Down the Rabbit Hole: Childhood in the Age of Social Media

Alice in Wonderland by Rochelle Blumenfeld

Growing Up Through Disorientation, Development, and Wonderland

Most of my work now happens through a screen. I meet children, tweens, and adolescents in small rectangles on laptops and tablets—often from bedrooms where posters shift in and out of view, kitchens where parents move quietly in the background, or cars idling in parking lots while someone waits for practice to end. I no longer sit in playrooms filled with toys or classrooms buzzing with noise. Instead, I watch posture, eye contact, breathing patterns, and the moment a young person’s voice changes just slightly before they say, “I don’t know,” or “I’m fine.”

Before this, my work was almost entirely face to face, and primarily with adolescents. Teenagers came into offices with their shoulders hunched or stretched wide in practiced nonchalance. They arrived with narratives already written for them by adults: oppositional, anxious, disengaged, unmotivated, dramatic. What struck me early—and has stayed with me—is how often those narratives missed the most important part of the story.

These young people were not breaking down because something inside them was defective.

They were breaking down because the world they were moving through no longer made sense in the way it used to.

There is a moment I have learned to watch for. It happens across ages and settings. A pause in speech. A glance away from the camera. A sudden irritation that doesn’t quite fit the situation. It is not full distress. It is not collapse. It is disorientation.

The rules changed.The expectations shifted.The meaning slipped out of reach.

The self was still there.

In this article, I did not choose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a lens because it is nostalgic or whimsical. I chose it because Carroll captured this sequence—world first, self second—with unsettling accuracy. Alice does not begin confused about who she is. She becomes disoriented because scale shifts, time stretches, logic collapses, and authority behaves unpredictably. Her internal experience changes in response to an unstable environment.

That ordering matters. It mirrors the developmental journeys I see unfolding every day.

Curiosity Before Confusion: Following the White Rabbit

Alice begins the story oriented. She is bored, yes, but not distressed. When she notices the White Rabbit behaving strangely—talking to itself, checking a watch—she does what healthy nervous systems do. She pays attention.

She follows not because she is impulsive, but because novelty registers as meaningful.

This is where many children’s experiences are misunderstood.

In early development, and again in adolescence, the brain is especially attuned to novelty, salience, and emotional relevance. Systems responsible for detecting change and importance mature earlier than systems responsible for inhibition and long-term planning (Schore, 2012). Curiosity is not a flaw in this stage—it is a feature.

I see this when a child online suddenly shifts the conversation to something that feels unrelated but clearly urgent to them. I see it when an adolescent follows a digital community, aesthetic, or ideology that adults dismiss as trivial or dangerous without asking what need it is meeting. Often, what draws them in is not rebellion but coherence—a sense that someone is naming what feels off.

Alice does not yet know she is entering a disorienting world. She only knows that something in the environment no longer fits the ordinary pattern of things.

That moment—the noticing—matters. When adults rush to shut it down, curiosity becomes the first casualty.

The Long Fall: When Time, Space, and the Body Lose Their Rules

Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole is slow, extended, and strangely calm. She notices objects as she passes. She wonders where she might land. She tries to apply familiar knowledge to an unfamiliar situation.

Her sense of self remains intact.

What changes first is her relationship to time, space, and gravity.

This is one of the most accurate metaphors we have for what happens to young people growing up in digitally saturated environments. Online spaces collapse time. There is no beginning or end to the feed. Emotional intensity is high, but sequencing is absent. Content appears without narrative order or developmental appropriateness.

Adolescents, whose circadian rhythms are already shifting, are particularly vulnerable to this distortion. Many teens describe losing hours without realizing it, then struggling to reorient to school, family expectations, or even their own bodies the next day.

From a neurological perspective, this makes sense. The prefrontal cortex—critical for time management, impulse control, and future-oriented thinking—is still under construction well into the mid-twenties (Casey et al., 2008). Meanwhile, emotional and sensory systems are highly active and easily stimulated.

When a teenager tells me, “I don’t know what happened—I just disappeared into it,” I hear Alice mid-fall, trying to reason in a world where gravity no longer behaves predictably.

Disorientation here is not moral failure.It is nervous system adaptation.

The Door and the Key: Developmental Mismatch and the Problem of Scale

When Alice reaches the locked door, she assumes the problem is her size. She drinks, eats, grows, shrinks—anything to make herself fit the space.

Children and adolescents do this constantly.

A tween learns to mute emotional responses to avoid peer rejection. A teenager absorbs adult-level political and social crises without the developmental scaffolding to metabolize them. A child suppresses sensory discomfort because expressing it leads to ridicule or punishment.

Neurologically, this is a period of uneven development. Emotional, intuitive, and interoceptive systems are often far ahead of executive functioning. Children and teens frequently know something is wrong before they can explain it.

