But do we really have any idea what its doing to them . Do you know the secret language theyre speaking to each other that they dont want their parents or teachers to understand. We spent the last two years looking for answers in a first of its kind investigation. We want to warn you, what we found kids say online might shock you. Remember, theyre only 13, but we thought it was important to show you all unfiltered. And for the next hour were taking you here inside the secret world of teens. Millions of tweets, comments, picture, post, likes, hashtags, videos, a steady stream of social media activity and all constantly at the tinger tips of 13yearolds across america. The volume of internet noise can be overwhelming. Aechb indecipherable to adults. How to crack the code . We went directly to the source. 13yearold themselves. We met with kids across the koun tr tri from cities, suburbs and small towns and they gave our experts access to their social media feeds in real time. With permission of their parents and their schools, teens registered their instagram, twitter and Facebook Accounts through a secure private server that stored everything they posted over six months. From mean comment dooshs. Sweetie, i success you stop being a bitch about it. To serious ones. You ear about to get your [ bleep ] ass kicked. To supportive messages. Youre my best friend and i trust you with anything. To nasty ones. You dirty bitch, dirty bitch. 150,000 pieces of a very complicated puzzle, seen, stored and analyzed by our team of academics. This groundbreaking cnn investigation is the first major study to look at what kids actually say on social media and why it matters so much to them. Designed by renowned child clinical psychologist Marion Underwood and dr. Robert faris. Teens answered survey questions like how often have you gotten into a conflict with someone on social media . Have you posted something on social media you later regretted . Whats the best thing thats happened to you on social media . How often do you worry youre missing out on what your friends are doing online . What our experts discovered might completely change what you think its like being 13. The first headline, the more teens look at social media, the more distressed they can become. Teens check their social media feeds way more than they actually post something. Our experts call it lurking. And the heaviest users in this study told us they check their feeds more than 100 times a day. Sometimes ill catch myself like going on my social media way too much. About 200 times in a day. We asked about 20 teens in our study to send us videos responding to questions about the power of social media in their lives. The most times i check it in a day, i lose track. Its just a need, like i have to. I probably check my phone 90, 100. Even when im hanging out with people, i still check my phone a lot. The one thing i dont want to do is miss out on something. I think i checked it about 100 times at school before. Ill whip it out in the middle of class and wonder, what else is everybody else up to . Why check over 100 times a day . They are worried about fitting in. 21 say i want to make sure no one is saying mean things about me. 36 say i want to see if my friends are doing things without me. 61 say i want to see if my posts are getting likes and comments. I would still check my phone because people post things at school and stuff. You still always worry. Clinical psychologist dr. Marion underwood is the coauthor of the study. Its stressful to constantly be monitoring and worrying about what people how people might have responded to what you put online. This age group has a lot of anxiety about where they fit in, how they rank, what their peer status is. They dont just get online to see how many likes or favorites they got. Theyre comparing their numbers to other peoples numbers. Some kids even buy likes and followers. Yes, theres an app for that, too. Why do they do it . Think of social media as a popularity barometer. How do kids boost their status . Our study found it was bullying or social aggression that did the trick. Sometimes the aggression is hidden or covert and sometimes its right there in your face. Go die. Stop trying to be popular. Holy [ bleep ], youre ugly. Were going to come for your life. You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. Get to a [ bleep ] point where i just want to burn bodies. And those are some of the tamer posts we can actually show on television. Remember, these are all from 13yearolds. How can they talk to each other like that you might ask . The answer is complicated. Because the communication is to remove themselves emotionally from what they say. In fact, most told us they say things on social media theyd never say face to face. I dont like dealing with things face to face because its really easy to hide behind your phone and on facetoface, like you have to deal with the other person and i dont like dealing with people that cry or get really mad. And they Say Something mean back to me and ill lose and i dont like losing. Some even had Horror Stories of friends cyberbullied who faked social media accounts. They wanted an Instagram Page and they made a fake account. And they just scroll through every single one of her photos and commented something rude. No human should be able to say such rude