There's an unexpected antidote to the social media stress that has become a part of growing up today.

When 13-year-olds believed that their parents were closely monitoring their social media, they were less distressed by online conflicts with their peers, according to a new study.

CNN commissioned the study to explore how 13-year-olds use social media and how it affects them. Researchers captured and analyzed the content of more than 150,000 social media posts made by more than 200 8th-grade students around the country. They started collecting the data last September and followed the group through the spring. The data included posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but not the students' private messages.

Along with tracking their posts, the researchers surveyed the children about how often they felt depressed, anxious or alienated; they also surveyed their parents. The results were published in an hour-long special on "Anderson Cooper 360."

Even if many parents remember the rough-and-tumble years of middle school -- the social insecurity of trying to find where one fits in -- earlier generations weren't subjected to a 24/7, real-time ticker that broadcast our social status to our peers. That's part of what social media becomes for many young people: a way to gauge popularity and self-worth in a very public way.

Thirteen-year-olds don't perceive a difference between their social lives in person and online. For them, social media is just as real a way to hang out, stay in touch and socialize.

"For young people, this is a big part of their social life," said researcher Marion Underwood, a clinical child psychologist and dean of graduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Some of what the researchers documented shouldn't surprise us. There was a fair amount of social aggression, vulgarity and bullying. But there was also a lot of positivity, validation and support from friends through social media. There are aspects of sharing and interacting on social media that make teens feel good, said Underwood.

A teen's perception of how closely their parents kept an eye on their social media accounts correlated to how distressed they felt by online conflict: the more monitoring, the less stress, the study found. Parents, however, tended to overestimate how well they kept tabs on their children. They also underestimated the troubles their children were experiencing online, compared to what the teens themselves reported.

The biggest source of the 13-year-olds' online stress is their friends -- not rivals or strangers. There are passive-aggressive, underhanded techniques of excluding or attacking a peer: A teen won't tag someone in a group photo on Instagram, or will make a derisive remark on Twitter without naming the other person, although everyone knows who the intended target is.

Parents said that trying to stay on top of their kids' social media was like trying to keep up with a runaway train. Plus, it seemed like much of the problematic interaction would happen in private messages or on anonymous sites, like ask.fm, or on hard-to-track apps like Snapchat.

But it appears that just the effort matters.

Co-researcher Robert Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis, said it may not be the monitoring itself that reduces kids' levels of emotional distress. It could be that those parents were more likely to have positive relationships with their children and more likely to be talking to their children about their interactions online.

"I sympathize with parents today, for sure," Faris said. "I was overwhelmed, and I was getting paid to analyze this stuff."

Underwood offered specific suggestions for navigating your children's digital world:

-- Get phones out of their bedrooms at night. "If you don't do anything else," she said, "do this."

-- Don't try to read every word of what your child posts or rely on snooping software. Tech-savvy teens find ways around it, plus parents may not understand the subtle language used to exclude or belittle a person. Be aware that what they post to their friends is often highly curated and doesn't tell the whole story of what may be going on in their lives.

-- Create your own social media accounts and use them so you can experience how it feels. Follow your children's accounts.

-- Talk to young children about how to use social media, what your expectations and boundaries are and ask them what they want to get out of it.

-- Set limits. For instance, no one should be using a device at the dinner table.

-- Turn off the geo-locators on your children's posts. They allow any of your child's followers to know exactly where your child is or was.

You don't have to be perfect -- just present.

There's no joy in arguing about a hot-button issue with someone you've just met online -- unless you're an Internet troll.

Matt Sweetwood and I belong to opposing camps in the debate over gun control. He is a gun advocate who says he spent $100,000 in legal fees fighting the state of New Jersey to regain his right to own weapons. (He won that battle in 2008.)

I support public policy changes to ensure that one person's right to own guns doesn't infringe on another person's right to life -- just as there are limits on my Constitutional right to free speech that protect others from libel.

But an essay Sweetwood posted online suggests we share some common ground.

It's a post that turned Sweetwood, a media consultant who often writes about fatherhood, into a pariah among many in the pro-gun community who would have previously considered him a hero. Even before a gunman shot and killed eight community college students and one teacher in Oregon last week, Sweetwood penned a six-step proposal on how to reduce gun violence in America.

His list did not include arming classroom teachers.

Instead, he offered solutions supported by the vast majority of Americans, such as universal background checks for those wanting to buy a gun.

"You can't have holes," he explained. "It's like a border. Either you block it or you don't block it."

He also suggested a seven-day waiting period before a gun can be purchased and called for eliminating gun sales and events that do not report their sales.

"We need to know who is buying guns," he said.

Sweetwood even took it a step further: He argued for a national database of all guns and gun owners. "This way when someone commits an aggravated felony, we know they have guns," he wrote. "This is to track felons, not to track law-abiding gun owners."

The NRA wouldn't stand for any of these proposals, of course. For his suggestions, he's been called a "Nazi" by many on his own side. (He's Jewish, he told me, and certainly not a Nazi.)

He's also suspicious of governmental overreach, and understands the fears of those wanting to protect their rights. When his commitment to the Second Amendment is questioned, he has asked his critics if they've spent $100,000 of their own money fighting for their right to own a firearm.

