Rich Johnston, a father of two school-age children in Atlanta, thought AOL Instant Messenger was bad enough. Johnston told me recently that “many messages screw with people’s brains,” emphasizing them. The self-professed veteran also loves the firehose of millennial information that is X, formerly Twitter, and yes, he knows it’s weird.
“Now we’ve got Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram, and it’s going to be worse in 10 years,” he said. “That’s the scary part of raising a kid in this environment.”
He’s not the only one who feels this way. There is now a nationwide and rather alarmed push to keep smartphones out of children’s hands and teenagers off social media, pointing to a correlation between youth spending more time online and an increase in mental health problems. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy even called for warning labels on social media platforms earlier this year.
That panic reached a tipping point this week.
Congress moved a step closer to passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA) on Wednesday, as tech companies scramble to move ahead with what will be the most important internet regulation in decades.
And just one day earlier that bill had been marked up in the House, Meta announced that it was overhauling Instagram With a new effort called Teen Accounts, which makes the accounts of users under 18 private by default, restricts notifications at night and gives parents the option to supervise their kids. It’s not exactly taking Instagram away from teenagers, but it could dramatically change how they use it. It’s the latest move by social media companies to make their platforms a little less, well, scary for parents YouTube and Snapchat announced the same this month
Whether these developments will actually be good for children remains an open question.
All this is happening against a background of seven kingdoms Bans passed in schoolsAnd another 14 are considered sanctions. There is also a wave of cultural pressure, intensified by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, Anxious generation, Rallying parents to work together “To swim against the tide of increasing screen time.” One of his colleagues, psychologist Gene Twenge, was one of the first to sound the alarm about the link between young people’s mental health and being online when he asked in an Atlantic article in 2017.Did the smartphone destroy a generation?“
To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t suggesting we ban kids from ever touching smartphones or scrolling through social media feeds. We don’t really know how such bans or even policy changes will affect young people’s mental health. Meanwhile, school phones are banned The race that has been swept Don’t control what parents do at home. However, we started using the phrase “phone ban” that we used to use.
“I hear the ban as a sort of cry of despair, really, that we’ve lost control,” said Sonya LivingstoneProfessor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying children and technology for decades. “We’ve lost control of feed from companies, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our family lives — as part of any kind of Faustian pact — taking over the infrastructure of commerce.”
In other words, we’re letting the tech companies win.
Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. Instagram’s new teen accounts may make parents feel like they have a bit more control over how their kids engage in these transactions, but their kids’ attention is still the product.
KOSPA, however, targets the business models of social media platforms. The law, which combines the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) to ban advertising targeted to minors, will allow users to opt out of algorithmic sorting in their feeds, and will at least prevent online accounts for ages 13 to 17. Age requirement for It would create a so-called “duty of care” for social media companies that would hold them accountable for harmful content on their platforms. Definition of what constitutes harmful content The bill’s language is still being hammered out.
We still do not know the fate of KOSPA. Its predecessor, COSA, passed the Senate in July by 93 votes to 3. Tech companies and their lobbyists It has been argued againstAs independent commentators believe it will Open the door to censorship. Combined with whatever self-regulation social media platforms decide to do, such comprehensive legislation could make raising children in our increasingly digital world a little less terrifying. But that hardly guarantees an end to youth mental health crises.
Kids can learn healthy media habits — and so can you
The internet, like parenting, doesn’t come with an instruction manual. However, there are resources available to help parents and children develop healthy media habits.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has a full Portal dedicated to children and technology. A good starting point is 5 Cs of media consumption — Baby, Content, Calm, Crowding, and Communication — which help you assess your child’s specific needs AAP indicates Although we are used to safety standards for children’s products, such regulations do not currently exist for technology. “This means that kids are using platforms and apps that can be designed For adults — not children at different stages of their development,” according to the AAP.
Parents should also follow suit Basic guidelines for healthy digital media useSuch as turning off notifications, avoiding screens before bed, limiting social media use, and occasionally putting your phone away. You can live without looking longer than you think.
To do that, Livingstone told me, we should study the causes of mental health problems in young people, rather than focusing on the consequences of screen time. Linda CharmermanThe founder and director of Wellesley College’s Youth, Media and Wellbeing Lab, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for caution on social media platforms as a sign of “a bit of hysterical panic.” He also said that addressing mental health issues will require more than a crackdown on smartphone use.
“People want something as if it’s going to be a magic bullet to stop the rise of mental illness,” Charmermon said. “I think it actually makes people not look at other root causes of mental illness.”
It’s not just kids who are having a hard time navigating life online. Surgeon General Murthy in August Issued an advisory on parental mental health and wellbeingAnd with it, kids and hands-on technology An ouroboros of concern begins to resemble. In A New York Times article In the advisory, Murthy even points to the “impact of social media on youth mental health” as a source of mental health challenges for parents.
“Stress, loneliness and fatigue can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being,” Murthy writes. “And we know that parents’ mental health has a direct impact on children’s mental health.”
No wonder everyone is feeling panicked. As Congress bands in on the goal of children’s online safety and gives parents more control over what their children see and do online, parents are stuck in a feedback loop. They are stressed by the child care crisis that Congress has yet to address. They suffer from an epidemic of loneliness that has no end. A 2022 Harvard study found 20 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers reported anxiety, compared to 18 percent of teens. And nearly 40 percent of teens said they were “somewhat worried” about their parents’ mental health.
We still don’t know how social media works for kids to affect their mental health. Turning off algorithmic feeds is likely to reduce the risk of exposure to harmful content. It is certainly possible that getting rid of targeted ads will have a positive effect Better privacy is imperative to keep kids safe from strangers online. If nothing else, we’ve at least started talking more about how these platforms work and can work better. And how we can feel good online and off.
“You can’t shield them from this forever,” said Johnston, an Atlanta father. “So you have to train them how to use it in a smart, safe, non-panic-inducing fashion as much as you can.”
A version of this story also appeared in the Vox Technology Newsletter.Sign up hereSo you don’t miss the next one!