things to someone, especially behind a screen where theyre being cowards. Direct aggression hurts but covert aggression, according to our experts, can hurt even deeper. Our study found that sites like instagram and twitter are the new front lines in this hidden warfare and parents hardly ever recognize the weapons. Some attacks are cleverly cloaked through whats called subtweeting. A subtweet is when someone talks about somebody else through twitter but without actually saying the names. Teens beat up on a classmate in the cyberworld without including their twitter handle. Even though in the real world, everyone knows who they are referring to. Im so done trying to get along with you. I really want to choke that girl and send her across a bridge. Then sins of omission. Intentionally excluding peers just to hurt them. One favorite technique is not to tag the name of a friend on a photo. Take a group photo on instagram. Everyone looks like theyre having a good time but look deeper. All the teens are tagged except one. A simple mistake . Dont bet on it. Not everyone in a group photo gets tagged because sometimes you dont like a person in the group so youre just like, no, i aint tagging you. Even when youre invited to a party in real life you can still get kicked out of it on social media. For a lot of 13yearolds, they really have one social group. And if they are left out of that one group, that feels devastating. They also view it as all or nothing. Youre popular, in, cool. Or youre nothing. Youre trash. Youre left out. Youre excluded. They feel like it will last forever. Do people ever post photos to make people feel left out on purpose . Yes, that actually happens a lot. Nearly half of the teens in this study said they felt purposely excluded by friends online. Its often many of those same kids that retaliate. More than onethird in this study admitted they purposely exclude others as well. Its really powerful form of aggression because its so subtle that its considered bad form to respond. So lots of us have experienced the pain of it. Many who do it are doing it for the purpose of hurting others but they can do it with the full expectation theyll not pay one single social consequence. Our study found the biggest source of online conflict for middle schoolers is their friends. Not strangers. Not kids from a rival click. Their biggest source of pain is from those closest to them. 360s other expert dr. Robert faris calls all of this social combat. To play the popularity game effectively, some kids believe they need to engage in some hard ball. And i think they do things deliberately to make their rivals in particular who are often their friends feel pretty bad. Those bad feelings that humiliation which comes from bullying and social combat is only intensified on social media where everyone is watching all the time. In fact, our study found that the line between the real world and the cyberworld no longer exists for kids in middle school. You heard that right. The line between the real world and cyberworld no longer exists for kids in middle school. In fact, what happens online sometimes matters even more to them than what happens in real life. Why . Well, the simple answer is there are more witnesses. Thats why our next topic is so important. Kids as young as 13 exposes to sexting and revenge porn and what thats doing to their Mental Health coming up on being 13 inside the secret world of teens. Obsters ultimae seafood celebration. With jazzed up new dishes like the decadent grand seafood feast and the ultimate woodgrilled feast why wait to celebrate . So hurry in, it ends soon. Why should over two hundred years of citi history matter to you . Well, because it tells us something powerful about progress that whether times are good or bad, people and their ideas will continue to move the world forward. As long as they have someone to believe in them. Citi financed the transatlantic cable that connected continents. And the panama canal, that made our world a smaller place. We backed the Marshall Plan that helped europe regain its strength. And pioneered the atm, for cash, anytime. For over two centuries weve supported dreams like these, and the people and companies behind them. So why should that matter to you . Because, today, we are still helping progress makers turn their ideas into reality. And the next great idea could be yours. And this year, look at whate he put in our driveway. The lexus december to remember sales event is here. Lease the 2016 es350 for 349 a month for 36 months and well make your first months payment. See your lexus dealer. At ally bank no branches equalsits a fact. Kind of like mute buttons equal danger. That sound good . Not being on this phone call sounds good. Its not muted. Was that you jason . It was geoffrey it was jason. It couldve been brenda. When i went on to ancestry, i just put in the name yes, we are twins. Of my parents and my grandparents. I was getting all these leaves and i was going back generation after generation. You start to see documents and you see signatures of people that youve never met. I mean, you dont know these people, but you feel like you do. You get connected to them. I wish that i could get into a time machine and go back 100 years, 200 years and just meet these people. Being on ancestry just made me feel like i belonged