José Ramón Ubieto, adolescent expert psychologist: “If you don’t educate your child, Mark Zuckerberg will do it”

José Ramón Ubieto (Sabiñánigo, 1958) has dedicated a whole professional career to understand and accompany children and, above all, adolescents in difficulties. After four decades of profession, this psychologist, also a professor and articulist, publishes XXI CENTURY ADVESENDS (UOC Editorial), where it enters the turbulence of this particular stage of life. And distinguishes between the challenges they have always faced with those who come from the accelerated digital society in which they have grown up.

What do teenagers of the 21st century have to be labeled as such? What differentiates them from other greater generations?

Teenagers live issues that are timeless, who have happened to them, their parents and their grandparents, and have to do with three things. Identity, because children no longer serves you and you must build a new one. Then you have a new and sexual body, which did not worry you before. And the third is how you relate to your peers, how part of the community is without being the Fiqui: belonging. This has not changed. What changes are the conditions to respond to those concerns.

What would you say are the most important changes?

One of them is virtuality. Without it, the answers were on your gang and in your proximity adults: parents, teachers and monitors. They allowed you to answer who you were and what you wanted. Another novelty is the operation that I call hyperan accelerated time in which everyone must have the maximum performance in everything that does, from climbing a mountain to sex. This we transfer to children, who have to have smartphones, make graduation ceremonies since the nursery end … things that are adults, who do not touch them.

You highlight the excess of activities and experiences in childhood as a factor that affects the development of adolescents.

It is the intrusion of adults in children’s life to erase childhood. To tell them that they are going to make up as you do, that you are 40 years old, it is to accelerate their subjective time and equate it to that of the adult. The other day, a 14 -year -old patient told me that he was going to spend the weekend with his girlfriend Oh with the in -laws. Integros? With 14 years? They will be your girlfriend’s parents! It is the idea of ​​compressing childhood as if it were something that must be quickly, when Freud said otherwise, that you have to stay in it as long as one needs.

For children, the future should be the afternoon snack, but we introduce it as a mortgage and transform it into hyperexigence towards themselves

Is it necessary to cultivate patience? The boredom?

It is a hyperexigency that we transfer them and that they assume. The idea of ​​precipitating. I have seen children with an agenda that we have neither you nor I only with extracurricular activities. An eight -year -old boy wondered the other day if I think about the future. And he told me that he, every day. Because his parents tell him that studying English and French is good for the future, sport is good for the future … For children, the future should be the afternoon snack, but we introduce it as a mortgage and transform it into hyperexigence towards themselves. Something similar happens when at eight years someone sees porn. With 15 years you know what to do with it, from masturbating to laugh with friends, but with eight? They don’t know what to do, they are helpless.

In addition to childhood acceleration, virtuality mentioned before as a differential factor for current adolescence.

We do everything today is in a reality Figitalmixture of digital and physical, hybrid. There are no two parallel roads. We only live a life, and it is hybrid. Therefore, we cannot prohibit them from the world in which they live. The problem is that in that reality there are thousands of interlocutors, including Influencers. And artificial intelligence will still aggravate it more. Then there is another phenomenon that has changed, which is that of the social understanding of sexual identities. Fortunately, now the binary element is no longer the only way to define your identity, and this is positive, but it has aspects that can cause confusion and hesitation.

The hyperexigence mentioned before is also clear with social networks and the continuous exposure of the image itself. Does this increase anguish?

The need to compare and receive validation from the other has always existed. The gang is exactly that: clothes, music, consumption … but digitalization exacerbates all that to the fullest. And immediacy reduces resonance. With the Traditional methoda girl could be compared to a friend and see that the other is more beautiful, another day perhaps less, and gradually builds her image with some time. But on Instagram or Tiktok he sees 100,000 girls more beautiful than her, because they are makeup and tuned. And the rhythm to metabolize and digest it is shorter. The time to understand has disappeared and this forces adolescents to respond quickly with changes.

The need to compare and receive validation from the other has always existed, but digitalization exacerbates all that to the fullest

On the other hand, an advantage of networks and the Internet is that they allowed young people who felt isolated to find referents, from a video game lover to a young trans. Do you think this has been lost?

Each makes their own use. There are toxic, problematic, who use it to insult or harass, and then who uses them for interesting and creative things. For some, it is an opportunity to maintain a connector thread with the world. There are trans people who cannot say it clearly at home, but on the Internet he finds a community. This was seen during the pandemic, which favored those who suffered harassment at school, because they found people who did not get with them and did not want to return to class.


