Parents, experts and lawmakers are expressing increased concern over social media addiction among children and teenagers.
Today’s youngest generation has never known a world without social media. The long-term implications of that reality are unknown, but experts are concerned about what research is already showing in relation to things like mental health, compulsive behavior and attention span.
Brittany Wolf is a Ross Township mom of two. Her children are too young to have cell phones and social media accounts right now, but she is already preparing to set firm boundaries.
“I’m gonna keep them away from it as long as possible. They don’t have tablets. They don’t ever get to use our phones,” Wolf said. “The mental health aspect, bullying, just general things that you see on there. It’s addicting. I’m addicted to it.”
She and her husband have a son starting Kindergarten next year, and she is already concerned.
“I complained immediately that they get tablets in Kindergarten… They are there to socialize and learn their alphabet and count. I wish they didn’t start that young,” she said. “I’ll probably have to lean into very 80s, 90s style parenting and be like ‘I don’t give a crap what everybody else is doing. Cause this is what we do in our house, and you’re not getting a phone.’”
Dr. Jessica Ghilani is an associate professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg.
“My biggest concern is the platforms are designed in a way that is extremely distorting, and that distortion is something that doesn’t just affect kids. It affects all of us,” Ghilani said. “Being on these platforms can feel bewildering, and they’re designed that way on purpose to make it almost like a digital casino without windows.”
Ghilani researches social media platforms and the methods they use to keep people scrolling.
“Parents perhaps don’t realize how the goal is always to keep their kids on that platform, by any means necessary. Whether the content makes a kid feel good or bad is immaterial to how the algorithms are programmed,” she said.
“They are especially susceptible to the kind of dopamine hit that we get when we’re scrolling a brightly colored, engaging screen… The people who run these platforms certainly know this, and we know that they know this because material has been leaked and whistleblowers have told us that they know this,” Ghilani said.
Last year, Pew Research Center found 48 percent of teenagers surveyed said social media has a “mostly negative effect” on people their age. Forty-five percent of teenagers surveyed admitted they spend too much time on social media.
Ghilani is raising two daughters. She and her husband have strict rules about screen time and social media.
“Any Meta platform is off the table for my kids until they are – I would like it to be until they’re 15 or older,” she said.
She also does not allow them to use any short-form video platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
“Short-form video is very engaging. You lose track of time using it, it is algorithmically sorted and it also has auto-play features, so it moves to the next video and suddenly it’s been an hour or more, and you’ve lost track of your time,” Ghilani said.
Brooke Gertz’s three children are younger than Ghilani’s, but as a child psychiatrist, she is seeing some of the effects of increased social media use in real time.
“I’ve heard from a lot of teachers, especially in the younger age group that they’re already noticing a difference in attention span,” said Gertz.
“Obviously, for younger kids, you worry about screen time replacing real time and real life, and the dopamine hits to your brain start early on. When kids are watching shows that have a lot going on, they’re already getting used to that instant gratification and dose of dopamine that are not realistic to maintain all the time, and they also miss the importance of boredom,” she explained.
She said artificial intelligence only adds to the challenges parents have to navigate with their children.
“There’s a lot of concerns about replacing real interactions with inauthentic interactions and with AI, it’s a new wave of concerns. It can be dangerous asking AI questions that are inappropriate for kids to be asking,” she said. “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of parental supervision. We would watch our 6-year-old kids when they’re playing outside, riding their bike down the street and screens are no different.”
Ghilani said parental controls are a step in the right direction, but they never go far enough because parents can’t disengage the algorithm. That, in part, is the reason some California lawmakers are considering a social media ban for kids under 16.
“That algorithm is going to do what it’s been programmed to do – show content that grips the person’s attention,” Ghilani said.
She encourages parents to set boundaries for screen time for their children, as well as for themselves, to set an example. She also is a firm believer that kids should not have phones in their bedrooms overnight. She recommends parents utilize tools and settings on cell phones to limit screen time.
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