Generation Z

What It's Like to Grow up in the Age of Likes, LOLs, and Longing

The Washington Post

Copyright

Diversion Books
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Copyright © 2016 by The Washington Post
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First Diversion Books edition October 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68230-888-2

Table of Contents

Introduction

13, right now

Who are these kids?

And everyone saw it.

‘They call it bunny hunting’

The Disconnected

‘What’s a tbh?’

More from The Washington Post…

Connect with Diversion Books

Introduction

The kids of Generation Z are the first true digital natives, the ones who have never known a world without smartphones and tablets and social media. For many of them, their online exposure begins at birth. Their baby photos are posted on Facebook. They learn to swipe at the same time they learn to speak.

Every generation experiences advances in technology, while the broader society debates the consequences. But researchers have found that the shift experienced by today’s teens is unprecedented. Every facet of their lives — education, friendship, romance, careers — will be shaped by the technology in their hands. We wanted to understand exactly what it means to grow up in this new era — and wanted to understand it through their eyes.

What does it feel like when your childhood friendships are shaped by Instagram, texting and Snapchat? What does it mean when your first sexual interaction with a crush happens through a phone? What are the consequences when your homework assignments are online, but you don’t have WiFi or a computer at home? And how will these kids — whose formative years are so different from the generations before them — transform our society?

So we started talking to tweens and teens — a lot of them. We found the childhoods they described seemed entirely different than our own:

“We haven’t really existed in a world where social media isn’t a thing.”

“I first got my phone when I was in fifth grade, for Christmas.”

“You really have to be careful what you say, because screenshots — screenshots are the worst thing.”

“My parents are always telling me to put my phone down.”

“Instagram makes you think about followers, whether you’re popular. It’s for comparing people’s lives.”

“I don’t like Facebook. I’m afraid that my mom’s friends would friend request me.”

“At the end of sixth grade, I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

We hope these stories illuminate what it’s like to be a kid in 2016. Whether you are one, know one, or want to raise one, the members of this generation will come to shape the world.

By Jessica Contrera and Caitlin Gibson

13, right now

This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing

Story by Jessica Contrera
Photos by Victoria Milko

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She says hello. Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?”

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine Pommerening in the front seat of her family’s station wagon. Katherine was born in 2002, meaning she is a member of what’s being called Generation Z.

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too. She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it. She’s on it while her 8-year-old sister, Lila, is building crafts out of beads. She sets it down to play basketball, to skateboard, to watch PG-13 comedies and sometimes to eat dinner, but when she picks it back up, she might have 64 unread messages.

Now she’s on it in the living room of her big house in McLean, Va., while she explains what it’s like to be a 13-year-old today.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

“I decide the pictures that look good,” she says. “Ones with my friends, ones that are a really nice-looking picture.”

Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable. Counselors are prying them out of Internet addictions. Parents are trying to catch up by friending their kids on Facebook. (P.S. Facebook is obsolete.) Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts – everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

Katherine at her house, playing Xbox (top left), in the kitchen with her au pair Rachel and 8-year-old sister, Lila, (top right) and outside with her skateboard (bottom.) Katherine got her first phone in the fifth grade.

Right now, Katherine is still looking down.

“See this girl,” she says, “she gets so many likes on her pictures because she’s posted over nine pictures saying, ‘Like all my pictures for a tbh, comment when done.’ So everyone will like her pictures, and she’ll just give them a simple tbh.”

A tbh is a compliment. It stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.”

Katherine tosses her long brown hair behind her shoulder and ignores her black lab, Lucy, who is barking to be let out.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

Tbh, Katherine is both nice and pretty. She has the cheeks of a middle schooler and the vocabulary of a high schooler. She has light brown eyes, which she only paints with makeup for dances, where there are boys from other schools. Her family is wealthier than most and has seen more sorrow. She is 5-foot-1 but will have a growth spurt soon, or so said her dad, Dave, in a very awkward talk he had with her about puberty even after she told him, “Please, don’t.” She is not sure how Converse shoes became cool, but it’s what happened, so she is almost always wearing them. Black leggings, too, except at her private school, where she has to wear uncomfortable dress pants.

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

Now she’s on her own page, checking the comments beneath a photo of her friend Aisha, which she posted for Aisha’s birthday.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

Katherine is the point guard on her basketball team.

Rachel, Katherine’s au pair, comes into the room and tells her it’s time to get ready for basketball practice. Katherine nods, scrolling a few more times, her thumb like a high-speed pendulum. She watches Vines — six-second video clips — of NCAA basketball games while climbing the stairs to her room, which is painted cobalt blue. Blue is her favorite color. She describes most of her favorite things using “we,” meaning they are approved by both she and her friends: Jennifer Lawrence, Gigi Hadid, Sprite, quesadillas from Chipotle filled only with cheese.

Her floor is a tangle of clothes, and her bed is a tangle of cords. One for her phone, one for an iPod, one for her school laptop, and one for the laptop that used to belong to her mom, Alicia.

A pink blanket with Alicia’s name on it lies across her comforter. A black and white photo of her mom on her wedding day sits on her desk. In a frame on her nightstand, handprint art they made together one Mother’s Day. Now, Katherine’s handprints are almost as big as her mom’s were.

The breast cancer appeared right after Katherine was born. It went away, then came back when Katherine was in third grade. In fifth grade, Alicia and Dave bought Katherine a cellphone, in case things took a turn. She was one of the first in her class to own one.

She signed up for Snapchat and Instagram, Twitter and VSCO. She stopped inviting friends to the house, because her mom was there, sick.

Last year, on a cloudy Thursday in March, Alicia died. Katherine won’t talk about it, today or any day. Not talking about it means she doesn’t need to think about it, except when the house is quiet and the thinking just seeps in. She doesn’t tell her friends how it feels. When she’s asked about it, she crumples. Her shoulders hunch, her eyes well, but no tears fall on her cheeks. Please, she would say if she were reading this, go back to talking about her phone.

A photo of Katherine and her mom, Alicia, that sits in the Pommerenings’ living room. Alicia died after a long battle with breast cancer in March 2015, when Katherine was in seventh grade.

Lila can’t find her tap shoes, Rachel is sick, the dogs are waiting for breakfast, and Katherine is heading straight to the garage.

“Don’t you think you should eat something?” her dad asks, rummaging through a cabinet. “A breakfast bar?”

Katherine’s arms are crossed with her pastel pink phone case in her hand.

“I feel like you should eat something before —”

“I’m fine,” she says.

Lila comes down the stairs, wearing shorts and complaining she’s cold.

“It’s 45 degrees out,” her dad tells her. “Do you think it’s a good idea to wear shorts today?”

He turns back to Katherine, but she’s already gone, somewhere in the house, doing something, he’s not sure what, on her phone.

