American Girls (5 page)

Montclair, New Jersey, is a suburb of some 39,000 people, about an hour by train from Manhattan. It's home to many commuters to New York, many with jobs in the arts and entertainment. Stephen Colbert lives there, as do a number of acclaimed authors and journalists from leading news organizations. It's known as a good place to raise kids, with good schools and its own art museum, art galleries, and live theaters. The downtown area of Upper Montclair has the look and feel of a village—a prosperous village, with antiques stores, boutiques, nice restaurants, and yoga studios for mother and baby.

On a spring day in Montclair, in Watchung Plaza, the shopping area in the center of town, children from three elementary schools were giving a musical performance in a grassy square. Parents were standing around in a semicircle, recording it on their phones.

“America, America,”
the children sang, in their high, sweet voices; some blew on flutes and clarinets, others banged on shiny drums. A cherry tree laden with pink blossoms blazed in the mid-afternoon sunlight. Some of the littlest girls had garlands in their hair. They looked like budding flowers in the grass.

The parents stood with cell phone cameras focused on the children. Almost every parent held a phone. If the children looked out at the crowd, they saw a sea of smiling adult faces, not looking directly at them, but gazing into their screens. One mother darted around, paparazzi-style, getting shots on a Canon DSLR.

“God shed his grace on thee…”

The concert trudged through “Do Re Mi” and “Under the Sea.”
Bang, bang
went the drums. An American flag flew languidly from a nearby Chase Bank.

Some parents started to discreetly check their e-mails and texts. Some were already posting the children's performance on Facebook. There were sporty moms in Lycra workout clothes, Burberry and Kate Spade bags dangling from their wrists. There were fathers in jeans and patterned button-downs, wearing Merrell hiking sneakers. One encouraged his son, low, “You got this, buddy, focus, focus,” when the boy started banging his drum out of sync. A girl blew hard on a flute, which squeaked in the air.

When the performance was over, the parents erupted in applause and cheers as raucous as if the children had won the Super Bowl.

“Mom,” said a girl, running over. She pulled at her mother's hand, which held a phone.

Her mother put an arm around the girl, saying, “You were great! You were so good.”

“No,” said the girl. “I messed up. And I look bad today. Don't post it.”

From the earliest days of photography, parents were using this exciting new technology as a way to capture images of their kids. The rapid growth of daguerreotype studios in the United States in the 1850s was fed in part by the craze for portraits of children and babies. Once upon a time, only the wealthy and privileged could afford to have their portraits done by a small, select circle of artists. Now, with photography, shopkeepers, doctors, butchers, and carpenters could appear in pictures that resembled life, and so could their offspring.

Parents, then as now, wanted pictures of their children to record their development, to be able to gaze upon their innocent beauty and charm, and to show them off to family and friends. There was also the anxious consideration of infant mortality; if a child happened to die before she had a chance to be photographed, she might very well be photographed postmortem, posed in a cradle or bed as if still alive, so intense was the desire to retain an image of the loved one, which was already serving as a stand-in for an actual self.

Today, parents use smartphone technology and social media to broadcast images of their children to the world. They cultivate their children's online selves from birth or even before, in the delivery room, even in utero. Social media has given parenting a whole new dimension, and it has provided a publishing tool for parenting as performance. A 2010 study by the Internet security firm AVG Technologies found that 92 percent of American children have an online presence before the age of two. Parents post nearly 1,000 images of their children online before their fifth birthday, according to a 2015 poll conducted by the U.K.-based Parent Zone, an online safety site. The debate, often heard in the early years of social media, about whether posting pictures of children online is safe, from a personal security standpoint—not to mention questions of privacy—has been overwhelmed by a new parental drive to post and the built-in competition to attract the most attention and adulation for one's own kids.

“There are mothers who actually try to help their daughters use social media to get popular,” said a mother of a high school girl in Boca Raton, Florida. “It's embarrassing because a lot of these women were not popular when they were in school. But now they're trying to feel popular through their daughters, and they will check the numbers of likes their daughters' pictures get. I have seen mothers take their daughters to have hair and makeup done to do selfies.”

The pride and joy which have always inspired the sharing of a photograph of one's child are now accompanied by the anticipation of the pleasure and personal reward of likes from online friends and followers. A video of Baby cooing or having her first bite of banana is a reliable way to get likes and “awww”s; a picture of Junior making his first soccer goal elicits “yay!”s and “go!”s. And in the background is the unseen image of the loving, doting parent, in effect photo-bombing. Parents wrap their children's online identities into their own online selves.

