Does Online Socializing Help Kids Build Social Skills?
Your teenager may spend hours texting friends, sharing videos, talking while gaming, or connecting over FaceTime. Yet, when you suggest inviting someone over, going to an activity, or spending time with friends in person, they may be less interested.
So….. Does all of that online communication really count as socializing?
The answer is not simply yes or no.
Online interactions can help children and adolescents maintain friendships, feel included, share interests, and find people who understand them. At the same time, communicating through a screen does not provide exactly the same experience as being together in person.
Rather than deciding that online socializing is either “good” or “bad,” it may be more helpful to ask: What kind of connection is my child experiencing—and what social skills are they practicing?
Online Socializing Is Still Socializing
Adults sometimes dismiss texting, online gaming, or social media interactions because they look so different from the ways we connected when we were young.
But these interactions can be meaningful.
A group chat may help a teenager feel included in a friendship group. Online gaming may provide a shared activity around which conversation develops. Texting can help friends stay connected throughout the day, exchange humor, offer reassurance, and make plans.
Research suggests that adolescents may feel more socially connected during periods when they are texting, video chatting, or interacting with friends online. Social media use also does not automatically predict social skills. In one longitudinal study, it was associated with slightly more time spent with friends offline and was not related to later deterioration in social skills.
For some children, digital communication may be especially valuable.
A child who is shy, socially anxious, physically limited, chronically ill, or still learning how to navigate social situations may find it easier to begin connecting online. Children with less common interests or identities may also find peers online whom they would be unlikely to meet in their immediate community.
Online communication can create a bridge to connection. But a bridge is not always the same as the destination.
Different Ways of Connecting Offer Different Experiences
Texting, video calls, online gaming, and in-person interactions all involve communication. However, they do not provide the same amount or type of social information.
Texting helps children maintain connection.
Texting is often asynchronous. A child can pause before responding, edit a message, send a picture, or return to the conversation later.
That flexibility can make communication feel more manageable. It may be easier to initiate a conversation, share something personal, or respond without the immediate pressure of another person watching.
But texting also removes many of the cues we use to understand one another.
There is no tone of voice or facial expression unless we imagine it. For example, a brief response might mean someone is angry, distracted, tired, busy, or simply unsure what to say. There is very little context to know.
Emojis and punctuation help, but they cannot communicate everything.
Video calls add live conversation and facial expressions.
FaceTime and other video-based interactions are synchronous: both people are responding to one another in real time, moment to moment.
Children can hear tone of voice, observe facial expressions, laugh together, interrupt, clarify misunderstandings, and notice changes in the other person’s emotions.
This makes video communication socially richer than texting in many ways.
But video still narrows the interaction. The child usually sees only part of the other person. Eye contact is slightly different. Body posture, gestures, physical distance, touch, and much of the surrounding environment may be missing. And the time spent may be limited.
Video calls can support genuine closeness, but the research indicates that they are not equivalent to being together in person.
In-person interaction provides the broadest social experience.
When children are together, they are not only talking.
They may be deciding what to do, sharing materials, moving through a physical space, noticing when another person becomes uncomfortable, recovering from an awkward silence, negotiating disagreements, and adapting when plans change. A lot is happening moment to moment.
These experiences provide continuous opportunities to interpret social information and adjust.
Studies examining adolescents’ real-time experiences have found that they tend to feel better while interacting face-to-face than while interacting online (although online interaction may still feel better than being alone).
Social Skills Develop Through Practice
We sometimes talk about “social skills” as though they are one ability that a child either has or does not have. In reality, social development includes many different skills, and timing is important to many of these:
- beginning and ending conversations
- noticing facial expressions and body language
- listening and responding
- taking another person’s perspective
- sharing attention
- tolerating pauses and awkward moments
- handling disagreement
- repairing misunderstandings
- adjusting to changing plans or different opinions
- managing emotions while interacting
- recognizing when another person needs more or less space
Some of these skills can be practiced online. Others depend much more heavily on real-time, face-to-face experience.