Dave Pommerening wants to figure out how to get her to use it less. One month, she ate up 18 gigabytes of data. Most large plans max out at 10. He intervened and capped her at four GB.

“I don’t want to crimp it too much,” he says. “That’s something, from my perspective, I’m going to have to figure out, how to get my arms around that.”

He says that a lot. He’s a 56-year-old corporate lawyer who doesn’t know how to upload photos to his Facebook page. When he was 13, he lived only two miles away. He didn’t have a cellphone, of course, and home phones were reserved for adults. When he wanted to talk to his friends, he rode his bike to their houses. His parents expected him to play outside all day and be back by dinnertime.

Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To Dave, it seems like they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems like they’re together all the time. He tries to watch what she sends them — pictures of their family skiing, pictures of their cat Bo — but he’s not sure what her friends, or whomever she follows, is sending back.

He checks the phone bill to see who she’s called and how much she’s been texting, but she barely calls anyone and chats mostly through Snapchat, where her messages disappear. Another dad recommended that Dave use parental controls to stop Katherine from using her phone at night. He put that in place, but it seemed like as soon as he did, there was some reason he needed to switch it off.

He finds Katherine waiting in the car with two backpacks, one for her books and one for her laptop.

“What jacket are you going to wear?” he asks.

“I’m going to grab a sweater,” she says, as if she already had this plan before he asked. She heads back into the house, phone in hand, protecting it from prying eyes.

Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments.

Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like. Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.

(Left) Dave and Katherine at a park near their house. (Right) Lila, 8, stands among her crafts. Dave grew up just two miles away from where he is raising his children, but technology has made their childhoods vastly different than his own.

Or how last week, at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname and that was totally embarrassing.

Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.

Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.

Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who knows what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.

She gets back in the car with a navy blue sweater. One small parenting win for Dave. He needs to figure out what Snapchat is about. And how to be a Washington lawyer and a single parent. And how to get them to eat breakfast and brush their hair and get to school on time.

He clicks on the car’s satellite radio and changes the channel from “60s on 6” to “Hits 1,” the station he thinks Katherine and Lila like. It’s playing Justin Bieber. He pulls out of the driveway and glances over at the passenger seat. Katherine is looking out the window, headphones on.

Katherine works on her homework. All of her eighth-grade classes have an online homepage where she can access notes and homework.

One afternoon, Katherine accidentally leaves her phone in her dad’s car. She shouldn’t need it while she does her homework, but she reaches for it, momentarily forgetting it’s not next to her on the U-shaped couch.

Her feet are kicked up onto a coffee table, and her mom’s old MacBook is on her stomach. She’s working on her capstone project, a 12-page essay and presentation on a topic of her choice. At the beginning of the year, she chose “Photoshop and the media,” an examination of how women are portrayed in magazines.

She types into Google, “How to change Chrome icon.” She finds what she needs in seconds. The icon becomes pink . She flips back to the essay and copies a line into the PowerPoint presentation she will give in front of her classmates.

Photoshop affects women of all ages ranging as young as six and even to women older than 40.

Her mom used to have People magazines around the house, but now there’s only junk mail with her name still on it.

Katherine doesn’t need magazines or billboards to see computer-perfect women. They’re right on her phone, all the time, in between photos of her normal-looking friends. There’s Aisha, there’s Kendall Jenner’s butt. There’s Olivia, there’s YouTube star Jenna Marbles in lingerie.

The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel like she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Her scooter sat in the garage, covered in dust. Her stuffed animals were passed down to Lila. The wooden playground in the back yard stood empty. She kept her skateboard with neon yellow wheels, because riding it is still cool to her friends.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore,” Katherine says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Katherine switches from her essay to Instagram, which she opens in a new tab. There’s a photo of a girl who will go to Katherine’s high school climbing out of a pool. A photo of clouds above a parking lot. A poorly-lit selfie. She flips back to her essay. There’s a section about how unrealistic portrayals of women lead to teenage eating disorders.

If you aren’t thin, you aren’t attractive

Being thin is more important than being healthy

Thou shall not eat without feeling guilty

She found the words on a blog encouraging anorexia. Its pages were filled with photos of rail-thin girls and tips for how to stop yourself from eating. If she were to go looking for them, Katherine could find sites like this for bulimia, cutting, suicide – all the dangerous behaviors that are more prominent for teens who have been through trauma. She could scroll through them on her phone, looking no different than when she’s reading a BuzzFeed article.

In the past you have heard all of your teachers and parents talk about you. You are “so mature”, “intelligent”, “14 going on 45”, and you possess “so much potential”. Where has that gotten you, may I ask? Absolutely no where!

She copies and pastes some lines from the blog into her presentation. She has never dieted. But for some reason, she says, when she first found this blog, she just couldn’t seem to get it out of her head.

On the morning of her 14th birthday, Katherine wakes up to an alarm ringing on her phone. It’s 6:30 a.m. She rolls over and shuts it off in the dark.

Her grandparents, here to celebrate the end of her first year of teenagehood, are sleeping in the guest room down the hall. She can hear the dogs shuffling across the hardwood downstairs, waiting to be fed.

Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs.

They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.

Who are these kids?

Inside the race to decipher today's teens, who will transform society as we know it

Story by Caitlin Gibson

AUSTIN — A serious research session is underway in a brightly lit conference room on a quiet boulevard in this university town, and it sounds a lot like a middle school slumber party.

At the chic headquarters of the Center for Generational Kinetics, a consulting firm that analyzes the characteristics of different generations and the way they interact (hence “kinetics”), five young girls sit in a circle of Starburst-colored folding chairs. They sip from cans of sparkling water and fiddle with mini rubber balls and plastic slinkies, toys that were offered to them if they felt nervous.

The girls, ages 10 through 13, are not nervous. They are excitedly talking over one another as the adult researchers in the room, Denise Villa and Elli Denison, ask them questions about their relationship with technology. For instance: Does it ever feel overwhelming being constantly connected?

“I once opened my phone after being gone for one day, and I had 219 text messages,” 10-year-old Kiera says.

“I lost my phone for a week once, and I had three thousand messages,” 11-year-old Molly announces with a dramatic flourish.

For an hour, Villa and Denison move through a list of questions and listen carefully for any clues that may tell them more about how these girls think and behave, how their digital and daily lives intersect.

They are part of a generation — sometimes called iGen or Gen-Z — that researchers are eager to understand. Depending on whom you ask, the group includes those up to ages 18 or 20. They are the first to learn to navigate a tablet before they learned to talk, the first to conduct childhood friendships through portable devices, the first to have their births and baby photos and elementary school recitals shared on social media. They are the true “digital natives,” a label that carries profound implications for their social lives and emotional health, not to mention their minds: Studies show that constant exposure to screens changes the neural circuitry of developing brains, leading to shorter attention spans, stunted social skills and a heightened ability to multitask.

