as you can see, she and her family are ecstatic. i wonder what will be waiting for her under the tree? adorable. >> glad she's home. thanks very much. right now, a cnn special report the 360 team produced we're very proud of, inside the secret world of teens starts now. the following is a cnn special report. >> welcome to the cnn special report "being 13 -- inside the secret world of teens." cell phones and social media have revolutionized the way we lived, but how has plugging in changed the wkids are growing u? most of worried about fitting in, being liked, answering the ultimate question, am i cool? imagine middle school with social media, likes, follower, refweets. it's a scoreboard for a realtime 24/7 popularity competition. it's just one of the reasons why kids are hooked, living more and more of their lives online.

but do we really have any idea what it's doing to them? do you know the secret language they're speaking to each other that they don't 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, they're only 13, but we thought it was important to show you all unfiltered. and for the next hour we're 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 13-year-olds 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.

13-year-old 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. >> you're 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 ground-breaking 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? what's the best thing that's happened to you on social media? how often do you worry you're missing out on what your friends are doing online? what our experts discovered might completely change what you think it's 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 i'll 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. it's just a need, like i have to. >> i probably check my phone 90, 100. even when i'm hanging out with people, i still check my phone a lot. the one thing i don't want to do is miss out on something. >> i think i checked it about 100 times at school before. i'll 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 co-author of the study. >> it's 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 don't just get online to see how many likes or favorites they got. they're comparing their numbers to other people's numbers. >> some kids even buy likes and followers. yes, there's 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 it's right there in your face. >> go die. stop trying to be popular.

holy [ bleep ], you're ugly. >> we're 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 13-year-olds. 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 they'd never say face to face. >> i don't like dealing with things face to face because it's really easy to hide behind your phone and on face-to-face, like you have to deal with the other person and i don't like dealing with people that cry or get really mad. and they say something mean back to me and i'll lose and i don't 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 they're 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 what's 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. >> i'm 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 they're having a good time but look deeper. all the teens are tagged except one. a simple mistake? don't bet on it. >> not everyone in a group photo gets tagged because sometimes you don't like a person in the group so you're just like, no, i ain't tagging you. >> even when you're invited to a party in real life you can still

get kicked out of it on social media. >> for a lot of 13-year-olds, 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. you're popular, in, cool. or you're nothing. you're trash. you're left out. you're 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. it's often many of those same kids that retaliate. more than one-third in this study admitted they purposely exclude others as well. >> it's really powerful form of aggression because it's so subtle that it's 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 they'll 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. 360's 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. that's why our next topic is so important. kids as young as 13 exposes to sexting and revenge porn and what that's doing to their mental health coming up on "being 13: inside the secret world of teens." obster's ultimae seafood celebration. with jazzed up new dishes like the decadent grand seafood feast and the ultimate wood-grilled 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 we've supported dreams like these,

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welcome back to "being 13." inside the secret world of teens. time to talk about sex and your teens. specifically, what our study found they're 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, i'm 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. it's 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. it's either like an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend 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 shouldn't 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 13-year-olds 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 he's a fake account. his user name is [ bleep ].hot69. anyway, i think he's fake. he's not even that cute. but i have absolutely no idea

who that is. >> let's look a little more closely at that. this instagram user says he's 18. following a 13-year-old 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 she's tanning at a lake. seems innocent enough, but any follower who clicks on this photo can pinpoint exactly where she is. that's because of the locator function that she didn't 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 won't be discriminating. unfortunately, they don't 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 america's 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 it's kind of for insecure people because you don't feel good about yourself. >> i take a lot of pictures. don't judge. i take like 100 pictures usually or like 150. maybe 200 sometimes if i'm really can't get the right one. >> there it is. >> all of these rules come with a price for an age group that's incredibly self-conscious 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, i'm thinking, you know, like what will people think of this? are they going to approve? are they going to think i'm ugly? are they going to think i'm pretty. i'm 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 i'm going to die. i would rather not eat for a week than get my phone taken away. it's 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. what's 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 don't talk about the kinds of conflicts they are experiencing because they feel like adults can't help. >> despite that finding, the data shows something remarkably empowering for parents. even if they feel they can't control their middle schooler's social media use, even if they don't 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 other's pain. that's right, 13-year-olds 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. >> don't listen to them. they are clearly jealous of you because you're an amazing person. >> and out of 150,000 posts, a lot of it is just kids being kids. >> happy birthday. >> i'm 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 13-year-olds. it's 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, i'll talk to some of the study's most plugged in teens about how quickly a single post can change their entire reputation. and later, i'll get their parents take on what their kids are doing online, all coming up on "being 13: inside the secret world of teens."

