Surely an unemotional teenager should raise questions?!

So I was chatting to a friend of mine the other day who told me a story about one of his daughters, who at 15, had got into a little trouble at a party and when he reprimanded her, she was so unemotionally detached that it worried him and his wife. Her face was blank, her comments were nondescript, and her demeanour was very matter of fact. In fact she started off confirming her involvement in the dangerous prank but then went on to make up some lies and deny any involvement at all; all whilst remaining completely and totally unemotional. You can imagine what kind of worry this scenario has created for the parents for example, is something wrong with their daughter, did they bring her up right, is she a sociopath (lol but not lol?!).

Whilst telling me this it occurred to me that maybe his daughter's reactions, or lack of, are created by a copious amount of time spent on social media. Maybe this new addiction is creating teenagers who don't know how to interact emotionally with others as they are only used to interacting with their smart phones, smart devices or computers, which lets face it are completely unemotional. How can our children learn to read each others emotions, body language, and expressions etc if they are communicating through devices a huge percentage of the time? Are we therefore creating robots? How will this new generation interact at work, in relationships, with life problems if they cannot communicate their feelings without looking, and behaving, blank and non-caring??

Hey it's not like we can ask our parents or grand parents for help on this one as let's face it, this is a brand new world. There are no previous experiences on this type of situation as social media doesn't go that far back; so the dreaded reality is that this is our problem to face on our own.

I've been reading up on social media addiction and I can see immediately that some of the social media problems that seem to arise from this addiction include lack of sleep, anxiety, depression, loss in academic studies and at work, plus anger management issues. People just can't put their phones down i.e. using them whilst driving, on the toilet, in bed and basically wherever they can get their hands on them.

The big question is, will it be too late for our teenagers who will already be damaged by the time they reach adult age? Where do we go from here and how do we build a program or campaign of help to stem this problem before it becomes an epidemic?