In full debate about the regulation of mobiles, not only in classrooms, but also outside them, what do you think?

The important thing is to understand that we must disconnect. That is, reduce the hours we dedicate to the screens. But all, not just children and adolescents. That is why the Spanish Pediatrics Association has an interesting proposal that is called Family Digital Plan. You can’t tell your child to leave the mobile while you use it to see Barça. And reduce also means prohibiting in some situations. We must not fear the word ‘ban’ for mobile phones if it is to limit very negative situations. For example, when going to sleep (because teenagers have lost sleep time), during meals (because it prevents conversations) or during duties (because it is an impressive distraction).

We must not fear the word prohibit for mobiles. For example, when going to sleep, during meals or during duties

Prohibit is part of education, but you can’t stay alone in that. You must also literate, because if you don’t do it, Mark Zuckerberg will do it. And offer face -to -face alternatives: hobbies, encounters, excursions … families must commit to face -to -face.

You oppose the term of digital natives and speak of digital orphans.

It is a fallacy, a myth. No one is born with an iPad under their arm. We give it to adults.

In recent years, the diagnosis of mental health disorders and the consumption of psychopharmaceuticals has triggered among children and adolescents. What does he attribute it to?

There are several factors. What has increased a lot is anxiety among adolescents. In relation to studies, with social relations, sex, with being in life in general. One of the causes is the feeling of demand for hyperthat everything must do well, superior to other generations, exacerbated again by social networks. The comparison is an important anxiety factor. Other elements may be the crisis of models such as educational or family, with the displacement of authority figures. Before one was oriented by what families and teachers said; Now you can do it on Tiktok.

It must also be borne in mind that the lack of time to assume changes contributes to the fact that the feelings of discomfort are lived as a pathology. We have no patience to withstand the discomforts and translate them into pathologies. Time in life is necessary for many things. And if you suppress it thinking you’ll be faster, you end up being more vulnerable. Finally, part of the increase in mental health diagnoses is due to greater visibility. I would have been a ADHD, but in my town there was no psychiatrist.

We have no patience to support discomforts and translate them into pathologies

What do you think when you listen to expressions such as Crystal generation?

They are media resources to name things we do not understand. One of the problems we have is that there are many answers and few questions. An important issue is emancipation, which allows a way of seeing the future with distance and trust. Going home today and making your life is difficult. We have young people with good formation, good material life, but a black future. They have no prospects of renting, having a lasting job … They are not genetically fragile, it is that housing, work and uncertain future return them as fragility.

The book also addresses the consequences of porn among adolescents. Do you think you have damaged its way of approaching sex?

Porn is a lie. And as a lie, it is dangerous. What porn tells you is: don’t worry, I explain how sexuality works, which has always been an enigma. Teenagers do not know how they should link, how to have sex, what does it mean to have a girlfriend, how they should allow the other … are the classic questions. And porn tells you that it has the white paper. But being a falsified vision, it is a danger. In Pornhub there are no preliminary, or protection, or words, and women accept everything and are sexual slaves.

Once a boy was angry because he told me that he had done it for the first time, but that it had been a disaster because the girl had punch her. What had he done? He had suffocated, because he saw it in porn. Of course, children educated and critical thinking know that this does not work, but there are no. And girls who access things who do not want because they think it touches.

Porn is a lie. And as a lie, it is dangerous. What porn tells you is: don’t worry, I explain how sexuality works, which has always been an enigma

Even so, an educator told us that teenagers today have more and also better knowledge of sex. For example, of female pleasure.

Yes, I don’t have a dramatic vision of porn in a moralistic sense. But of their insufficiencies. I find that I have porn addicted patients, for example. And I also find the insufficiency of access to sexuality through porn, because young people also want company, tenderness, and porn does not offer it.

At the end of the book, families are very advised to work the conversation. Why is it so important?

The conversation is something worrying for everyone, because language commits us. But it is a way of treating difficulties. In conversation groups with adolescents, about social networks or harassment, we clearly see that they need to talk about what happens to them. And with some peace of mind. Teenagers need a story of themselves that is not that adults assign them, and must build it.

#José #Ramón #Ubieto #adolescent #expert #psychologist #dont #educate #child #Mark #Zuckerberg

Next Post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recommended