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with solar we have saved about 85% on our energy cost. with this extreme drought we're 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, we're building a better california. welcome back to the cnn special report. we're 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 13-year-olds 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. >> we're sharing this stuff that was supposed to be kept private between the two and really shouldn't 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 -- that's pretty common? >> that happens. >> it happened to what's her name? >> this one girl actually sent nudes to a guy like at a different school, and it wasn't 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, you're not even thinking about it and then when someone else does it and get in trouble, it's like the girl got arrested and other guy got expelled. reality check. you're like, you know what?

i need to slow down and retrace my steps and think. >> you can't ever recover from that, though. >> yeah. >> like the ex-boyfriend would post something like that of that girl. he doesn't think about what that actually does to her and how much -- how much crap she's about to get. like if anybody from the school was to see somebody's 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 kid's 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. >> it's interesting because you talk about ruin your image. you're not talking about for one day when you applied for a job someone may see this. you're talking about how your friends are judging you. >> or talk behind your back because that happened to so many people. it's happened to me before, happened to my friends before. >> everyone is going to talk to you. it's inevitable. you can't -- like everyone talks about everyone, and no one can lie about it. like you always talk about someone. that's literally what drama is. it's 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. >> i've read a lot of your postings. the people you are face-to-face seems a lot different than the people you seem to be on social media. do you think that's -- >> no. >> yeah -- >> depends on the person. >> most people. to me, all my friends know that i'm the same, either way. >> yeah. >> jonathan, you think you're 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 that's very graphic that i can't 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 wasn't 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 don't 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. i'm 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 that's 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 that's different than who you really are. >> for example, like you're a double agent or whatever.

you have one side of life and another one. coming up, i'll talk to our study's most plugged-in teens about bullying. and i'll talk to parents who say trying to keep up with their kids' social media is like chasing a runaway train. that's 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.

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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 aren't just a bully or just a victim, they can be both. that's where we pick up my conversation. gia, you sent us a screen shot of from your ask fm page and it's obviously a site where kids post comments and questions anonymously. it says you're annoying and a minute later somebody posted go die. two minutes after that, you have fat thighs and no booty. a minute after that, you're f'ing ugly and a few minutes after that, holy [ bleep ], you're 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 didn't want to tell my mom because it's not something -- you don't want to tell your mom about that. it's kind of like embarrassing. >> it made you cry? >> yeah. it -- because that's a lot at once. >> and yet, you -- did you read them all? you did? you read them all? even though you know it's anonymous, you don't 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 i'm a mean person so i deleted all my "to be rudes," wink, wink. don't tell my parents. it was rude. i'll 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 can't say on television. one of the things you posted that was directed at a girl you said, like on a serious level you're 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. >> uh-huh. >> it's a pretty messed up game. >> it's really messed up. people get -- people are crazy. >> not to let you off the hook so easily. you say people are so crazy, it's messed up. you were doing it. >> yeah, i know. i'm crazy. [ laughter ] we're all teenagers. teenagers do dumb things. that's 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. it's 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 you're 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? >> it's a stressful thing. like this one person i know, she can't go like a day without her phone. she didn't have her phone that night and didn't sleep that night. she felt like she didn't know what was going on. we have group chats and stuff and if i didn't have my phone and i knew they were texting on a group chat, sometimes i feel they might be talking about me and i can't defend myself. if you're talking about me, i want to be there to defend myself and put my two cents into it. >> that's 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 you're not at the place, you want to know what is going on. >> doesn't seem like it's making you feel better knowing this stuff. >> coming up, i'll get their parents' take on this including if they think their kids are addicted to social media. we asked all parents to confiscate their teen's 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 can't have your phone? >> i can take pictures and send them to you. >> it's not the same! because, healthier doesn't 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 we're here to make healthier happen.