somewhere. Discover your story. Start searching for free now at ancestry. Com. Welcome back to being 13. Inside the secret world of teens. Time to talk about sex and your teens. Specifically, what our study found theyre exposed to when using social media. I want to warn you, some of what you hear might shock you considering these kids are only 13 years old. I always tell them, im like if you send me a dick pic i will slice it off. This study found kids as young as 13 are exposed to the darker sexualized side of the internet. I was like walking out of the store with my mom and looked down at my phone and there is this wiener, and i was like mom 15 of middle schoolers admitted they received inappropriate photos. The damage lasts long after the photo is deleted. These kids were almost 50 more distressed than others in our study. Receiving these pictures is upsetting, especially at such a young age. Its illegal, worrisome, scary, dangerous, loaded. If you tell an adult, everybody will get in a lot of trouble. So i think it puts them in a really tough position. Just like in the adult world, sometimes middle schoolers use these sexualized photos for revenge. What they like to call it is exposing. Its either like an exgirlfriend or exboyfriend and what they do is post naked pictures and nudes of the person and sharing the stuff supposed to be kept private between the two and really shouldnt have happened in the first place but it did and now they are spreading it. Remember, these kids are only 13. When they are hurt, when they are furious, when they go through a breakup, which is very intense and difficult at this age, unfortunately, they are likely to use social media to get back to the person by sharing inappropriate pictures. Unfortunately, that is just perfect ammunition. Many middle schoolers we spoke to said their parents warned them about the dangers of inappropriate photos and say their parents warned them to watch out for online predators. We asked our group of 13yearolds to scroll through their followers and look for strangers. A lot of people follow me that i do not know. Here is this one person, i think hes a fake account. His user name is [ bleep ]. Hot69. Anyway, i think hes fake. Hes not even that cute. But i have absolutely no idea who that is. Lets look a little more closely at that. This Instagram User says hes 18. Following a 13yearold girl. There is actually a lot of people i have no idea who they are, but i just let them follow me because the more, the merrier. Gabby, like many middle schoolers in this study, shares a lot of her life on social media, sometimes even more than she realizes. Take a look at this instagram post. She wants to show her friends shes tanning at a lake. Seems innocent enough, but any follower who clicks on this photo can pinpoint exactly where she is. Thats because of the locator function that she didnt even know was turned on. According to the fbi, there are more than half a million sexual predators online every single day in america and they regularly create fake online profiles to groom unsuspecting verdicts. For a Certain Group of young people, they want to attract as many as possible. They wont be discriminating. Unfortunately, they dont have that entire cast of thousands in mind with everything they post. Other potential hazards of posting photos are not obvious to adults. Take selfies. The art of the selfie has become the National Pastime for americas teens, and there are rules. Lots and lots of them. Do you feel confident . Is the outfit amazing, or do you feel really pretty or on point that day . Add different faces like duck face or smiling. Sometimes you share like this, sometimes like this. I specialize in this. I like made this google document of all my rules and requirements on how to take a selfie. So then when i take the selfies, i just scroll through and just see the ones that i want. The goal is to make yourself look the best you can because its kind of for insecure people because you dont feel good about yourself. I take a lot of pictures. Dont judge. I take like 100 pictures usually or like 150. Maybe 200 sometimes if im really cant get the right one. There it is. All of these rules come with a price for an age group thats incredibly selfconscious about their looks, constantly scrolling through photos that are more like glammed up fashion shoots more than snapshots from middle school can make being 13 even harder. I definitely feel pressure to look perfect on instagram. What goes through my mind as i post a picture of myself, im thinking, you know, like what will people think of this . Are they going to approve . Are they going to think im ugly . Are they going to think im pretty. Im thinking all these things and comparing myself to others. And those anxious feelings comparing themselves to others and the constant need to check their status leads a lot of parents to ask a simple question is my child addicted to their phone . Addicted to social media . Our study found it does have some hallmarks of clinical addiction. For example, what some kids said about losing phone privileges sounded a lot like an addict suffering from withdrawal. I literally feel like im going to die. I would rather not eat for a week than get my phone taken away. Its really bad. When i get my phone taken away, i feel kind of naked. I do feel like kind of empty