Their online personas have made them accustomed to a certain degree of attention and exposure, which may have something to do with why they seem so at ease as they talk about themselves. It also does not hurt that the two 40ish researchers, casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts, know how to talk to kids — Denison has tween daughters, and Villa was a middle- and high-school administrator.

Researchers Denise Villa, left, and Elli Denison, right, listen as teens talk about how they use their phones during a focus group.

After the session, when the group returns to the bright main office downstairs, 13 year-old Isabella shoves her fists into the pockets of her pink hoodie and surveys a wall tiled with colorful corporate logos: Hyatt, General Motors, Cheesecake Factory, Kraft, Mercedes-Benz, Marriott, the Army, dozens more.

“Are those, like, sponsors?” she asks.

“Those are our clients,” the center’s executive assistant answered.

In fact, Isabella, they are the reason you are here.

Mia, 11, checks her iPhone for a list of her most-used apps.

Different, but how?

It might seem like the same age-old dilemma: grown-ups struggling to understand Kids These Days. But there is a new sense of urgency when it comes to this generation of post-millennial teens, because they represent a significant turning point in societal evolution. Society and technology are always taking big leaps forward, and these leaps often feel alarmingly unprecedented — plenty of people predicted that television would turn us into a society of slack-jawed zombies — but many researchers agree that this generational pivot actually is unprecedented.

What does that mean for society at large? The Center for Generational Kinetics has more than 100 high-profile clients — financial institutions, restaurants, car manufacturers, fashion retailers, education groups, tourism companies, policymakers — who want to find out. And the sooner the better: This fall, the older members of Gen-Z will be able to vote for the first time (only 26 percent of them say that they trust elected officials, according to the center’s research). By 2019, tens of millions of Gen-Z’ers will enter the workforce. And by 2020, the young adults will wield roughly $3 trillion in purchasing power.

Clearly, there is money to be made mining the propensities of this group.

“People are trying to get the inside scoop on this generation,” says Jason Dorsey, the center’s co-founder and chief strategy officer. “They come to us saying, ‘We can already tell they’re different, but we don’t know how different, and we don’t know what to do about it.’ ”

Social trends, especially those driven by technology, ripple from the youngest generation to the oldest, Dorsey says. Automakers must determine what built-in technology future drivers will expect. Advertisers must realize that their target audience is watching YouTube instead of live TV. If Gen-Z’ers prefer to shop on their phones and choose to attend college online — and do not feel that it is necessary to conduct a job interview in person or work in an office building — then the broader culture must respond and adapt, he says.

Last year, the research company — which also gathers data about Baby Boomers, Gen X and millennials — launched a national survey to learn more about how Gen Z communicates and uses technology. The findings confirmed trends and illuminated a few new ones: Yes, this generation communicates almost entirely through screens and not always with actual words (GIFs, videos and emoji also do the trick). Gen-Z’ers are less idealistic and more thrifty than millennials, having grown up in the twin shadows of the recession and student debt crisis. When it comes to privacy on social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr or Twitter, the survey showed that teens are far less guarded than millennials and Gen X members. Members of Gen Z think that everyone should get a smartphone at age 13 and that it is acceptable to use it basically anywhere — at a family dinner, during a religious service, even at weddings (even their own weddings, the survey shows.)

And that is just scraping the surface. This is one national survey of 1,250 people, Denison says, and there is not a ton of research out there otherwise — Gen Z is still largely uncharted territory.

With the national survey behind it, the center planned its first focus groups with tweens and teens, using contacts in the Austin community and local schools to recruit about a dozen boys and girls with the promise of $50 for an hour or so of their time. The group is not a representative sample of the generation at large, the researchers acknowledge; for now, they are hoping to add a more personal dimension to their data.

“We just want to understand who they are, how they think, and how they’re making different decisions,” Dorsey says.

Resisting definition

But this is a particularly challenging generation to characterize. They are the most racially diverse generation in American history. They are extremely open-minded and fluid in the way they think about gender and sexuality. Because their digital movements are so trackable, they are prone to being data-mined and stereotyped — yet surveys show that they prize individuality over conformity.

“Ironically enough, the fact that so many of them think they’re so individualistic makes them like everybody else,” Dorsey notes dryly.

But even a group of mostly white, middle-class Texas kids can’t be so easily summarized. Asked if she spends most of her free time online, Kiera says: “I’d much rather read a book. Or just knit.” Offered a theoretical $1,000 to spend, 14 year-old Alex reports that he would probably buy materials to forge his own knives.

Denison, left, and Villa, right, debrief after leading three focus groups with teens and tweens.

Still, a few clear trends emerge over several hour-long focus group interviews. Most of the youths interviewed by Villa and Denison say that they spend between two and five hours a day in front of screens. The girls tend to focus their energy on texting and connecting with their friends through social apps such as Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Snapchat; the boys are more likely to lurk on Reddit and play games (many games, for many hours) on smartphones and Xboxes. None of them use Facebook much, except to appease adult relatives (or “old people,” as 15-year-old Daniel put it).

Some of them talk about the lessons they have learned from watching their older peers and explain why they are more cautious than adults might realize. Take DeCora, 10, who says that she learned about cyberbullying at school: “Our teacher was like, ‘Don’t post anything on social media that you’ll regret.’ And somebody in class was like, ‘You can just delete the photo.’ ” Her silver hoop earrings sway as shakes her head disapprovingly, because she knows better.

Or 15 -year-old Kieron, who saves his allowance — “I’m going to be, like, $100,000 in debt when I get out of college,” he says matter-of-factly — and is skeptical of credit cards: “Don’t buy anything you can’t pay for, that’s the number one rule.”

The center is primarily looking for concrete guidance for its clients, but the researchers also hope to divine a deeper understanding of these young people and how they are shaped by the tech-laden world they live in. The emotional and psychological impact of their devices matters, too.

“So, social media,” Denison queries. “I want to know how it affects how you feel about yourself, if it does.”

DeCora shrugs. If someone is mean to her, she says, “I’ll get upset about it, but I’ll definitely get over it.”

“Haters gonna hate,” Isabella says, “and you can just block them.”

Kiera, the youngest in the group, suddenly pipes up.

“Social media doesn’t really affect me now,” she says. “Right now, all it is is our closest friends, and they’re not going to hurt us.”

She pauses.

“But it might affect us more as we get older, and we’re teenagers, as mean girls develop. It might affect us more when we’re older and thinking that we need to be perfect.”

