WASHINGTON (TNND) — As more countries move to restrict teens’ access to social media, a child and adolescent psychiatrist says bans are likely to face backlash from young users — and may fall short without stronger support from parents and schools.
Only a small number of countries have national laws in effect that ban or strictly prohibit social media access for those under 16, including Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Other countries are potentially introducing similar laws, but the measures have been unpopular and have faced enforcement challenges.
In one example of how young people are reacting, a group of students ages 11 to 14 were asked to raise their hands if they welcomed a ban, with few appearing to support it. Some students expressed frustration about having more time to fill, with one asking, “What will you do? Stare at a wall.”
Dr. Mark McDonald, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, told The National News Desk that kind of response is expected.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all, because when you take something away from a child that does damage, which the child is addicted to, there’s going to be a reaction,” McDonald said.
He compared it to taking away “unlimited ice cream and pizza” from children, saying they would be “unhappy and displeased.”
McDonald said children “spend on average between 8 to 12 hours on a phone or other device up until the age of 18,” and that in college “it actually goes up to 14 to 16 hours.” He said usage is “heavily weighted on the cell phone because that’s what’s in their pocket.”
“It is actually a drug. It acts like a drug,” McDonald said, adding that it “provokes a release of dopamine in the brain, similar to gambling and sex,” and that social media algorithms function “just like gambling,” using “intermittent reinforcement” to keep users engaged.
As lawsuits involving Meta, Google and TikTok continue or reach verdicts, some in the legal world have described social media as having its “big tobacco moment.” acDonald said it is “a nice analogy,” but argued there is a key difference in how parents respond.
“With some exceptions, smoking was never considered acceptable by parents,” he said, adding that parents who caught their children smoking would punish them and take away cigarettes. “Parents don’t do that with cell phones.”
McDonald said many parents give children phones as gifts, and he questioned whether government bans would be effective without parental buy-in. He also pointed to the role of advertising, saying there were “billions of dollars invested against smoking in advertisements for decades” but that today “most of the advertising is pro-social media because the advertisers pay social media companies to promote their product.”
“When you have social media and advertising agencies working together, and parents don’t really support removing the phones because it makes their children very upset and they go through withdrawal, I’m not really sure that a law simply banning something like a cell phone or social media from the hands of children under the age of 18 is going to be very effective,” he said.
Instead, McDonald pointed to school-based restrictions as a potentially more effective approach. He cited a cell phone ban adopted last year by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which he described as the second-largest school district in the United States.
“A cell phone ban was put in place across the entire county. That’s 600,000 children,” he said. McDonald said removing phones from schools “would be huge,” because it would “essentially remove the drug from at least eight hours a day of the kids brains.”
“I think that’s a great step and I support it,” he said.
World leaders at the G7 summit are expected to discuss child online safety. Asked what he hopes comes from those talks, McDonald said: “A lot of talk, a lot of printing of paper and not really much change at all.”