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welcome back to "being 13: inside the lives of teens." most parents were at a loss how to deal with their teen's social media use. despite many monitoring feeds, experts found two-thirds 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 gia's reaction when you told her not to use her phone. >> are you crying because you can't have your phone?

gia, look, are you crying? [ crying ] >> are you upset you can't have your phone for three days? >> she's recording you. >> i know. >> gia. >> i can take pictures and send them to you. >> it's 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, it's really that important to you that you can't 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 don't have a way of communicating. so you take the phone away and they talk to you and tell you about their day. what they've done or what's going on. >> sociologists don't use the term addiction. do you think your kids are addicted -- >> absolutely. >> oh, yeah. >> absolutely. >> yes. >> that's universal. didn't 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. didn't 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 that's 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 gabby's video about followers she didn't know for her mom and the group. >> i just let him follow me. his user name is [ bleep ].hot69. anyway. >> and she's got more than 2,300 followers. and it's 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, it's got to frighten you and worry you. >> right. and i'm a parent who probably over monitors, you know, social media, but the geographic location is something that i'm not very familiar with, and so that is pretty terrifying. >> yeah, you can turn it off. it's 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. >> i've 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 it's 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 can't 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. that's one of the tamer parts of it. that's not a lot different from what other kids are saying out there. i'm not zeroing in on him but when i asked him about it, he basically said it's about kind of adopting a persona that's not necessarily -- he's not going around saying this in real life. do you monitor jonathan's postings a lot or worry about them? >> i would say like any other parent, i don't monitor him as much or as deeply as i would want to.

those type of things i would find distressing coming from my son. >> what's interesting is to me, that's not -- certainly not the jonathan i just met. >> no. >> and it's not the jonathan you know. >> it's not the jonathan i would have conveyed to you. so that's something that definitely raises my eyebrow, and you'll probably catch that on camera later, too, but, yeah, that's where -- that causes concern. >> and that's not all to be concerned about. many teens use social media to cry for help when they're 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 don't 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. she's only had one or two years with friends and then we're 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 don't understand you. >> sometimes being 13 feels like no one understands you. that's where good parents really make a difference. just a note, i've done a lot of reports over the years about kids who commit suicide after being bullied online. that's 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 didn't happen. coming up next, i'll sit down with experts who can help teens and parents understand how

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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 it's not social media they're addicted to but addicted to each other. >> they're addicted to the peer connection and affirmation they're able to get via social media. it's 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. it's 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? >> it's highly combustible and flammable and accelerates the degree to which kids form their own self-image, have feed back from peers that strongly informs what they think -- how they

think about themselves. that's a lot of what they're addicted to. they're addicted to each other but also really addicted to the image of themselves as it's reflected in the eyes of their peers. it's about figuring out who they are. i think this platform -- these platforms really speed that process up in a way that's truly new. >> there's 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. >> what's 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 they're 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 what's 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 they'll know more about the impact on their children. i also believe that they should be their children's 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. don't sweat the small stuff.

don't worry if you aren't tagged. don't count likes. don't exclude other people. there's a lot of things that can make social media healthier for kids. >> parents can help kids remember that it's 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 it's making you feel bad you can just put it down for a while. >> i'm glad i'm not 13, and i'm glad i don't have a 13-year-old right now. it's a lot of -- there's a lot out there that parents have to keep in mind. thank you both. that's 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. i'm anderson cooper. good night. live made this hour, more troops are being sent to iraq to help fight isis. plus, chicago's top skop is being forced to resign in the aftermath of a police shooting of an african-american 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. i'm isha sesay, "newsroom l.a." starts right now.