The girls keep chatting and giggling — kids happy to answer a few questions in exchange for a little cash. The most serious people in the room are the researchers, whose pens keep flying over their notepads, hoping to get it all down.

Kiera, 10, listens as other tweens talk about how they use social media.

And everyone saw it.

The seventh-grader’s sext was meant to impress him. Then he shared it. It nearly destroyed her.

Story by Jessica Contrera
Photos by Bonnie Jo Mount

She crunched the cookies in her mouth, carefully mashing them into chunks. She spit. They made a plunk sound as they hit the toilet water. The worst, the absolute worst thing had happened, and now, Maureen was sure, this was her only option.

“Moommm,” she called down the stairs. “I puked!”

She could not show her face in the seventh grade. She had to play sick. All day she lay crumpled on the couch, replaying what he’d said to convince her.

You’re so beautiful.

Don’t be ashamed of your body.

I won’t show anyone.

Then, last night, when he admitted he’d shown the photo to a few people:

“Don’t even come to my funeral,” she texted him.

I’ll piss on your grave, b—-.

At least she had been wearing a bra and underwear. The camera flash reflected in the mirror had hidden her face, hadn’t it?

But he knew. And by the end of the day, everyone else would too.

It would be months before Maureen would learn she wasn’t the only girl who had fallen for his promises, who had trusted him.

She heard her dad come in from work. She heard the phone ring.

Then he was barreling out of the kitchen, the phone still in his hand. He stopped in the doorway to the living room. A sign above his head read, “Yesterday’s Memories Are Tomorrow’s Treasures.”

“Your principal called,” he said. “What pictures is he talking about?”

Maureen plays Minecraft and checks messages in her living room, where she was sitting when her principal called her parents to tell them about a nearly-naked picture of their daughter that circulated around her middle school.

When Maureen’s parents were in middle school, if a girl wanted to show a boy her body in the middle of the night, she would have to sneak out of her house, find a way to get to his, evade his parents and yank up her shirt. For their daughter, all it took was a few clicks.

A few months before, Maureen had started messaging on Kik with a tall, athletic boy in her class. They weren’t officially dating, but they talked every day. For weeks he asked for her picture. When she sent one, he asked for more. She liked him. She believed him when he said he would delete them. By March, the middle school crush had fizzled, but he still had the three photos she sent. One day, another girl in their class saw one of them on his phone. The next day, while Maureen was hiding at home, she says he texted it around the lunch room.

At her parents’ request, Maureen and her family members are being identified only by their middle names. The boy involved is not being named because he is a minor. His mother declined on behalf of her family to participate in this article. The principal of Maureen’s Auburn, Mass., middle school also declined to comment.

Maureen’s parents believe the boy was suspended from school for a few days; their daughter was expected to learn her lesson and move on. The ordeal began in March 2014, when Maureen was 13 years old.

Law enforcement agencies could have told her parents how truly ordinary their situation was. Sexting has gained a presence in every kind of school — rich and poor, urban and rural, big and small. As phones make their way into the hands of younger and younger kids, the incidents have grown more complex: Students collect their peers’ nude photos in passcode-protected Dropboxes, private Instagram accounts and apps disguised as calculators. In Massachusetts alone, the state police computer crimes unit gets multiple calls a month from schools needing its intervention.

The story hardly ends when punishment is handed out. For every “sexting scandal” reported, an unknown multitude of parents and teens — mostly girls — are just beginning to grasp what it means to live in a world where nothing digital ever truly disappears. What do you do when your 13-year-old takes photos of her body to impress a boy, and now she’s crying, stomping up the stairs, slamming her bedroom door screaming, “You don’t understand!”

Then help us understand, begged Maureen’s parents, Elizabeth and Michael.

“It wasn’t the picture itself,” she would later explain. It was that the boy told everyone that he didn’t ask for it. That she sent it because she was so desperate for his attention. Now, the comments streamed in on her social media accounts, the new outlet for time-honored middle school cruelty.

Gross.

Slut.

Go kill yourself.

Her parents thought about sending her back to school in the next town over. But Maureen knew the kids there had heard about her, too.

“I felt like I couldn’t fix it,” she said. “Like I was alone and nothing was ever going to be better.”

Left: Maureen jokes with her mother, Elizabeth, and her uncle in the family's kitchen. Right: Maureen's father Michael cleans the back yard of their home in Auburn, Ma.

Elizabeth and Michael started to wonder whether they could have done something to prevent all this. Should they have expected this stuff to start in the seventh grade? They knew their tall, brown-eyed daughter had always seemed to grow up too fast.

“Even when she was 2, I would follow her around on the playground going, ‘She’s only 2,’ because she was so tall, the 5-year-olds would want to play hide-and-seek and tag with her,” Elizabeth said.

Maureen grew up to be a vibrant, quirky kid, who loved to invent songs and tell jokes. She could spend hours drawing in charcoal pencil before jetting off to cheerleading practice, where her role was to catch the smaller girls as they came down from flips.

At school, she always seemed to be on the outskirts of fitting in. Note-passing and three-way-call eavesdropping have been replaced with disappearing-message apps and covert screen shots, but the Shakespearean drama of middle school hasn’t changed much. Her friends were viciously mean one day, BFFs the next.

When one friend told her how cutting made him feel better, she started doing it, too.

Later, her parents would think that the tall, popular boy in the class must have known what it would mean to Maureen to have his attention.

She had just gotten her first cellphone that year, as she entered seventh grade. Elizabeth and Michael had argued over the decision, which today plays out in almost every family household: When should they give her a phone? It would be the convenient way to communicate with her about cheer practice, but how much could she be trusted? How could they know what she was doing on it? And was it worth paying for? As an administrative assistant and a farmworker with three children, they couldn’t afford unnecessary expenses.

Michael didn’t want her to have a phone at all.

“So, what, she doesn’t get one until she’s 18, and then we watch her go off the deep end?” Elizabeth argued. “That’s not going to work, either.”

Now, after the incident, they had taken away her phone, but she was still finding out what kids were saying about her. The longer she stayed out of school, the worse the rumors. The cutting grew more frequent and more serious. Their youngest daughter learned to search her sister’s room for razors. It was like the light in Maureen had been powered off. Once, she took a whole handful of Prozac, coming dangerously close to becoming another headline about a sexting scandal leading to suicide.

Instead of going back to the seventh grade, she went to overnight counseling facilities in Worcester and Boston. Each time Elizabeth and Michael heard doctors say words like “trauma” and “lack of coping skills,” they started to worry that their daughter’s fears — that this moment would last forever — weren’t just a 13-year-old’s distorted perspective of time. They didn’t want to believe it was possible that one foolish iPhone photo could derail their daughter’s entire life.

Maureen rides in the back of her father's car. The scars from when she cut herself are still visible on her arms.