without my phone. I hate whenever i get my phone taken away. It is like the worst thing you can ever do to me. Makes me so mad. I just want to rip my hair out. 57 of kids in this study said they would rather be grounded than lose their phone. Meaning if they had to choose, they would rather be cut off from the real world than the cyberworld. We see a lot of evidence of, if not out right addiction to social media, heavy dependence on it and almost a compulsive need to be checking social media. We have very high rates of kids being anxious, worried they are missing out on what their friends are doing online. Beyond that, they are addicted to the image of themselves that they see reflected in the eyes of their peers. The majority of parents said they try to control their kids social media use. But our study found they have limited success. Whats more, parents were way out of touch with what their kids were feeling. About 60 underestimated how lonely, worried or depressed their kids were, and 94 under estimated the amount of fighting going on. What is going on is two things. One is that the language of social media, the subtleties of exclusion and social combat are indecipherable for parents. The other thing is kids by and large dont talk about the kinds of conflicts they are experiencing because they feel like adults cant help. Despite that finding, the data shows something remarkably empowering for parents. Even if they feel they cant control their middle schoolers social media use, even if they dont understand a lot of what is being said online, just trying really counts. Making an effort to monitor what your kids are doing online mitigated the negative effects of their kids experiencing conflict with their peers. Parent monitoring effectively erased the negative effects of online conflicts. Friends ease each others pain. Thats right, 13yearolds stab each other in the back, but we also saw thousands of posts of love and support. I am thankful to have the most amazing best friend ever. Friends standing up for each other. Dont listen to them. They are clearly jealous of you because youre an amazing person. And out of 150,000 posts, a lot of it is just kids being kids. Happy birthday. Im in my bed listening to beyonce. What can i say, never a bad time to listen to beyonce. Social media is positive for a lot of 13yearolds. Its a way to connect with friends and see what people are doing and a way for them to feel affirmed, supported, lifted up. There is nothing about the technology that means it has to be bad. Unfortunately, there is the occasional hurtful comment and painful experience of an exclusion that i think looms large for most of them. Up next, ill talk to some of the studys most plugged in teens about how quickly a single post can change their entire reputation. And later, ill get their parents take on what their kids are doing online, all coming up on being 13 inside the secret world of teens. Yea, its nespresso. I want in. Youre ready. Get ready to experience a cup above. Is that coffee . Nespresso. What else . Some of these experimentsere notmay not work. Il. But a few might shape the future. Like turning algae into biofuel. New technology for capturing co2 emissions. And cars twice as efficient as the average car today. Ideas exxonmobil scientists are working on to make energy go further. No matter how many tries it takes. Energy lives here. At t and directv are now one. Which means you can watch in the house, in a treehouse, or even in miss pepperpies house. Pause in your pjs and hit play during a pb j. Nice and enjoy some cartoons instead of listening to dads car tunes. dad meet you all the way get the best of both worlds. Directv at home and 2 wireless lines. From directv and at t. I work here at my namfive star auto care. In rocklin california. A lot of thought was put into the change to solar and we couldnt have done it without pg e. Pg e is very committed to clean energy. Working with five star auto care we looked at how we could make their business more Energy Efficient and save them money in the long run. With solar we have saved about 85 on our energy cost. With this extreme drought were using the savings from our solar system to save every last drop of water. If you are looking for ways to save energy, your first step is to call pg e. Together, were building a better california. Welcome back to the cnn special report. Were showing you what your kids are seeing, doing and saying on social media. Some may have surprised you and you may be asking yourself, how can 13yearolds act like that . We sat down with them and asked. We invited eight kids from more than 200 in our study to talk about social media and take us further into the secret life of teens. One thing that came up in our conversation was the dangers of sexting. They post private pictures of the other their ex, these pictures are, well, they are naked pictures. So we played what morgan had to say in her video to the whole group. Were sharing this stuff that was supposed to be kept private between the two and really shouldnt have happened in the first place, but it did, and now they are spreading it. Does that happen do all of you know about this . That happens thats pretty common . That happens. It happened to whats her name . This one girl actually sent nudes to a guy like at a different school, and it wasnt