Children and Teenagers
How the Self-View Distorts Identity Formation
Forced to temporarily transition to homeschooling, eight-year-old Alice saw herself during a school lesson for the first time. It turned out that looking at the laptop screen while trying to solve a math problem was an entirely different experience than looking in the bathroom mirror while brushing her teeth or watching a birthday video. After three months of daily online classes, she told her mother: "I don't want to turn on my camera. I have a weird face when I think."
Alice, of course, is a composite character for this book. But this exact clinical picture has been observed by tens of thousands of child psychologists and educators worldwide—both during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond it, whenever remote or hybrid learning is implemented. This can happen to children who previously gave no thought to their own appearance (at least while studying), suddenly finding themselves with the ability to observe themselves for hours on end.
On a Global Scale
According to the Pew Research Center, by 2024, 48% of American teenagers believed that social media negatively affects their generation—up from 32% just two years earlier [1]. A sixteen-percentage-point increase in two years, given properly conducted measurements, represents a severe shift. Furthermore, 44% of teenagers reported actively trying to reduce their screen time but failing. These figures apply to social media in general, but video conferencing is part of that same digital environment, with one crucial difference: you can step away from Instagram without real-world consequences; you cannot step away from a Zoom school lesson.
Precise statistics on exactly how many children regularly experience discomfort specifically from the self-view during online classes do not yet exist—researchers are only just beginning to isolate this specific factor from the broader picture of digital fatigue. But indirect data is unambiguous: everything we know about the effect of mirrors on adults (Part I of this book) applies to children as well—with the caveat that a child has fewer resources for self-regulation and lacks a stable, fully formed self-concept. The self-view simply "sucks the child in."
The Mirror Stage
In 1949, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the "mirror stage"—a developmental phase (typically between six and eighteen months) when a child first recognizes themselves in a reflection and begins to form a cohesive image of their own body [2]. Prior to this moment, the infant experiences themselves in a fragmented way: as a collection of sensations, movements, and sounds. The mirror provides visual unity: "This is me."
Lacan emphasized that this moment is not only joyful but also anxiety-inducing: the reflection is always slightly "alien," slightly idealized. The gap between the internal sensation of the self and the external image of the self does not disappear over time; it becomes a constant engine for identity formation.
Lacan's idea later received empirical support outside the psychoanalytic tradition. Gordon Gallup demonstrated in 1970 that chimpanzees are capable of mirror self-recognition, an ability shared by only a few species [3]. In 1972, Beulah Amsterdam systematically described the emergence of self-recognition in human toddlers, reliably occurring by 18–24 months [4]. Self-recognition is linked to the maturation of specific neural structures; without them, the skill does not form. Incidentally, the child who recognizes themselves in the mirror simultaneously acquires the capacity for shame—that is, the ability to evaluate themselves through the eyes of another.
The "mirror" through which a modern child navigates this extended stage of identity formation is not a reflective surface on a closet door, but a screen with a front-facing camera. Let's recall the properties of this digital mirror that a regular mirror lacks:
1. It distorts. A front-facing camera with a short focal length creates barrel distortion: the face looks wider, the nose larger, and the proportions more unfamiliar than in reality (detailed in Chapter 6). A child, who does not yet possess a stable internal image of their appearance, automatically accepts this distorted picture as the truth. 2. It is public. A regular mirror is a private tool used in a fairly intimate context. The self-view during a video lesson means the child sees themselves in the exact same space where their classmates and teacher see them. The boundary between "I am looking at myself" and "I am being looked at" blurs. 3. We interact with the digital mirror for vastly longer periods. Contact with a regular mirror lasts seconds or minutes. The self-view on a video lesson operates for hours, five days a week.
The Lacanian "mirror stage" is simply a milestone on the developmental path. The digital "mirror stage" is an environment in which the child lives every single day.
What Happens During a Video Lesson
When an adult participates in a video conference, they bear the triple cognitive load described in Chapter 2: processing the content, processing the speaker's nonverbal cues, and on top of that, processing their own face. For a child, this burden is heavier for several reasons.
The prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for executive functions, attention control, and suppressing irrelevant stimuli—is the last to mature. The process continues until the age of 20–25. In a ten-year-old child, it is quite literally still under construction. This means that the ability to not look at oneself when visible (an ability that is highly limited even in adults) is even weaker in a child.
Furthermore, children on a video lesson are forced to remain still. The camera imposes a frame that is arguably more rigid than a physical classroom—you cannot walk out of frame, turn sideways, or stand up and pace. For a child, whose age dictates a biological need for movement, this is an additional source of exhaustion. The body goes numb, but the brain continues to process its own image on the screen—motionless, frozen, and entirely unlike the living, breathing creature the child feels themselves to be from the inside.
Finally, the child is forced to monitor their own facial expressions. The self-view creates a feedback loop: they frown → see themselves frown → attempt to correct it. For a child who is still learning to recognize and regulate emotions, this is like trying to learn how to walk in front of a mirrored wall: every awkward step is visible, which doesn't aid coordination but paralyzes it.
The result is exhaustion—and a specific type of exhaustion the child can neither name nor explain. They say, "I don't want to do the lesson," "My head hurts," or "I'm bored," and adults interpret this as laziness, acting out, or motivational issues. In reality, the cause is often that their attention resources, already limited by age, have been entirely depleted by processing their own reflection.
Self-Concept and Motivation
The connection between a child's self-concept and their ability to learn is one of the most robust findings in educational psychology. A positive self-concept—"I can handle this, I am capable, I am good enough"—is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for self-regulated learning: the ability to independently set goals, choose strategies, track progress, and course-correct after failures.
The self-view undermines this foundation because the child sees themselves at the worst possible moment. In a physical classroom, the student is engaged in a task: thinking about an answer, listening to an explanation, or writing in a notebook. Their attention is directed outward. On a video lesson, another variable is added to the task: their own face. The internal dialogue shifts. Instead of "How do I solve this equation?", it becomes "Do I look normal while I'm solving this equation?" Instead of "I understand," it becomes "Does my face show that I understand?"
The mechanism described by Duval and Wicklund (Chapter 1) operates at full force here: upon seeing their reflection, a person shifts from action to self-evaluation. For an adult professional with a stable identity, this is unpleasant but tolerable. For a teenager, whose identity is actively under construction, this can systematically shift the focus from "Who am I and what can I do?" to "How do I look and what do they think of me?"
Teenagers: A Special Vulnerability
Adolescence is the period when public self-consciousness reaches its absolute peak. This is not a pathology; it is a normal developmental phase. The teenager is learning to secure their place in a social group, and to do so, they must understand how others perceive them. But the self-view on a video call mutates this natural process into something fundamentally different.
In a physical classroom, a teenager might feel the gaze of others, but they do not see themselves through others' eyes. They can guess how they look, but they don't know for certain. On a video call, they see themselves—literally, in real-time, on the exact same screen as their classmates. The gap between "I think I look like X" and "I see I look like X" vanishes. This is not the resolution of a conflict, but a trap: the visible image does not soothe; it generates fresh reasons for anxiety (this is the exact mechanism described in Chapter 4 for the Controller archetype, but operating within an immature psyche).
Recall the Dartmouth study data from Chapter 2: those for whom the self-view caused the most discomfort looked at it the most often. For teenagers, for whom physical appearance and social acceptance are central themes, this effect can be especially pronounced. The vicious cycle looks like this: Anxiety about appearance → frequent glances at the self-view → discovery of new "defects" → increased anxiety. This cycle spins much faster in a teenager, with far fewer chances for autonomous braking.
In 1979, Arthur Beaman and his colleagues showed that a mirror radically alters the behavior of children on Halloween—but only those who were already capable of self-recognition (Chapter 1). The mirror effect depends on the maturity of self-awareness: the more developed it is, the stronger the mirror's influence. A teenager with highly developed but still fragile self-awareness is the perfect target for the self-view. They are mature enough to compare themselves to an ideal, but not mature enough to withstand that comparison without damage.
The situation for teenagers with developing eating disorders and dysmorphic tendencies deserves special attention. For them, the self-view during a video lesson is not just a discomfort; it is daily, multi-hour exposure to a stimulus perfectly calibrated to reinforce a pathological pattern. What is described in adults with Body Dysmorphic Disorder as compulsive mirror gazing (Chapter 6) often starts exactly like this for teenagers: with the forced contemplation of their own face on a school screen.