And so many children growing up today experience the world as a never-ending series of photo shoots, for public consumption. “We're raising our kids to be performers,” says the author and journalist Donna Freitas, who writes about campus culture. “Kids know their parents want them to make them look good on social media. So they work really hard at becoming good performers. But nobody is really thinking about what this is doing.”

As Freitas suggests, one thing this seems to be doing is encouraging kids to repeat the behaviors, not only by posting images of themselves but by sharing personal information. Parents share intimate details of their children's lives online from the time they are born, sometimes overshare. Researchers at the University of Michigan coined the term “sharenting” to describe parents who use social media to communicate with one another about everything from their children's temper tantrums to their eating and sleeping habits and bowel movements. The website STFU, Parents posts submissions of the most egregious examples of social media oversharing by moms and dads, from stories involving “placenta smoothies” to mucus plugs. Created in 2009 by Blair Koenig, the site, which jokingly calls itself a “public service” blog, exposes an online culture of “sanctimommies” and “mompetitions”—two symptoms of another aspect of American life discussed in the news: “narcissistic parenting.”

“The winner-loser dynamic is at the heart of extreme narcissism, and the narcissistic parent is somebody who plays that game through their children,” Joseph Burgo, a marriage and family therapist and clinical psychologist, said on CNN in 2015. Parenting as a “winner-loser dynamic” could also describe two wildly popular reality shows of the last decade—
Dance Moms
and
Toddlers & Tiaras
—in which monster mothers fight pitched battles through their daughters. It's been almost twenty years since the brutal murder of JonBenét Ramsey brought attention to the horror of the world of child beauty pageants—the extreme sexualization of the little girls, the skimpy costumes, garish makeup, and risqué dance moves once associated with stripping. In 1996, this was a dark revelation, seen as a national scandal. But since
Toddlers & Tiaras,
these images have become routine and are even seen as “hilarious” (as in a comment about the show on a pop-culture website). Now parents routinely post videos of their daughters suggestively shimmying to Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj. You can almost hear Kris Jenner saying, “You're doing amazing, sweetie.” These videos tend to get a lot of likes.

And if the videos get enough likes on sites like YouTube or Instagram, they can attract advertisers, and the parents who posted them can profit. In 2015,
The New York Times
ran a piece on “Instamoms,” or mothers who cultivate their children's online personas with professional photography in the hopes of attracting endorsement deals and “blowing up.” One toddler in the story, two-year-old Taylen, had 112,000 followers on Instagram, and her mother, Angelica Calad, said Taylen had “become a brand.” The
Times
's story didn't mention, however, that in 2013 Taylen's mother and father, Josh Biggs, were in the news in Florida voicing their concern that Taylen's baby pictures were being “copied and shared on other Instagram pages,” some of a “sexually pornographic nature,” Biggs told WPTV in West Palm Beach. “ ‘I was just completely blown away and the morbid words I was reading, I was just, I'm sick to my stomach,' ” Biggs said. But Taylen's online presence continued. The
Times
reported that she would be “headlining the holiday campaign for Kardashian Kids Kollection.”

“Oh my God.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh…”

The three girls were coming out of the middle school at the end of the day. They were staring at Riley's phone, on which there was a screenshot of a Snapchat from a boy named Zack, asking her for nudes.

“I can't believe him,” fumed Sophia.

Kids streamed past them, coming down the steps of the school. It was a redbrick building with tall white windows, an idyllic-looking school, as if from a John Hughes movie. There were black, white, Latino, and Asian kids, most holding their phones or checking their phones, some already texting and talking about what they were seeing on their phones.

Riley looked around, wondering if anybody was talking about her.

Sophia said, “Let's go.”

The three girls walked along Bellevue Avenue toward Valley Road, the commercial section of Upper Montclair, where kids hung out on Friday afternoons. Sophia and Victoria maintained a sympathetic silence. Riley said she was “trying really hard not to lose it.”

It wasn't that she had never been asked for nudes before; she said she had; in fact, it had been happening a lot lately. “After this rumor spread around, people have been asking her for nudes every day,” Sophia explained. “They think Riley gave Danny a BJ so she's probably gonna send them.”

The “BJ,” or blowjob, rumor had been started by Danny himself, according to the girls, after Danny and Riley had broken up. The breakup, Riley said, had been sparked by another girl who “told him I was flirting with other guys. She wanted to make him break up with me and he did.”