even at our school and that guy sent it to kids at our school. Three kids got expelled, she got arrested. A couple kids got suspended. Stuff like that. What kind of an impact does that make you think about what you send out . Definitely. Yeah. Like a reality check. So you, at the time, youre not even thinking about it and then when someone else does it and get in trouble, its like the girl got arrested and other guy got expelled. Reality check. Youre like, you know what . I need to slow down and retrace my steps and think. You cant ever recover from that, though. Yeah. Like the exboyfriend would post Something Like that of that girl. He doesnt think about what that actually does to her and how much how much crap shes about to get. Like if anybody from the school was to see somebodys like from our school was to see somebody that goes to our school nudes, it would cause a frenzy. Everybody would go crazy. Oh, yeah they will talk about you endlessly. Sharing nude photos is not the only way to ruin a kids reputation. Believe it or not, just posting one bad selfie can change everything. Like, if you could be like the most popular kid in school and post this one picture and everyone just like takes your life, like your social media life. However you want to take it, and you go from the most popular kid to the most made fun of kid. Things are that tenuous. It can change it can change that quick. If you post something bad on instagram or any type of social media, you can just ruin how like your image. Like because you could have so many perfect selfies and have a really, like, what . Went from being perfect to like to this. Its interesting because you talk about ruin your image. Youre not talking about for one day when you applied for a job someone may see this. Youre talking about how your friends are judging you. Or talk behind your back because that happened to so many people. Its happened to me before, happened to my friends before. Everyone is going to talk to you. Its inevitable. You cant like everyone talks about everyone, and no one can lie about it. Like you always talk about someone. Thats literally what drama is. Its what gossip is. And everyone does it. Beyond gossip, some teens admitted the pressure to fit in to be popular makes them act like an entirely different person online saying and doing things they would never do in the real world. Ive read a lot of your postings. The people you are facetoface seems a lot different than the people you seem to be on social media. Do you think thats no. Yeah depends on the person. Most people. To me, all my friends know that im the same, either way. Yeah. Jonathan, you think youre the same in real life as you are in social media . Yeah. Yes. He really is. Despite what he says, the affable, respectful jonathan in the real world seems to totally contradict jonathan in the virtual world. A couple posts of yours that some of them were pretty sexually explicit, used a lot of profanity. Somebody posted somebody else posted a photo that i want to show, and you reposted and made a comment and said let me hit. You posted a photo thats very graphic that i cant put on television. It said, most of these bitches at Rodney Thompson middle you dirty bitch, you dirty bitch, you dirty bitch. I found that on a repost on twitter. I found that on there and posted it on my instagram. Do you worry about well then. Some of the stuff you put out or yeah, but at one point, i wasnt really using it and people would tell me you got to make your instagram useful or funny, so at one point i was like, okay, i mean, i can try. So i took like a couple days to figure out what to do and how to set it up. Do you worry about that . Saying let me hit it . I was just playing around. I dont mess with drugs or whatever. That was one of seven weed posts. So i mean, i guess it gets to the earlier questi about presenting yourself on social media as different than you are in real life. Im not picking on jonathan here because a lot of you and a lot of the 200 kids we talked to, the way they the way you all talk is very different than the way you talk certainly to adults and even just listening to you in the green room, the way you talk to each other. It seems like sometimes you adopt a persona maybe thats tougher on social media than it is in real life. Yeah. Yeah. Every day is just about social media and how you and how people see you. So basically, you can be the most quietest kid in the back of the class, no friends, anything. As soon as you get home, you can go on the computer to facebook and start doing whatever you want, and then you can have like 15k followers. 15,000 followers . Yeah. You can create an identity thats different than who you really are. For example, like youre a double agent or whatever. You have one side of life and another one. Coming up, ill talk to our studys most pluggedin teens about bullying. And ill talk to parents who say trying to keep up with their kids social media is like chasing a runaway train. Thats coming up on being 13 inside the secret world of teens. Having one tool to get the job done helps you work smarter. Craftsman tools have a long history of making tool sets that help you move from job to job without skipping a beat. Like this 42 piece 3 8 inch drive bit socket set. No need for all those hex keys anymore, this ratchet set does it all. With all these bit sockets and an extension on the ratchet, i can get into all of the tough to reach places. Saving my knuckles, and saving time. With this set, i have all the tools i need to get the job done quickly. No more hex keys. Just get this handy 42 pc set, and get it now at 70 off, for only 29. 