A day doesn’t go by without an article appearing somewhere about the impact of social media on tweens and adolescents.
Recently, my wife and I went to dine in a nearby restaurant. As we were waiting for our meal, a family of five, father, mother and three daughters, was shown to a nearby table. As soon as this family took their places at the table, the mother passed a cell phone to the youngest of the children, an animated three- or four-year-old. Displaying ample dexterity, this child scrolled though the phone’s menu until she settled on some site that held her interest. She did not interact with her siblings at all.
Diana Graber is the founder of Cyberwise, a website for adults who want to help young people use technology safely. In her book, Raising Humans in a Digital World, she reports 44% of children under 1 year of age use a mobile device daily. By age 2, this number will climb to 77%!
Common Sense Media reports that tweens, ages 8-12, spend 5 hours and 33 minutes daily on their phones; adolescents, ages 13-18, will average 8 hours and 39 minutes engaged with a device. Boys will average more hours than girls. This may be due to the amount of gaming boys participate in.
In 2023, the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Media and the Mental Health of Youths stated that 3+ hours exposure to social media doubles the risk of poor mental health. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children ages 2-5 be limited to 1 hour a day social media exposure; ages 6-17 to 2 hours.
The Mount Sinai South Nassau Truth in Medicine Poll found that 58% of children were reported to have phones. That poll finds the average time spent daily engaging with social media to be 3.41 hours. A deeper dive into the data shows that 27% of kids spend 2 hours daily doing this; 34%, 3-4 hours; 16% 5 hours while 34% were not sure of their hours. A Stanford University poll found that children aged 8-12 spent 5 to 8 hours in front of a screen. Amazingly, this study further found children were spending as little as 4 to 7 minutes in unstructured outdoor play.
Newsday, July 2,2024, published an article by Jim Baumbach: Eleven school districts sue social media firms. This article reports the districts “each filed nearly identical five-page complaints that accuse the social media companies of negligence and being a public nuisance.” Further, “The school districts say they are on the front lines of redressing damage caused by the companies’ algorithms targeting children when they are uniquely susceptible to addictive features in digital products and highly vulnerable to the resulting harm.”
85% of parents support banning phones in school.
Melinda Wenner Meyer wrote a September 11, 2023, article for the New York Times, Demonizing Social Media isn’t the Answer to Online Safety. She wrote, “…perhaps banning social media or heavily monitoring kids who use it (another common parental response) isn’t the most constructive solution to the problem… we should focus more on helping kids learn how to safely navigate social media and manage online privacy and decision making.”
Deborah Heitner, PhD, also offers tech advice for parents in her books, Screenwise: Helping kids thrive in a digital world and Growing up in public: Coming of age in a digital world. She cautions parents that banning can backfire; to mentor before you monitor and for parents to model good online behavior.
As if there were not enough on a family’s plate already!
Be Safe!