The boy still had her picture. The middle school principal had called again, this time with worse — was that possible? — news.

Maureen had entered the eighth grade, and she seemed to be doing fine. Sometimes she would cry all the way to school, but when Elizabeth pulled up to the low brick building, Maureen would always get out of the car.

Now it was early November, and the principal was telling them that the boy had shown Maureen’s photo at a Halloween party. It was the same picture they thought had been deleted from his phone.

And it wasn’t just her picture. There were also photos of at least four other girls in the class, all displayed in a slide show. The girls later learned that the boy had made a game out of it: Because they had framed their photos so their faces weren’t visible, the boys guessed which body belonged to which girl. One they recognized by her dark skin. Another, by a large freckle on her chest.

Before this, the middle school thought Maureen’s ordeal was an isolated event. Now, they realized they were dealing with a more pervasive problem.

“I thought, we’re a small, middle-class, suburban town. This isn’t going to hit us,” said one of the school’s counselors, who asked not to be named. “But boy, was I wrong.”

She was shocked to hear “some of the brightest girls in the building” had flirted with the boy for months, and then, late at night, alone in their bedrooms and bathrooms, sent him what he asked for.

“I don’t say it lightly when I say that if it can happen to them, it can happen to anybody,” the counselor said.

She brought all of the girls to a room together. Among them was one who had dated the boy for eight months. Her photos — ones she sent and ones he had taken of her — had been on the screen at the party too. Together the girls spent hours comparing messages, realizing he had been texting them all the same smooth lines.

Meanwhile, the boy was in the principal’s office again. According to students and the counselor, the boy showed the principal the password-protected app where all the photos were hidden on his phone. He had them organized into folders, one for each girl he’d won over.

The school called the police.

The news rippled across the class of 205 eighth-graders and the 16,000-person town. For Maureen, there was almost a sense of relief: Sure, more people had seen her photo, but at least she wasn’t the only one being called a slut.

“There was so much shame involved for the girls who had done it,” the counselor said. “Then those girls’ friends felt like, ‘If I hang out with you, I’m going to be seen as like you.’ And then the girls who were not involved were envious of all the attention the other girls were getting.”

Some teachers, she said, seemed to think the girls got what they asked for by being so careless.

Taylor, the boy’s former girlfriend, recalled trying to explain to everyone why it had seemed just so normal at the time.

“Sixth, seventh grade is when people started sending nudes. The popular girls would send them to the popular guys . . . . I would find out about it and be like, ‘You know that’s wrong, right?’ ” she said. “I was iffy, at first. But everyone was doing it, so I just felt like I had to.”

Taylor — who is also being identified by her middle name — and the boy had been friends since they were young. Their moms went to high school together. Her family once threw him a birthday party. And now, this.

She heard he did it because his friend group had been pushing him away. This was his attempt to get back in.

On his social media accounts, anonymous commenters wrote to him that he ruined their lives.

He wrote back: “And my own.”

The high school where Maureen and the boy pass each day in the halls. They are purposefully not placed in classes together.

Every morning, Maureen puts on her makeup in the purple bathroom where she sent him the photo. Winged eyeliner has become her signature look. Tight jeans, loose T-shirt, badass eye-flair — it all says: I don’t care what you think.

Now she’s in high school. So is the boy. Every day, they pass in the hall.

“It doesn’t even bother me,” Maureen says. “People are always like, does it bother you when you see” him?’ I’m always like, no, why would it bother me?”

The Worcester, Mass., Telegram reported that the boy is facing criminal charges: possession of child pornography, dissemination of obscene materials to minors and enticement of a child under 16. But so far, the families of Maureen and Taylor haven’t heard anything about a conviction or a plea deal. A spokesman for the Worcester district attorney said the office is legally prohibited from disclosing any information about any juvenile case.

Although many states have passed laws that draw a distinction between child pornography and sexting among underage kids, Massachusetts has not. Conceivably, if convicted, the boy could face jail time and registration as a sex offender.

But chances are, he won’t.

Michael Ramos, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said that in places where the law hasn’t caught up with technology, it’s rare for a minor to come away with a felony on his record. The consequences are usually lessened to misdemeanors, probation time, educational diversion programs or community service. In a 2013 survey of state prosecutors who had filed charges in sexting cases involving juveniles, 16 percent resulted in the defendant being registered as a sex offender. Just 4 percent led to a criminal trial.

“You’re dealing with young teens, people who don’t have criminal intent. Believe me, they’re making some huge mistakes, ethical mistakes, but you have to come up with other solutions,” Ramos said.

Depending on the nature of the charges, Ramos said, one key factor in a prosecution would be whether the boy had “intent to harm” the girls whose pictures he showed — something that can be difficult to prove without the participation of the girls themselves. Because coming forward means that they, too, could face at least the theoretical risk of charges. Although they took photos of their own bodies, in a technical sense, they have produced child pornography.

Until it’s sorted out, the boy will remain in school. Administrators purposefully kept him in separate classes from Maureen and Taylor. But his former girlfriend rarely comes to school anyway; after more than a year of counseling and therapy, her parents say, she still hasn’t recovered.

Maureen, now 15 years old, plays Minecraft in her bedroom. She has built a community of friends playing the game and has thousands of followers. The lion in the background was a birthday gift from her father when she turned five.

In summer, Maureen lives in another world, where there is no boy, no girls who stare at her, no one who can see the thin scar lines on her forearms. It exists on her iPad, in an online gaming community called Minecraft.

She started playing it regularly in the first few weeks of ninth grade, when she realized that even though she was in a new school, the people were the same. To them, she was the same.

“It’s not even brought up anymore,” she says. “It’s just like, oh, that’s [Maureen], nobody talks to her.”

But in Minecraft, they call her Queen. And Mom. The game is made up of many tiny worlds where players can unite on teams to build places completely their own. In the summer, Maureen can be in her world anytime she wants. At cheerleading camp, on the bleachers of her sister’s softball games, in the car when her dad is listening to songs she rolls her eyes at. She founded her own team, and now there are more than 120 players from every corner of the world who know her. They look to her for guidance, in the game and in life.

The rules of their Minecraft world are that no one is allowed to swear or call anyone names.

“People come there because nobody can get hurt, or you’ll get banned,” Maureen says.

If one of her team members gets bullied, it’s Maureen who gets to report it.

“If there’s a problem, like drama or something, people come to me,” she says. “And I’ll solve it.”

Last week, summer ended. She started the 10th grade. She went back to the halls where every day, she passes him. But after school, she can escape again, to the place where no one has seen her undressed and she is always in control.

Maureen and her sister walk with their dog on an August afternoon. At the end of the month, Maureen started her sophomore year of high school.