99. And craftsman hand tools are protected by a lifetime full warranty. This Holiday Season craftsman tools are the perfect gift for the one who keeps things moving around your house. Our study found that middle schoolers use social media to boost their own popularity status and knock other kids down the ladder. Our experts call it social combat. Most kids arent just a bully or just a victim, they can be both. Thats where we pick up my conversation. Gia, you sent us a screen shot of from your ask fm page and its obviously a site where kids post comments and questions anonymously. It says youre annoying and a minute later somebody posted go die. Two minutes after that, you have fat thighs and no booty. A minute after that, youre fing ugly and a few minutes after that, holy [ bleep ], youre ugly. All of you are very attractive girls and guys. What goes through your mind when you read Something Like that . At that point i think i was crying. I didnt want to tell my mom because its not something you dont want to tell your mom about that. Its kind of like embarrassing. It made you cry . Yeah. It because thats a lot at once. And yet, you did you read them all . You did . You read them all . Even though you know its anonymous, you dont know who these people are. Why do you think you read it . Because if one person says something and then it just keeps coming, like you want to know what they are saying. Another favorite technique for social combat is what teens call a tbr. It stands for to be rude. If you preference the insult with tbr on social media, it seems like you can pretty much get away with anything. 1,000 comments on my instagram. Zack sent us a video about a tbr he orchestrated against a girl. The sniping went on for 16 hours and involved nearly 1,000 comments. I deleted it because i knew you guys were going to be watching me, and i was like they will think im a mean person so i deleted all my to be rudes, wink, wink. Dont tell my parents. It was rude. Ill admit. It was rude. She tried to cook me. I cooked her. How it works. [ laughter ] so the experts who were following this did actually catch the exchange that you tried to delete. And one of the things a lot of the stuff we cant say on television. One of the things you posted that was directed at a girl you said, like on a serious level youre about to get your [ bleep ] kicked. This went on for a long time and a lot of serious back and forth. And yet, at the end of it, it seemed like it was treated like a game. Uhhuh. Its a pretty messed up game. Its really messed up. People get people are crazy. Not to let you off the hook so easily. You say people are so crazy, its messed up. You were doing it. Yeah, i know. Im crazy. [ laughter ] were all teenagers. Teenagers do dumb things. Thats like one of the things our parents say. You make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, every one says mean things. Mean things. Remember 21 of teens in this study say they check their social media so much because they want to make sure no one was saying mean things about them. Its another reason many of the teens we spoke to said they felt like they were addicted. The thing i keep coming back to is how much your generation, the pressure youre under or the pressure you feel to constantly monitor your social status, to constantly check how are you up, are you down . Who is liking you . Who is not . Its a stressful thing. Like this one person i know, she cant go like a day without her phone. She didnt have her phone that night and didnt sleep that night. She felt like she didnt know what was going on. We have group chats and stuff and if i didnt have my phone and i knew they were texting on a group chat, sometimes i feel they might be talking about me and i cant defend myself. If youre talking about me, i want to be there to defend myself and put my two cents into it. Thats a big concern, the idea of missing out is huge. Yeah. Whether missing out on an event or what they are saying about you or somebody else. Because people really want to know what other people are doing and what they are missing out on. Even if youre not at the place, you want to know what is going on. Doesnt seem like its making you feel better knowing this stuff. Coming up, ill get their parents take on this including if they think their kids are addicted to social media. We asked all parents to confiscate their teens phones the weekend before our taping just to see how long they could go without social media. One mom was so surprised she grabbed her phone and recorded it. Are you crying because you cant have your phone . I can take pictures and send them to you. Its not the same because, healthier doesnt happen all by itself. It needs to be earned every day. Using wellness to keep away illness. And believing a single life can be made better by millions of others. As a Health Services and Innovation Company optum powers modern healthcare by connecting every part of it. So while the world keeps searching for healthier were here to make healthier happen. dramatic music centrum