He's no darling of the left, either, he says.

He's angered gun control advocates by suggesting that anyone who has not committed a crime and is not mentally ill should be allowed to carry a weapon. His six-point proposal also calls for minimum mandatory sentences for crimes committed with a gun, and states that police officers should be able to stop and frisk people.

He realizes that some of his suggestions are politically impossible, but his point was to spark a conversation between two sides that don't trust one another -- often to the point that they cannot even hear the other's point of view.

Gun rights advocates are convinced that liberals want to ban guns outright, he said. Meanwhile, many on the gun control side believe gun owners will not accept any restrictions at all.

"Ninety percent of the people are in the middle," he said. "They want reasonable restrictions."

But this is where he misses a crucial point in this debate. He's correct that most people support the same reasonable restrictions he suggested, such as universal background checks. But he ignores the fact that the gun lobby kills the mere suggestion of any such proposal and targets politicians who support similar measures.

Mistrust and hostility exist on both sides, but the power of shaping policy has completely tipped toward the gun lobby.

He and I debated about whether or not guns should be licensed and insured like cars. We disagreed on how to keep guns away from people who express suicidal or homicidal thoughts, either to friends, family members or doctors. Several recent mass shooters obtained their guns legally, and had expressed their homicidal desires in some way.

But we agreed that the problem of excessive gun violence requires a different kind of conversation about solutions.

America has suffered a threefold increase in the frequency of indiscriminate mass shootings since 2011, according to researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University. There have been (at least) 47 school shootings already this year. We have allowed more gun violence against the most vulnerable people in our country than any other developed country on Earth.

Reasonable people are disgusted by the idea that there's nothing we can do to prevent our children from being murdered in schools, theaters, malls and churches.

It's why staunch gun-rights supporters like Sweetwood have also taken a bold public stand. Responsible and passionate gun owners like himself will be critical in moving the rhetoric around gun violence to a rational, solution-oriented place.

He was surprised at the reaction his post provoked.

While neither of us changed the other person's mind on whether more guns make our country safer or less so, we agreed that those differences are beside the point.

We didn't need to see eye-to-eye on every aspect of this debate.

"Don't let perfection be the enemy of a solution," he said to me. Each side will need to compromise and give a little.

I agree completely, I told him.

We both write on parenting, but our spirited conversation felt more like a teachable moment for adults.

Pope Francis doesn't have to put up with teenagers slamming bedroom doors in the Vatican or toddlers flinging communion wafers in the kitchen, but he had some sound parenting advice for his American audience.

When he addressed the bishops in Philadelphia last week, he talked about the challenges facing modern families. The family is at the crux of most religions, so he's got a vested interest in helping the institution along.

He drew an analogy from the way economies have shifted from smaller, intimate markets built on relationships and necessity to big-box superstores built on competition and consumption. We are raising children in a culture that is increasingly competitive, in which business is no longer conducted on the basis of trust, and consumption reigns supreme.

"Today's culture seems to encourage people not to bond with anything or anyone, not to trust," he said.

It's a mistake to see the younger generation's indifference to marriage and family as simple selfishness or some other character flaw, he said. The root of these contemporary situations, he offered, is a "widespread and radical sense of loneliness."

What a poignant way to describe our social condition. There is a documented increase in feelings of loneliness, and not just among the young. I've had days when some kind of digital communication has felt like the most "real" connection to people I've had. Indeed, the human experience is one of recognizing that we are alone and seeking ways to alleviate it -- to connect and feel recognized. Perhaps we once turned toward our churches and families for that sense of connection. Now, we chase "likes" and accumulate "friends" on social networks, the pope said.

He argued that this shift in where we seek validation wounds our culture. Fierce competition and vapid consumption undermine social bonds and human relationships.

This is a legitimate and familiar critique. The strength in the pope's argument rests in the line he draws between the current economic realities to the decline of familial ties, marriage and social bonds.

He brought up the same point with both the bishops and Congress alike: We are living in a culture which pressures some young people not to start a family because they lack the material means to do so, and others because they are so well-off that they are happy as they are.

That pressure on one end to be economically stable is about more than lifestyle choices. It's about survival. It's responsible to start a family only when you are able to support one. But staggering student debt, coupled with fewer well-paying job opportunities and skyrocketing housing costs, would give any sensible young adult pause before starting a family.

On the other end, he highlighted the growing income inequality between the poor and middle class and the wealthy. Marriage rates among the non-college-educated have fallen sharply in the last few decades, creating a "marriage gap."

Francis asked the bishops, "Are today's young people hopelessly timid, weak, inconsistent?" He admonished anyone for thinking so.

Of course they aren't.

They are growing up in more pressure-filled homes and schools, in a culture with far less compassion. The cultural shifts and changing economy both contribute to weakening families in America.

Someone with hefty moral authority needed to call out political and religious leaders who preach "family values" without valuing policies that actually support families.

He didn't let parents off the hook, either.

He recalled being approached by mothers in Buenos Aires complaining about children who were 30, 32 or 34 years old and still single.

"Well, stop ironing their shirts!" he told them.

It's true. We can offer a financial cushion or launching pad for young adults without catering to them like children.

The pope's straight talk on parenting and families underscored the heart of his message: Raising a family transforms the world and human history.