Protective Factors
Fortunately, the psyche has its own buffers. Research indicates that one of the most reliable protective factors against the negative impact of digital technologies (as a whole) on adolescent self-esteem is prosocial behavior: helping friends, participating in family matters, volunteering, or engaging in any activity where the teenager experiences themselves as useful to others [5]. The mechanism is clear: prosocial behavior shifts the focus from "how I look" to "what I am doing for someone else"—effectively restoring the "subject" position that was lost in front of the digital mirror.
Offline communication is the second reliable buffer. Live contact, absent the third communication channel, reminds the nervous system that the normal state of interaction is one where you cannot see yourself. For a child whose communication has largely migrated online, returning to live contact is not just generic "get some fresh air" advice; it is the restoration of basal social interaction patterns forged over hundreds of thousands of years. A child playing with friends in the yard is immersed in an activity and does not think about how they look. This is the exact "subject" mode we return to when we turn off the self-view. For children and teenagers, its value is paramount: it is in this mode that a healthy identity, independent of external evaluation, is formed.
What to Do: Recommendations for Parents and Educators
Recommendation One (and the most important): The self-view on children's video calls must be disabled by default. Not "can be turned off if they want," but "turned off unless there is a specific reason to turn it on." The child absolutely did not ask to see their own face during a lesson. The child does not know this function can be disabled. And they lack the cognitive resources to resist the automatic attention hijack of their own reflection. The responsibility for configuring the interface lies entirely with the adults.
Recommendation Two: Format rotation. Not every lesson needs to be a video lesson. Audio format for discussions, text chat for group assignments; video should be reserved only for situations where visual contact is genuinely necessary. The Carnegie Mellon study mentioned in Chapter 12 demonstrated that audio groups exhibit higher collective intelligence than video groups. For students, for whom the process of developing teamwork skills is just as important as the result, this is a substantial argument.
Recommendation Three: Conversation. It is highly beneficial for a child to know that their discomfort in front of the camera is not a unique personal failing, but a universal phenomenon shared by anyone with a human brain. A straightforward explanation along the lines of, "The camera shows your face, and it's really hard for the brain not to look at it; that's normal, that's how everyone is wired," strips away layers of shame and the feeling of "something is wrong with me," giving the child the vocabulary to describe what they are feeling. A video lesson is not a selfie, and this should be stated out loud. Conduct the "rubber hand" or "phantom limb" illusion experiment at home (easily found on video hosting sites) to solidify their understanding of how vulnerable the brain is to simple optical tricks.
Recommendation Four: Attention to signals. If a child avoids turning on their camera, complains of exhaustion after video lessons that is disproportionate to the difficulty of the material, or begins criticizing their appearance using camera-specific phrasing ("I have a weird face on video," "I hate how I look on the screen")—this is not a teenage whim. It is a highly probable sign that the self-view is doing its job: turning the subject into an object. These signals must be taken seriously. Start with the simplest intervention: remove the window.
References
[1] Pew Research Center. (2024–2025). Series of reports on teens and digital life.
[2] Lacan, J. (1949). Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je.
[3] Gallup, G. G. (1970). Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition. Science, 167(3914), 86–87.
[4] Amsterdam, B. (1972). Mirror self-image reactions before age two. Developmental Psychobiology, 5(4), 297–305.
[5] Empirical data demonstrating how online prosocial behavior protects adolescent self-esteem and acts as a buffer against digital stress has been actively published in recent years; see, for example, recent data: Shodiq, M., et al. (2024). Social media use and online prosocial behaviour among high school students. The mechanism of this protective effect—shifting cognitive resources away from exhausting self-objectification (focusing on one's own image) toward empathy and other-directed activity—relies on the fundamental distinction between passive and active digital media use. For a detailed breakdown of how active social interaction reduces the negative effects of the digital environment, see the large-scale meta-analysis: Meier, A., & Krause, H.-V. (2022). Does Passive Social Media Use Diminish Well-Being? An Extended Meta-Analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 27(6).