brings us the biggest news in multivitamin history. a moment when something so familiar becomes something so new. impact on metal introducing new centrum vitamints. A multivitamin that contains a full spectrum of essential nutrients you enjoy like a mint. New centrum vitamints. Go to centrum. Com for a 4 coupon. Usic thunder clatter by wild cub new centrum vitamints. Most weekends only last a couple of days. Some last a lifetime. Hampton. We go together. Always get the lowest price, only when you book direct at hampton. Com welcome back to being 13 inside the lives of teens. Most parents were at a loss how to deal with their teens social media use. Despite many monitoring feeds, experts found twothirds of parents under estimated how lonely, worried and depressed their kids were, and every single parent, 94 underestimated how much conflict their teen was involved in. 94 . Parents of the teens we met so we invited them to talk and begin with an experiment to see how hooked their kids were on the phones. We asked, i know, your kids to not use their phones for this weekend. I think only a few of them were actually able to do that. I want to show gias reaction when you told her not to use her phone. Are you crying because you cant have your phone . Gia, look, are you crying . [ crying ] are you upset you cant have your phone for three days . Shes recording you. I know. Gia. I can take pictures and send them to you. Its not the same did her reaction surprise you . No, that was actually a calm version. The first time that i told her about that, she really cried a lot harder. Like wow, its really that important to you that you cant shut it off for a day. Does it drive you all nuts how much they use the phone . It does. You can feel the life being drained from you. Sucks it out of you because they dont have a way of communicating. So you take the phone away and they talk to you and tell you about their day. What theyve done or whats going on. Sociologists dont use the term addiction. Do you think your kids are addicted absolutely. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Thats universal. Didnt even have to think about it. Jonathan got in trouble and his phone was pulled away from him for like two weeks. He literally went into depression. His mother and i watched him every day. He moped. Didnt want to speak. His mood was foul. And finally, at the end of that when he got his phone back, it was like we turned on a light switch. So thats how powerful all of this is. Beyond worries of addiction, one of parents biggest concerns is online predators. A lot of people follow me that i do not know. We played gabbys video about followers she didnt know for her mom and the group. I just let him follow me. His user name is [ bleep ]. Hot69. Anyway. And shes got more than 2,300 followers. And its interesting because she, about a month ago, she posted a picture of herself sunning herself. Whether she was aware or not, with the click of a button anyone could access geo location data to know where she was. Does this kind of stuff, its got to frighten you and worry you. Right. And im a parent who probably over monitors, you know, social media, but the geographic location is something that im not very familiar with, and so that is pretty terrifying. Yeah, you can turn it off. Its a thing you can actually easily turn off. That has to be one of the things, just keeping up with the technology has got to be so worrying. Ive asked them, do you know all your followers . Of course not. The more followers you have, again, the status, it looks good. The need for status or popularity was something these parents were very aware of. The lengths some of their teens were going to achieve it, that was a surprise. It does seem like a lot of kids are posting stuff that they think will boost their social status but its not really who they are. And jonathan is an example of that. I mean, he referenced marijuana like seven times. He said at one point about we cant actually show the graphic of a picture. He said most of these bitches at Rodney Thompson god damn you dirty bitches. You dirty bitches. You dirty bitches. Thats one of the tamer parts of it. Thats not a lot different from what other kids are saying out there. Im not zeroing in on him but when i asked him about it, he basically said its about kind of adopting a persona thats not necessarily hes not going around saying this in real life. Do you monitor jonathans postings a lot or worry about them . I would say like any other parent, i dont monitor him as much or as deeply as i would want to. Those type of things i would find distressing coming from my son. Whats interesting is to me, thats not certainly not the jonathan i just met. No. And its not the jonathan you know. Its not the jonathan i would have conveyed to you. So thats something that definitely raises my eyebrow, and youll probably catch that on camera later, too, but, yeah, thats where that causes concern. And thats not all to be concerned about. Many teens use social media to cry for help when theyre lonely, sad, angry. Simone puts a lot of a lot out on social media. I just want to put up show you some of what some of the things she posted. She said, i just need one good friend i can tell everything to. She posted i dont have no type of friends. I really hate this school. I really want to choke that