Riley and Danny had been dating for about six months. They'd hooked up for the first time at a party at a “free,” or a house where the parents weren't there; such parties took place in the afternoons when parents were at work, said the girls. They said there was weed and vodka at the parties—“boys get nudes from girls and give them to high-schoolers and get l.q. in return”—and there was hooking up. No one they knew had had sex yet—except for one “savage” boy from another school who bragged that he had—but there was “making out, blowjobs, handjobs, everything but”; except they had never heard about a boy giving oral sex to a girl.

“It's like, in bed with a bra,” Riley said. She'd hooked up with Danny “wearing a shirt and Spandex.” “Danny told me he loved me,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “I didn't say it back.”

She was a green-eyed girl with dark blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wore short shorts, a white T-shirt, and blue Converse sneakers. Sophia was tall, with straight black hair, and wore a beach wrap and flowing pants, a look she described as “Coachella-y” (a reference to the annual fashion-forward music festival in Indio, California). And Victoria, brown-haired and freckled-faced, wore a flowered romper. She looked young for her age. They were all thirteen and had braces. Riley and Victoria were white, and Sophia was Latina.

Riley's parents were writers. Victoria's mother and father worked in the media, and Sophia's mother was an artist and her father an executive at a big corporation. Victoria's mother and father were divorced; the other girls' parents were married.

After Riley and Danny's breakup, said the girls, Danny took to social media, where he spread the word that Riley had given him oral sex.

“And I obviously didn't,” Riley said.

“Like he called her a slut,” said Sophia.

“He called me a slut,” Riley said, “and everyone thought I was a slut and everyone started to hate me about that on social media. Like on Ask.fm.”

On Ask.fm, users post personal information and invite others to ask questions and make comments, which they can do anonymously. The site, which had a reported 150 million monthly users in March 2015, has a history of attracting cyberbullies. Founded in Latvia in 2010, it was acquired by Ask.com, the question-answering Web search engine, in 2014. Ask.fm has been linked in the news to several infamous suicides by cyberbullying—also known as “cyberbullicides”—including that of Jessica Laney, a Hudson, Florida, girl, age sixteen, who hanged herself in 2012 after Ask.fm users called her “a slut” and a “fuckin' ugly ass hoe.” “Can you kill yourself already?” one suggested.

“They told Riley to kill herself and stuff, and the school didn't do anything,” Sophia complained.

“People were like, So, how many blowjobs did you give?” Riley said in her downcast tone. “Everyone posted about me, You're a terrible person, stay away from my friends. People commented that they don't like me. It was completely humiliating.”

“It was horrible, horrible,” said Sophia.

“People kept posting about me on all their personal accounts,” Riley said. “And I didn't do anything. I really didn't do anything. Everyone just believes what they hear.”

“Like I could post that Victoria has a secret mansion underground and everyone would believe it,” offered Sophia.

Riley said that she'd tried calling Danny to talk it over with him, but “he hung up. We have never talked about it in person and now he hates my guts…He thinks I flirted and am a huge slut, but I'm not a slut. And now he's trying to get revenge.”

Instead of talking to her, she said, Danny sent her Snapchats, those picture and video messages of one to ten seconds, which instantaneously disappear. Snapchat's nearly 100 million users were sending 700 million photos and videos a day in 2014, according to the company. When its founders introduced the idea for the app, naysayers said that no one would want to use a social media site where pictures go away; but, as it turned out, that was exactly what proved appealing to people, including, sometimes, people who had something hurtful to say, or who wanted to share nude images.

Sometimes Danny appeared in the Snaps with the girl who'd told him Riley was flirting with other guys. “I was like, Can you stop sending me Snapchats?” Riley said. “And he was like, When you stop being a slut. I got really upset. I didn't come to school for like a week.”

When she refused to go to school, Riley's parents demanded to know why, and she finally told them. Until then, they had no inkling of their daughter's problems on social media. Now they supported her totally. “My parents think it's ridiculous,” she said. “I was never close with them until this happened.” They “got really involved,” she said, informing the school that she was being cyberbullied by other students. But her parents were told there was nothing the school could do. The principal said it was a private matter.

“People would come up to me in school, people I didn't even know,” Sophia said, “and if Riley missed school they'd be like, Oh my God, did Riley kill herself? Did Riley commit suicide? Did she give Danny a BJ?”

The girls walked along.

Riley looked pensive.

“Riley's gonna send the boys who asked for nudes a picture of a naked mole rat,” Sophia said after a moment.

The girls giggled and started running down Valley Road toward the Dunkin' Donuts.