This is where intuition and what is often called “heart knowing” live—not as mysticism, but as embodied cognition. Research on heart–brain communication shows that bodily signals significantly influence perception, emotional regulation, and decision-making (McCraty & Zayas, 2014).

Alice’s body knows the room doesn’t fit long before her reasoning does.

When adults respond by asking children to adapt faster rather than questioning the environment, disorientation becomes internalized as shame.

The Pool of Tears: Emotional Flooding Before Meaning

Alice cries, and her tears become a literal landscape she must navigate.

This scene mirrors what I see most often in tweens.

As children move toward adolescence, emotional capacity expands dramatically. Empathy deepens. Social awareness sharpens. Moral sensitivity increases. Yet the neural systems required to regulate, contextualize, and articulate these feelings—especially in the frontal lobes—are still developing.

Social media intensifies this imbalance. Tweens encounter emotional content without mediation: public shaming, idealized bodies, political outrage, peer rejection. Their emotional reservoirs fill faster than their capacity to swim.

I see this when a tween cannot explain why a message thread feels devastating, or why a video left them unsettled for hours. Adults often ask for logic when the nervous system is still flooded.

Affect regulation precedes cognition (Porges, 2011). When we demand explanation too early, children learn to disconnect from bodily awareness rather than integrate it.

Alice survives the pool not by understanding it, but by staying afloat long enough to orient again.

The Caucus Race: Adolescence in Nonsense Systems

The Caucus Race is chaotic, circular, and meaningless—and everyone pretends it makes sense.

This is adolescence in fragmented systems.

Teenagers move between schools, families, peer cultures, and online spaces that operate by conflicting rules. Online visibility is rewarded without coherence. Consequences appear without explanation. Authority is diffuse and inconsistent.

The adolescent brain is particularly sensitive to reward and peer approval, while impulse control and long-term reasoning lag behind (Casey et al., 2008). This makes teens especially vulnerable to environments that promise belonging without clarity.

When teens disengage, mock systems, or refuse to participate, it is often a rational response to nonsense—not a failure of character.

Alice tries to understand the race. No one helps her.

Many adolescents stop asking.

The Caterpillar: Identity Questions Asked Too Soon

“Who are you?” the Caterpillar asks.

By adolescence, this question arrives relentlessly—from parents, schools, peers, and online audiences. Identity becomes something to declare, perform, and defend long before it has had time to settle.

Yet identity development requires orientation first. Trauma-informed theory reminds us that meaning must follow safety, not precede it (van der Kolk, 2014). When identity questions are asked too early, they feel invasive rather than clarifying.

Alice cannot answer because she is still adjusting to gravity.

Teenagers often know what feels wrong before they know who they are. Adults who tolerate this uncertainty provide safety. Adults who demand clarity too soon increase fragmentation.

The Queen of Hearts: When Power Turns Disorientation Into Danger

Wonderland becomes unsafe when authority becomes arbitrary.

The Queen of Hearts punishes before understanding. Rules change without warning. Power replaces coherence.

This is where disorientation shifts from doorway to alarm.

Adolescents are exquisitely sensitive to injustice—not because they are oppositional, but because moral reasoning is rapidly developing. When authority figures act unpredictably, teens’ nervous systems register danger.

Online, this is magnified. Social punishment occurs without due process. Shaming and exclusion happen instantly and publicly. Teens learn quickly which spaces are playful and which are predatory.

Alice survives by learning to discern patterns of power.

Children and adolescents should not have to do this alone.

Staying With the Story Long Enough

Across childhood, tweens, and adolescence, the pattern repeats.

The world shifts.Orientation wobbles. Meaning lags behind perception.

Sometimes disorientation is growth. Sometimes it is adaptation. Sometimes it is an alarm.

The task of adults—parents, educators, clinicians—is not to eliminate confusion, but to interpret it carefully.

The most important question is rarely What’s wrong with you? It is almost always What changed around you first?

When we stay with the story long enough, children do not lose themselves in Wonderland.

They learn how to walk through it.

How Adults Can Help: Re-Anchoring Children in a Shifting World

If disorientation often begins outside the child, then support must begin outside the child as well.

This does not mean controlling environments completely or removing children from every source of complexity. It means becoming more attentive guides—especially at the moments when the world tilts before a child has language for it.

Across years of working with children, tweens, and adolescents, I have seen that the most protective adults do a few quiet things consistently. None of them require perfection. All of them require presence.

Slow the Moment Down Before You Interpret It

When a child becomes suddenly irritable, withdrawn, tearful, or oppositional, the instinct is to correct or explain. But the most important intervention often happens before any interpretation.

Pause long enough to ask: What just changed? What might feel different in the world right now?What rule stopped working?

For a young child, it might be a transition that came too fast.For a tween, it might be a social rupture they cannot yet explain.For a teenager, it might be an accumulation of online input that tipped their nervous system into overload.

