impact the use of the Internet has on the psyche of children has become highly controversial. Many children have found a great sense of excitement and connection from using the Internet. It can be an invaluable tool to improve their communication skills. Others find the Internet offensive and even dangerous. With the click of a mouse, children and adults have access to vast visual and auditory information that can lead to a wonderful learning experience. But this has the potential of becoming frightening, with many primitive images. It is like having access to the “id” of the Internet.
In my clinical work with children, my experience with the way they use the Internet has been, overall, a very positive one. Parents, on the other hand, are frequently concerned about the potential negative effects in light of the problems some children have been victim to in unmonitored chat rooms. In my work with families, when parents have had to restrict the use of Internet for inappropriate use, it invariably has stemmed from the fact that there has been poor communication between child and parent. The inappropriate activity was the children's cry for involvement from their parents, not that much different from eating disorders, suicide attempts, etc. The children unconsciously act out, hoping to fulfill their wish to have their parents listen and value their ideas.
A teenage girl came to the clinic for the treatment of her obsessive-compulsive disorder. She had seen several clinicians but had felt misunderstood by them. Her first question was, “Do you use the Internet”?
I said I used it often, and with a sigh of relief she said, “I created a Web page where I rate the sites that review medications available for OCD. Would you look at it the next time you're on?” I agreed and was surprised how well she had researched the sites. I learned that she was correct about her choice of medication for herself. She was eager to make her Web site available to other kids with OCD: “I don't want them to suffer as long as I did before they feel it's OK to talk about it.”
She would send me e-mails sharing conflicts with her parents because she felt that guilt would prevent her from sharing these matters during our weekly sessions.
It seemed similar to the analytic setting; she could associate if she did not have to see me. This gave us the opportunity to address the neurotic conflicts that were masked by her OCD symptoms. This patient has been of enormous help to many children, and she now speaks in many schools about struggling with OCD.
A rather shy twelve-year-old girl began to experiment with meeting teenagers in chat rooms. She lied to her parents about the age of the teens she met. Fortunately, her parents asked to meet personally with the teens involved. The parents were surprised to learn some of them were eighteen years old. What most shocked her parents about this activity was that their daughter was a bright student who excelled at school and whom they had no reason to suspect of dangerous behavior.
When I asked her about how she felt about her parents, she cried and said that she had felt abandoned by her mother. She did not know how to “look good like my mother” and felt her mother did not spend time with her. What emerged were issues of jealousy toward a brother with a learning disability and attentional problems that required significant amounts of the parents' time. With help, mother and daughter now spend time together exploring “very interesting Web sites” about makeup and clothes and have printed material for her father about “what fathers need to talk about with their teenage daughters.” She continues to use chat rooms, but only to talk to her family and close peers.
I was asked to help a bright latency-age boy cope with the divorce of his parents. This youngster was anxious and guilty because, several months after the divorce, his father had emergency bypass surgery. He wondered if it had happened because he had not agreed to live with his father. After several months of working on his guilt and conflicts with oedipal issues, the boy improved.
During our sessions, he told me his father refused to let him use the Internet because he feared he would misuse it. He felt this was unfair because he was allowed to use the Internet at school and at his mother's home. In one session I noticed he looked preoccupied, which was usually not the case. He was angry because he was extremely disappointed in his father and did not know “what to do about it.” He had walked into their home office and was shocked to see his father “looking at pornographic stuff. He has no respect for women, like my mother and stepmother.” Needless to say, this reawakened many oedipal struggles, which we worked with in treatment.
A teenage male was hospitalized for suicidal ideation and had been cutting his arms with a razor blade when he was upset with his parents. After a year of therapeutic work, he felt ready to go to college and had received a good scholarship to a private college several hours away. We had to reduce our sessions to once a month. We agreed that he could also send weekly e-mails, which helped him put in writing “the urge to cut on myself when I felt so lonely” rather than acting on it.
When children have a relatively healthy ego and family life, the use of the Internet is generally positive. On the other hand, children's abuses of the Internet usually reflect a conflicted relationship with their parents. Occasionally children are seduced by the accessibility of “neat stuff.” Parents should be active in reviewing sites their children like to access. This is not only to establish controls in order to prevent the delivery of offensive and inappropriate information to their children, but also to know what children get excited about.
Parents are proud to listen to their children's ideas or to watch them play sports or a musical instrument. We should also feel proud learning about their accomplishments in cyberspace.
Sergio V. Delgado, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst, child supervising analyst, and chair of the Child Analytic Program of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is on the faculty of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry at the Menninger Clinic.