‘They call it bunny hunting’

By Caitlin Gibson

Sgt. James Spurlock leads an outreach session for the sheriff’s office on the dangers of cyberbullying and online sexual exploitation. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

The sheriff’s deputy paces slowly at the foot of the school auditorium stage, a gold badge pinned to the pocket of his polo shirt, a gun holstered at his hip. His expression is somber. He would look right at home leading a DARE or gang-resistance program, warning teenagers against ruining their lives with drug use or street crime.

But his audience members this morning are fidgety, pint-size 11- and 12-year-olds, and his warnings are about the threats lurking in their laptops, gaming devices and smartphones — such as grown-ups who send messages or photos to kids they don’t know, trying to get them to respond. Child abusers have a name for this technique.

“They call it bunny hunting,” the deputy says, and the hundred-or-so tweens sitting before him grow very quiet.

The original version of this class was offered only to parents, with an emphatic content warning. But as perils such as sexting, sextortion, cyberbullying, sexual predation and identity theft have grown, the sheriff’s office in Loudoun County, Va., expanded its outreach to include sessions for sixth-graders and ninth-graders — the kids transitioning to middle or high school, still figuring out how to navigate their teen years, even as the devices in their pockets place a world of adult content and consequences at their fingertips.

And so the deputy, Sgt. James Spurlock, a 26-year law enforcement veteran who oversees the sheriff’s Crime Prevention and Juvenile Resource Unit, has come to Stone Hill Middle School in Ashburn, Va., to lead a program called “Technology Safety for Teens”— an anodyne title that belies its disturbing material — because police know that the need to teach kids about sexual exploitation online starts younger and younger.

Spurlock begins by asking the middle-schoolers a question.

“If someone threatened you online or sent you something inappropriate, how many of you would immediately go tell your parents?”

Several dozen kids raise their hands right away. A few of their classmates visibly hesitate, then do the same. Other students sit with their arms pinned firmly to their sides.

“Okay, not everyone’s hand is up,” Spurlock says. He doesn’t sound surprised. “So let’s talk about that.”

Educating young people about the dangers of the digital realm has become a growing priority for law enforcement agencies and schools nationwide. Some jurisdictions use specific curriculum or training programs — i-SAFE, a leading technology safety training program employed by officials in the United States, is used in 4,000 school districts across the country — while others conduct their own outreach.

Spurlock has been leading Loudoun’s technology safety classes since they began in 2012. He always tells the students that he’s not only a deputy, but also a dad, and also a weapons designer for the video gaming industry (the Stone Hill crowd is impressed by this revelation). His goal is to connect with kids and leave a lasting impression, which means he doesn’t sugarcoat the material.

And he also wants to hear what the kids have to say. So he asks the Stone Hill students why they wouldn’t tell their parents if something upsetting happened online — a friend was mean to them, or a stranger contacted them, or someone asked them to send a picture.

“They might take away your phone,” one girl says.

“You might just think it’s a joke,” another girl says.

“Maybe you think you can just handle it yourself,” a boy volunteers.

Spurlock explains how important it is for kids to tell an adult if something — anything — makes them feel unsure or uncomfortable online. When he teaches these classes to parents, he says, he always tells them that they shouldn’t get angry or punish a kid for telling the truth.

After all, their parents are probably the ones who brought them into the digital world, posting childhood photos and videos. “For most of you, your Internet presence started long before you touched your first device,” Spurlock says.

A few rows back from the stage, two girls are raptly focused on a paper fortune-teller game.

The session is about an hour long and slightly gentler than the version presented to parents; Spurlock doesn’t tell the students about the worst cases — the ones where a teen committed suicide because of bullying, or a child was killed by someone who stalked them online. He avoids mentioning the lives cut short, focusing instead on those who were irrevocably changed.

Like Cassidy Wolf, a onetime Miss Teen USA whose laptop webcam was hacked by a 19- year-old student who took nude photos of her: “Forever, this will follow her, because there’s no way to know where those pictures went,” Spurlock says. Or Axelle Despiegelaere, a pretty Belgian teen who lost a lucrative modeling contract with L’Oréal after a photo of her posed with a hunting rifle beside a dead oryx antelope surfaced online.

He tells them about a girl who posted a photo online with a “geotag,” which meant that an online stalker figured out where she lived and showed up on her front porch. He talks about voice-modulating software that can disguise someone’s age and gender — adults often use it when they contact kids through video games. There is a large community of predators out there, he says, and now the two girls with the fortune-teller game are staring at him.

In a recent case in Loudoun, investigators arrested a man who had used Skype to send sexual solicitations to more than 70 children. The man was a government official, Spurlock says, making the point that predators are often seemingly trustworthy figures: “Judges, law enforcement officers, teachers,” he says. “It’s not the creepy old guy in the basement.”

A girl with a curly ponytail raises her hand. “Why would someone work so hard just to hurt a kid?”

For the first time, Spurlock hesitates for a moment. He explains that predators have a range of motivations — “every person is a little different” — but offers no specific examples.

He changes the topic, focusing next on what kids can do to protect themselves. Dozens of iPhones are pulled out of pockets when Spurlock explains how to disable the geotag function on Instagram and check that their accounts are set to “private” instead of “public.” He explains that they should never share their family’s wireless router password with anyone else (about a dozen raise their hands to admit they already had).

He also reminds the students that they themselves could be considered predators: “If you have nude pictures of a person under the age of 18, you are going to prison,” he says. “How old do you have to be in Virginia to be prosecuted as an adult?”

A confident chorus answers: “Eighteen!”

“Fourteen,” Spurlock says. This gets the reaction he was looking for; the kids gawk and gasp.

“I know this might all seem unbelievable,” he says, “but don’t ever think it can’t happen to you.”

He surveys the grim-faced children in front of him and recites a statistic from a 2014 FBI report about children between ages 12 and 18 who receive unwanted sexual solicitations online.

“One in 5 of you will be a victim before you turn 18,” he says. He repeats: “One in 5.”

The room is mostly quiet. Some tweens stare at their phones, or at the wall-mounted clock over the auditorium door, ticking down the final minutes of the school day.

Others glance uncomfortably at each other’s faces, doing the math, wondering when and how and who.

The Disconnected

Teen lives and futures depend on the Internet. What happens when they can’t afford it?

Story by Caitlin Gibson
Photos by Matt McClain

The other kids are talking about their phones again, and she is trying not to listen.

She likes it here, in the big room at the library in Northwest Washington where she comes twice a week for her after-school youth program. In this space, 15-year-old DJ knows she can be honest, even when she feels different — like she does now, as the teens sitting around her gaze at their smartphone screens and commiserate over the frustration of dying batteries.

Editor's note: To protect her privacy, The Washington Post is identifying DJ only by her initials and her mother by her middle name.