Slowing the moment down gives the child’s nervous system time to catch up to their experience.

Help With Orientation Before Asking for Explanation

Children are often asked to explain themselves while still disoriented. This is especially true online, where adults may only see the emotional aftermath and not the sequence that led there.

Orientation comes first.

That might look like:

• naming what you notice (“Something feels off right now.”)

• offering grounding (“Let’s pause for a second.”)

• restoring predictability (“Here’s what’s happening next.”)

Only after orientation returns does explanation become possible.

This is not indulgence. It is how the brain works.

Treat Intuition as Information, Not Insubordination

Children and adolescents often sense incoherence before they can articulate it. They feel when something is unfair, unsafe, or contradictory long before they can make a logical case.

Too often, this intuition is dismissed as attitude, overreaction, or immaturity.

Instead of asking, Why are you reacting like this?Try asking, What do you think doesn’t make sense here?

You may not always agree—but taking intuition seriously builds trust and helps children learn to integrate bodily knowing with reasoning over time.

Make Shared Reality Explicit

In a fragmented world, shared reality cannot be assumed—it must be built.

This is especially important around social media and digital life. Children and teens often live in realities adults do not fully see, governed by rules adults do not intuitively understand.

You don’t need to master every platform. But you do need to ask: What worlds are you moving between today? What feels confusing or loud right now? What feels fun—and what feels heavy?

Shared reality reduces disorientation simply by making meaning visible.

Be a Consistent Reference Point When Systems Are Not

Children can tolerate strange worlds if there is at least one reliable guide.

Consistency does not mean rigidity. It means:

• predictable emotional responses

• fair consequences explained clearly

• willingness to repair when you get it wrong

• curiosity instead of immediate judgment

In Wonderland, Alice is not harmed by nonsense alone. She is harmed when power becomes arbitrary.

Adults can counter this by being steady, legible, and responsive—even when they don’t have all the answers.

Normalize Not Knowing Who You Are Yet

Especially for adolescents, identity questions often come too early and too loudly.

Instead of pressing for answers, adults can say:“You don’t have to know that yet.”“It makes sense to be unsure.”“We can figure this out as you go.”

This does not delay development. It protects it.

Identity settles best in environments where exploration is allowed without performance or premature commitment.

Walking With Them Through Wonderland

Children and adolescents today are not fragile because they are confused. They are confused because the world they are growing up in is genuinely complex, fragmented, and fast.

When adults respond to disorientation with curiosity instead of control, with orientation instead of explanation, and with steadiness instead of panic, something important happens.

Children do not lose themselves in Wonderland.

They learn how to walk through it—with their intuition intact,their nervous systems supported,and their sense of self emerging in time.

Sometimes disorientation is the doorway. Sometimes it is the alarm.

The role of adults is not to decide too quickly which it is—but to stay close enough to help children tell the difference.

Conclusion: Staying With the World Long Enough

Most children do not lose themselves first.They lose the thread of the world.

What they show us—through silence, resistance, intensity, withdrawal, or sudden change—is often not confusion about who they are, but confusion about what they are being asked to navigate. The rules have shifted. The meaning has thinned. The pace has outstripped integration.

Wonderland is not a fantasy because it is strange.It is familiar because it is unstable.

Children, tweens, and adolescents today are growing up inside multiple realities at once—physical, digital, social, symbolic—each governed by different logics and timelines. When those realities fail to align, disorientation is not only expected; it is adaptive. It is the nervous system’s way of saying, something here needs attention.

The danger is not that children feel disoriented.The danger is when adults respond as though disorientation itself is the problem.

When we rush to label, correct, or resolve too quickly, we teach children to mistrust their own perception. When we stay long enough to notice what shifted first—when we ask what changed in the world before we ask what is wrong with the child—we offer something far more protective than certainty.

We offer orientation.

Alice survives Wonderland not by mastering it, but by continuing to pay attention—by noticing patterns, by questioning authority that makes no sense, and by trusting that her experience is real even when it is strange. Children need the same permission.

They need adults who are willing to stay with the moment before meaning solidifies. Adults who can tolerate uncertainty without abandoning clarity. Adults who understand that development is not a straight path, and that disorientation is sometimes the sign that something new is trying to take shape.

If we can slow down enough to walk beside children through these moments—rather than pulling them back or pushing them through—we help them do something essential.

We help them learn how to stay themselveswhile the world is still becoming.

And that, more than any explanation or label, is what allows a child to find their way out of Wonderland with their sense of self intact.

References

Carroll, L. (1865). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Casey, B. J., Jones, R. M., & Hare, T. A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

McCraty, R., & Zayas, M. A. (2014). Cardiac coherence and heart–brain interactions. Global Advances in Health and Medicine.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.

Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation.

Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.