For those adolescents who are uncomfortable with conflict, they may shy away from any difficult moments and can easily avoid or leave the online interaction.
This does not mean that every child needs to be highly social, attend large gatherings, or spend every weekend with friends. Children differ in temperament, social energy, interests, and the number of relationships they need or want.
The goal is not to turn an introverted child into an extroverted one.
The goal is to help children develop enough flexibility and confidence to participate and maintain the relationships and activities that matter to them.
Online Interaction May Be a Starting Place
For a child with anxiety, autism, ADHD, medical complexity, or a history of difficult peer experiences, online communication may feel safer and more predictable.
That safety is not necessarily a problem.
A child may first become comfortable talking to someone through a shared game. Texting may help two adolescents move from acquaintances to friends. A video call may make it possible to maintain a relationship when fatigue, transportation, illness, or distance makes getting together difficult.
Online interaction may provide a lower-pressure place to practice conversation and connection.
The question is whether it is serving as a bridge to a broader social life—or gradually becoming a way to avoid experiences the child finds uncomfortable.
Avoidance can be hard to recognize because it often brings immediate relief.
A teenager who feels anxious about meeting friends in person may feel calmer when the plans are canceled and the conversation moves back online. But if this happens repeatedly, they may have fewer opportunities to discover that theycan tolerate the discomfort, recover from awkward moments, and eventually feel more comfortable.
The goal is not to remove the bridge. It is to help your child keep moving across it when they are ready.
Look Beyond the Number of Hours
Parents often focus on how much time a child spends online. Time matters, especially when technology interferes with sleep, schoolwork, physical activity, family life, or other responsibilities. But the number of hours does not tell the whole story.
Consider asking:
- Is my child interacting with others offline?
- Do these interactions leave them feeling connected or distressed?
- Are they creating, talking, laughing, and collaborating during online connections—or mostly scrolling and observing?
- Does online communication lead to opportunities for in-person connection?
- Can my child tolerate phone calls, face-to-face conversation, and shared activities when necessary?
- Is technology expanding their social world or narrowing it?
A child laughing with friends while playing a cooperative game is having a different experience from a child scrolling alone and comparing themselves with others on social media. Research increasingly suggests that what young people are doing online, whom they are interacting with, and how those experiences affect them may matter more than treating all screen use as the same activity.
How Parents Can Support a Broader Social Life
Dismissing digital relationships may cause children to feel that parents do not understand an important part of their social world. Instead, become curious.
Ask who they enjoy talking with. Learn what they do together online. Notice which relationships seem supportive and which create stress.
Then look for manageable ways to widen the range of interaction.
A child who feels overwhelmed by an open-ended invitation to “go hang out” may do better with:
- one friend rather than a group
- a planned activity rather than unstructured time (e.g., meet for pizza or ice cream)
- a shorter visit (e.g., just coffee)
- a familiar environment (e.g., their own house)
- a shared interest (e.g., vintage record store)
- clear transportation plans
- the option to take a break (e.g., come help me in the kitchen for a minute)
For some adolescents, the first step may not be a large social event. It may be asking a friend to get something to eat, work on a project, walk the dog, play a game in the same room, or attend an activity built around a common interest. Small experiences count.
Connection Does Not Have to Look Like It Did Before
Children and teenagers are building relationships in a world that is different from the one in which many parents grew up.
Texting is not meaningless. Online friendships are not automatically superficial. Video conversations can offer real comfort and closeness.
At the same time, children still benefit from opportunities to share physical space, read the full range of social cues, navigate spontaneous moments, and experience the ordinary messiness of being with other people.
So perhaps the question is not, “Does online socializing count?”
A more useful question may be, “Is my child developing a range of ways to connect?”
Remember that: Texting can maintain a relationship. Video conversations can deepen it through live interaction. In-person experiences provide the broadest opportunities to practice social communication, flexibility, emotional regulation, and shared problem-solving.
Children do not need to choose only one. They may need support in learning how to move among them.