girl, sling her across a bridge. It really gets to a [ bleep ] point where i just want to burn bodies. Does it surprise you to see her putting that out on social media . Yes, but i can understand her frustration. We moved a lot. Military family. I was in the military. Father is in the military. Shes only had one or two years with friends and then were move again. So then you learn somebody new, the school is new, friends are new, the area is new. You get to a point where people dont understand you. Sometimes being 13 feels like no one understands you. Thats where good parents really make a difference. Just a note, ive done a lot of reports over the years about kids who commit suicide after being bullied online. Thats why our team of Child Development experts who we were working with examined all 150,000 posts. We had a plan in place to notify parents and schools immediately if they saw any red flags for suicide risk. Thankfully that didnt happen. Coming up next, ill sit down with experts who can help teens and parents understand how to navigate this brave new world of social media. Santa has a magic snow globe for every family. And whatever he puts in our snow globe, shows up at our house. And this year, look at what he put in our driveway. Santa can do that . He sure can, honey. The lexus december to remember sales event is going on now, with some of the most magical deals of the year. This is the pursuit of perfection. Welcome back. This is the first generation of kids to grow up on social media. You just heard some of their parents talk about the frustration trying to raise their plugged in teens. We wanted to give families some practical information, what to worry about, what to let go and how to use social media to deepen their relationships with their kids. We turned to dr. Underwood and dr. Faris for tips. You say its not social media theyre addicted to but addicted to each other. Theyre addicted to the peer connection and affirmation theyre able to get via social media. Its not the screens or devices but the access that social media gives them to each other to know what each other are doing and where they stand, how many people like what they posted, how many people followed them today and unfollowed them. Its the peer connection. The affirmation and reinforcement that is highly adductive. Your report compares rocket fuel for teens, that is accelerates can you explain what that means . Its highly combustible and flammable and accelerates the degree to which kids form their own selfimage, have feed back from peers that strongly informs what they think how they think about themselves. Thats a lot of what theyre addicted to. Theyre addicted to each other but also really addicted to the image of themselves as its reflected in the eyes of their peers. Its about figuring out who they are. I think this platform these platforms really speed that process up in a way thats truly new. Theres another phenomenon that people have written about since the 1960s, the imaginary audience. Adolescents walk around think everyone is scrutinizing their life. This is the audience come to life. Whats the message for parents watching this . What can a parent do . Two things are important for parents. We need to talk with our children about their online lives and what social media platforms theyre using. If we see them frantically tied to their phones say, is something going on . Is there some sort of problem . We need to get them talking to us about whats going on online. That should start really early as soon as they get on these platforms. The other thing is sign up for these services themselves. They need to understand how they work. So that theyll know more about the impact on their children. I also believe that they should be their childrens twitter followers, facebook friends. For parents, sign up, know what these sites are. Know what your kids are doing and have ongoing conversations with them about it. Talk to them. Help them navigate the digital street. Encourage them not to try and keep score. Dont sweat the small stuff. Dont worry if you arent tagged. Dont count likes. Dont exclude other people. Theres a lot of things that can make social media healthier for kids. Parents can help kids remember that its possible to have fun other in ways. There are other things important and interesting and just use the strength of your relationship with your child to get them away from it periodically. Not by punishment by ripping it out of their hands. If its making you feel bad you can just put it down for a while. Im glad im not 13, and im glad i dont have a 13yearold right now. Its a lot of theres a lot out there that parents have to keep in mind. Thank you both. Thats it for this cnn special report being 13 inside the secret world of teens. If you want to learn more about our study go to cnn. Com being13. Im anderson cooper. Good night. Live made this hour, more troops are being sent to iraq to help fight isis. Plus, chicagos top skop is being forced to resign in the aftermath of a Police Shooting of an africanamerican teenager. And facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pledges to give away billions of dollars of shares. The big change that inspired this big announcement. Hello and welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. Im isha sesay, newsroom l. A. Starts right now