DJ focuses instead on the art project in her hands, a paper model of BB-8, the spherical “Star Wars” robot. She picks up a pair of scissors, her dark eyes squinting behind her black-rimmed glasses, and carefully cuts along the dotted line.

“You know when your phone —” one boy begins, and now DJ looks up.

“I don’t have a phone,” she says.

“Don’t keep rubbing it in,” Dia Bui, the program coordinator, tells the boy.

The program technically ended 15 minutes ago, at 6 p.m., but DJ isn’t in a hurry to leave. She gets lonely at home, she says. Her mother often has to work late, and her brothers are often busy with their friends. So DJ usually retreats to her small bedroom, hidden behind a floor-length curtain, where she curls up on a bed strewn with clothes and piled high with stuffed animals.

“It’s sad, sometimes,” she says, “when I’m left alone with my thoughts.”

There is no beeping or buzzing, no message notifications to answer or apps to preoccupy her. At a time when many parents agonize over their kids’ consumption of social media — fretting over the hours spent playing games and posting Instagrams and incessantly texting — DJ represents the flip side: teens who can’t afford phones or computers and don’t have reliable WiFi at home.

They are the outliers. The Pew Research Center reports that 88 percent of all American teens ages 13 to 17 own or have access to a cellphone, and most — 73 percent — have smartphones. Technology that was once considered a luxury is now viewed as necessity.

D.J. uses a computer at a local library.

But for some low-income families like DJ’s, these devices are still out of reach. Not having a phone or a computer compounds her other worries: the sense of isolation from her classmates, the struggle to keep up at school, the difficulty of finding resources that might offer academic or emotional help.

She finds other ways to occupy herself. “I started using my sketchbook more,” DJ says as she walks home along shaded streets. “But my teacher asks us to draw from references, to use the Internet to look up things to draw, and I can’t.”

Someday, she wants to go to a great college, to become a famous artist, to make a lot of money and provide for a family. But lately, she hasn’t been doing her homework, because almost all of it is online, and she can’t get online at home. She’s been missing her childhood friends, the ones who moved away from the District before high school started. She used to talk to them all the time over text and Snapchat, before her iPhone broke.

The phone was a long-awaited Christmas present from DJ’s mother, Lidia. For months, it was DJ’s lifeline — but then the battery suddenly stopped charging, and the screen went dark.

Lidia, a 33-year-old single mother who came to the United States from Guatemala when she was 16, works at a salon six days a week to support DJ and her two brothers. Replacing the phone wasn’t an option.

“It’s expensive,” Lidia says, again, after DJ arrives at their ground-level apartment and curls up on the couch beside her. Lidia nudges her daughter playfully. “Even your mom can’t get a new phone.”

DJ nods. “I know.”

Lidia shakes her head. The heel of her sandal taps against the parquet floor. She hears what her kids keep telling her — that they need a computer at home, that they feel left out when they can’t talk to their friends. “When we were young, we didn’t have those things,” she says.

“But now it’s different,” DJ says, touching her mother’s arm. “Because everybody has technology, and then you’re the one person left out.”

D.J. poses for a portrait at her home.

The effect on the few who remain technologically disconnected has never been more profound — especially for the teens, like DJ, who are part of the most digitally defined generation in human history. Almost everything they need exists in cyberspace: Hard-copy workbooks have been replaced by online libraries. Homework assignments and practice exercises are posted to school websites. Instead of meeting up in the library for study groups, students collaborate remotely through cloud applications. Test preparation, college applications, employment and internship opportunities — all of it is online.

Families are adapting to this new reality, and the digital divide between those who can and cannot afford technology is narrowing. This year, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop released the first nationally representative survey of low-income parents focused on digital connectivity; it showed that 91 percent of families living below the poverty line have an Internet connection at home.

But many of those households remain “under-connected,” meaning their Internet access is inconsistent at best, and often available only through a phone. This is the case in DJ’s home, where other utility bills frequently take priority over WiFi, and the three siblings sometimes share one smartphone to do homework. The survey also found that families headed by Hispanic immigrants, like DJ’s mother, are the least connected of all low- and moderate-income American families.

Students without home access can turn to school computer labs or public libraries, which might mean staying late after class, riding public transportation alone, waiting in line for a computer or grappling with a slow, overtaxed connection. This might not seem like such an excessive burden, except that it generally falls on the already-overwhelmed kids who are least able to bear it.

Not having a phone isn’t, in itself, a terrible thing; some families who can afford the devices prefer to keep their kids away from them. But for underprivileged teens, not having a phone or computer is just one of a myriad of challenges they face, says Mary Brown, executive director of the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative. “We have children and families that don’t have access to health care, education and employment, and it’s this consistent lack of opportunity that really leads to this whole cycle of poverty.”

Her organization recently worked with Comcast to provide low-cost Internet connections to impoverished families in the District. “Having access to the Internet — it’s just huge, to have that at home,” she says.

For teens shut out of the social-media world their friends inhabit, the exclusion isn’t trivial; when teens can’t relate to what their peers are doing, they miss out on a basic cultural fluency.

Sara Kirschner, curricula and training manager for Higher Achievement, a national academic program for middle school students, has seen the social consequences for students who don’t have the same digital privileges as their peers.

“Even when their phones aren’t out, kids chat about what’s going on online,” she says. “And the kids without technology can’t even engage in the conversation.”

The promise of summer is escape, a time to go away to camp or to the beach. For DJ, summer is just more time spent at home, away from her classmates, where boredom and isolation make the long days feel even longer.

But there is relief through a regional youth program called Asian American Leadership, Empowerment and Development, or AALEAD, which offers support to low-income children of color. For six weeks, DJ can count on time with friends, free meals and her first paid job — the program hired her as an intern.

During the summer session, DJ has been working with several friends on a group project, a short video documentary about gentrification in the District. The team took photos in Columbia Heights, Navy Yard and Chinatown, speaking to workers and residents, capturing ways the communities have changed. Then the girls recorded interviews with each other, talking about how those changes made them feel.

DJ says the project has helped her understand why so many of her childhood friends have moved away: “They must have left because of gentrification.”

One sweltering morning, the team members arrive at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where AALEAD has reserved a row of gleaming white Apple computers for them to use to edit their footage — but the software baffles the teens, who have never used it before.

During a break in their work, Stephanie Lim, one of AALEAD’s program coordinators and mentors, asks DJ if she has time to talk. The teenager follows Lim, 27, into the vast lobby of the library, where they settle into orange plastic chairs and Lim opens her laptop. A disheveled man in a torn shirt slumps against the wall nearby, snoring softly.

“What are some of the things you would like to talk about today?” Lim asks DJ.

