In The Kids are All Right, published Friday in The Mark, Robert Barnard skewers the myth that teenagers “spend most of their time creating virtual relationships on Facebook and in Second Life … On average (he notes), teenagers have 90 online friends. More than half have less than 20 online friends, which means a small minority have tons of them.”

This is a welcome reality check. There is a worrying tendency to see the internet as the principal cause and solution to young people’s disinterest in politics. In this view, their social relationships are increasingly formed and lived online. As a result, their values and perspectives – indeed, their identities – are different from ours. If governments want to engage them, goes the thinking, they should get online and talk about “youth issues,” such as the environment or intergenerational change.

As Barnard’s findings suggest, this overstates the role of online communities. If our political discourse fails to speak to youth, this is not because it is disconnected from some parallel life they are living on the internet. Rather, it is disconnected from the life they are living in actual communities. Why?

The question of social relationships is important here. Young people are at the epicentre of a seismic shift in how social relationships are formed, but this is about much more than the internet.

On one hand, youth are like everyone else in that their relationships and identities are shaped by key choices about their lives, such as their friends, careers, spouses, homes and lifestyles. On the other hand, young people today must make many more “life-defining” choices than their parents. Moreover, by comparison, these choices are often bewilderingly complex and entangled.

Consider first-generation immigrants. Often they are caught between the traditional values and identity of their parents, and the modern, cosmopolitan lifestyles of, say, Toronto or Vancouver. The relationships they form with family, friends, and colleagues draw on both sources.

As a result, they must work to align and integrate different, often conflicting values and roles into a single, coherent personality. As any therapist knows, this can be a huge task and the stakes are very high. Failure can result in deep and lasting mental and emotional conflicts, which can be debilitating, even paralyzing.

The same can be said about other kinds of lifestyle choices. Consider, for example, the career woman versus the traditional homemaker. Research shows repeatedly how many women (and the men they live with) are caught between these two roles and unable to find a workable balance. Instead, they feel obliged to fulfill both roles, which then makes unmanageable demands on their time and energy and can create huge personal stress.

So here is the challenge for those thinking about youth engagement: What does politics have to say to young people about the special issues they face around integrating their own values, roles, and identities? What are governments doing to equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to manage this kind of social and cultural diversity and complexity?

It is worth recalling a parallel development in the first few decades of the 20th century. As industrialization spread, people flocked to the cities, gathered in neighbourhoods, and became wage-earners. The old social order based on kinship and land began to erode. The idea of a “career” emerged; people traveled more and became more autonomous, specialized, and educated.

With hindsight, we now see that the identity of the 19th-century farmer was being transformed into the 20th-century city dweller. Governments responded with a wide range of new initiatives to help people adjust to the new world, such as mass education, new labour laws, health care, career planning, unemployment insurance, and pension schemes.

Such initiatives redefined the role of government by redefining the identity of citizens; and, in the process, reshaped the political discourse of the day. By contrast, it is not even clear that governments today recognize the special identity challenge facing young people.

Discussion around the internet and online communities is useful here. It focuses attention on the changing nature of youth’s social relationships and identity. Engaging youth in our political discourse will require some serious thinking about how they are adjusting to the information age.

But if the internet has an important role in all this, we must keep this in perspective. We should not confuse the tools with the task. The task of engaging youth in our politics remains the same as it was for every other generation: talking with them about the things that matter to them in ways that speak to who they are.