Teens are navigating nuanced digital communication, with behaviors like dry texting and ambiguous signals creating emotional and social challenges. Experts highlight how such subtle cues can cause anxiety and hinder conflict resolution, especially since adolescents are still developing these skills. Despite concerns about social skills, teens also find that phones can facilitate safer or more thoughtful ways to handle disagreements. Listening to young people's experiences and understanding the impact of digital interactions are crucial steps in supporting healthy social development in the digital age.

Why ambiguous texting hurts

For answers, I turned to Scholastic’s Kid Reporters, a group of 10–14-year-olds who cover “news for kids, by kids.” The young journalists went to work in their respective schools, and came back with much the same observation the Behind the Screens co-hosts shared with me: phones definitely make it easier to ignore someone you don’t want to talk to.

“Sometimes it’s just easier to leave someone on read or not respond right away instead of talking face to face,” one 13-year-old told Scholastic reporter Aiden. “I’ve definitely avoided talking to someone in person and just showed I was mad by muting them for a bit. It’s kinda petty but it’s also how a lot of people deal with stuff now.”

“In real life you can’t ghost somebody,” Scholastic reporter Xander Dorsey told me in an email. “In texting you could say ‘oh, I’ll be right back.’ It’s much more awkward to walk off in real life.”

Teens can also express their displeasure with someone by taking them off their close friends list on Instagram, or — a more extreme step — unfollowing them entirely, Akshaya said. Online communication “makes it a lot easier to be passive-aggressive,” she explained.

But being on the receiving end of such passive aggression, whether it’s a “dry” text or message hanging there on the screen without a response, kids and experts agree: “It will trigger this anxious thinking spiral where they see that they’ve been left on read, and you start to wonder, are they mad at me?” Weinstein told me. “Do they hate me? Do they think I’m an idiot? Did I say the wrong thing?”

When the meaning does become clear, ambiguous signals can be even more painful than a more direct confrontation, teens say. “​​I got removed from a group chat and found out they were talking about me behind my back,” the same 13-year-old told Aiden. “I felt confused and like I wasn’t even worth a real explanation.”

“It hurt even more that they didn’t just come talk to me,” she added.

Phones are shaping how kids navigate conflict

Passive-aggressive phone behavior is far from unique to kids. But because they’re at a developmental stage in which they’re extremely sensitive to what their peers are thinking and feeling about them, “they’re more likely to be scrutinizing these ambiguous signals,” Weinstein said.

Adolescence is also a time when conflict resolution skills are still developing, Weinstein said. We all need those skills because “life is full of conflict,” said Darja Djordjevic, a psychiatrist who works with Stanford Brainstorm, a lab focused on mental health and digital well-being. Dealing with people who disagree with us is a crucial part of growing up.

Some fear that phones could disrupt that process. “We learn how to argue and fight productively in person,” Djordjevic said. Sending ambiguous signals over text or social media could represent “a lost opportunity for confronting things” in real life.

There’s a lot of concern among adults about how phones affect social skills more generally, and while I don’t always share that concern, I think it’s reasonable to ask whether new forms of communication will change how teens handle (or don’t handle) confrontation as they mature.

The older teens I spoke with allayed these concerns somewhat. Akshaya told me that when she and her friends were younger, “we would start removing each other from our followings if there was a big falling-out, or getting dry and stuff to avoid talking to each other.” Now that they’re about to graduate from high school, though, “I don’t see it as much.”

Kids also pointed out that phones can sometimes actually help them resolve a conflict. Texting “gives me time to think before responding and helps me express my thoughts more clearly,” one 12-year-old told Aiden. “Sometimes it’s less intimidating to start a difficult conversation through messages, and that can help us work out the problem later.”

Teens will also often show a draft text to multiple friends before hitting send, Tanisha told me. That way, “you’re more confident that that text isn’t going to be something bad or anything like that, because you have other people’s approval.” (With workshopping texts, however, there is a risk that “your voice kind of gets lost,” she noted.)

And avoiding confrontation isn’t always the worst thing. If, for example, a kid lives in a community or goes to a school where physical fights are common, “the stakes of certain kinds of online conflict are very different than a teen who’s in a context where all that might happen is someone’s gonna be mad at them,” Weinstein said. For some teens, ambiguous signals could actually be a way to stay safe.

Still, just as teenagers might need tools for responding to big, loud problems like bullying, they need help dealing with the subtle fault lines their phones create as well. It starts with listening to young people about the role tech plays in their lives, Weinstein said.

Some app features that may seem benign to adults (Instagram close friends or location sharing come to mind) can feel very different for teens, Weinstein explained. “So often, adults miss or misunderstand aspects of what teens are experiencing behind their screens.”

The kids I talked to also had advice for their peers dealing with dry texting and other ambiguous phone behaviors, much of it strikingly low-tech. Scholastic reporter Evy, 12, recommends hashing things out in person whenever possible. “Having a real conversation with them and laughing with them — that makes it so much better,” she said.