“About college?” DJ asks. In a matter of weeks she’ll be a high school junior.

“Sure,” Lim says. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

DJ twists a lock of dark hair between her fingers.

“I want to go to Harvard,” she says, with a dreamy smile. “They say it’s nearly impossible, but I want to do it!”

“Okay, wow,” Lim says. “You’re going to aim high!”

“I don’t know anything about how to apply for college,” DJ says. “I know it’s a lot of money. Where am I gonna get that from?”

Lim nods. She was also the first generation in her family to go to college, she tells DJ, and students like them are more likely to struggle with certain issues, including money. “There’s a lot to adjust to,” Lim says. “A new social setting, and people who grew up very differently from you.”

DJ’s expression turns somber. “Oh. Yeah.”

“This is not to scare you,” Lim says. “How is school going?”

DJ shrugs. “My GPA is like a 2.8 or something, but that’s without trying.” She looks at the table. “I don’t usually do my homework.”

“Okay,” Lim says, typing notes. “What do you think you need in order to do your homework consistently?”

DJ is quiet. The answer to the question is complicated; a home computer isn’t going to happen. She is afraid of riding the bus by herself. And her mother doesn’t like her to go out in their neighborhood alone, so DJ will visit the library only with a friend. She can’t do her online homework on her phone, like she used to.

She presses her fingers to her temple and sighs.

“I don’t know,” she says.

D.J. is seen at her home.

DJ says she feels “different” because she doesn’t have a phone, but the truth is she felt different even when she did have one. At her high school across town, she is among a minority of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and many of her classmates are from wealthier neighborhoods. On Instagram, she watched their lives unspool in an endless feed of picture-perfect moments, flawless selfies and luxurious vacations. The privilege DJ saw every day in class followed her home in her pocket.

“Instagram is for people with interesting lives,” she says, sitting on her couch on a summer Sunday. “I didn’t think my life was so interesting, to put it out there like that.” She posted a selfie only once, she says, and took it down a few hours later.

She found herself obsessing over how many followers she had, comparing the number with her friends’ accounts. She started noticing when her friends unfollowed her, mirroring her shrinking social circle. Five months after she added the app, she deleted it.

“I was afraid people would really look at me and judge me,” she says. “It made me feel bad about myself.”

She misses other apps, the ones that offered an escape. She loved the whimsical filters on Snapchat, how with the flick of her finger she could become a goddess with flowers in her hair.

But she never did get used to seeing herself on a screen. So when her group video project is played at a local coffee shop, as part of a celebration at the end of AALEAD’s summer session, DJ is excited and proud but also a little nervous. Dozens of teens and staff members have gathered to recognize the students and applaud their work. All those people will be watching her on video, in the interview where she talked about what life is like in her city.

“It’s a little embarrassing,” DJ says, shouting to be heard over dance music pulsing through the nearby loudspeakers. “I wasn’t looking my best that day.”

When the music stops and the film starts playing, DJ quickly retreats to the second floor of the cafe, leaning against the railing as she gazes down on the crowd below. Her own face stares back at her from the screen against the wall.

Off camera, an interviewer asks: Are there opportunities for youth in your community?

DJ’s answer is immediate and absolute.

“No,” she hears herself say. “Everything costs money.”

‘What’s a tbh?’

Terms we had to explain to our editors when reporting these stories.

Story by Caitlin Gibson & Jessica Contrera

When we started our reporting on teens and technology, we were feeling pretty confident: We’re both (relatively) tech-savvy millennials, glued to our phones and plugged into pop culture. Then we actually talked to teenagers, and realized we are The Olds. Millennials might be the creators of our modern social media landscape, but we can still remember life before cellphones — the era of waiting for Mom to get off the landline so we could log on to AIM. The true digital natives are the members of Generation Z, who have never existed without constant connection.

We had to a lot to learn. They provided some answers:

What’s “lb”?

“Like back,” a.k.a asking to trade a like for a like. You’ll see it a lot on famous Instagram accounts, like that of Kylie Jenner. She gets hundreds of comments asking her to “lb.” She does not lb.

Which one is Kylie again?

The youngest one. She’s 18, which makes her a member of Gen Z.

Why is it uncool to have a lot of pictures on your Instagram now?

The members of Gen Z we met spend a significant amount of time curating their profiles to show only the best pictures; they tell the person visiting your page who you are. That’s what all of social media feels like to teenagers now: They want all of their pictures to say something about their lives. So they will delete the photos that seem redundant or don’t get many likes. This is v. important.

“v.”?

It’s the new “very.” Winston Churchill used it well over 100 years ago, according to the Atlantic.

Can we say “r.” for “really”?

No. But if you’re trying to say “really?” in an “are you serious?” way, you can say “Bruh.”

What’s a Snapchat score?

“A special equation combining the number of Snaps you’ve sent and received, Stories you’ve posted, and other factors,” according to Snapchat. You can check your score by opening the app, pressing the Snapchat icon at the top of the screen and sliding it down. (Jessica’s snap score is 13,297. Caitlin’s is 9.)

What’s “tbh”?

“To be honest.” It might sound like the beginning of a dis, but it’s usually written before a compliment in the comments beneath a photo. “Tbh, you are nice and pretty.”

How do you “like for a tbh”?

If you write this in the caption of a photo, you are asking followers to like your photo, and in exchange, you will write a tbh (compliment) beneath one of their photos.

So how old are Gen Z-ers, exactly?

The exact age range varies slightly depending on which researcher you ask, but the label generally applies to anyone up to age 18 or 20.

How much time are they spending in front of screens?

On average, teens spend nearly nine hours a day consuming media while tweens (ages 8 to 12) spend nearly six, according to a 2015 study by the nonprofit Common Sense Media.

How much is too much?

lol, Before you judge, check how much you live on your own phone. On an iPhone, check by tapping Settings > Battery. When “Battery Usage” loads, click the clock symbol on the right side of your screen. It will tell you how much time you’re spending on each app. You can find similar stats on Android by looking at your battery usage in Settings.

I thought it was LOL — capitalized.

Jessica’s 14-year-old cousin says it’s lol now.

Mom

A term of endearment that conveys respect and admiration. It is often commented beneath photos or tweeted back at someone. If the admired person is a man, the term is usually “dad” or “daddy.”

Queen

A complimentary term meaning someone, usually a woman, is powerful and beloved. Sometimes spelled Kween, frequently preceded by the word “YAS.”

YAS

A better or worse way to enthusiastically say “yes,” depending who you ask. YAS shows you are extremely satisfied or approving of something. Add as many A’s as you would like.

What is ‘bunny hunting?’

An extremely creepy term used by adult predators. It describes the practice of sending unsolicited digital messages or photos to kids online, with the aim to establish a line of communication with them.

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