GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — Childhood seems as challenging as ever these days, with anxiety, depression and other emotional difficulties at all-time highs.
Health experts say frequent use of social media is playing a key role in undermining the health and wellbeing of kids and teens (and adults, too).
Developmental psychologist and co-host of the Mom Enough podcast, Dr. Marti Erickson, says parents can take steps to understand the addictive power of social media and make healthy choices.
"Social media platforms have one goal: making money," Dr. Erickson said. "And their means to achieving that goal is to hook our kids and us on spending as much time as possible on their platforms, using our personal information and sophisticated algorithms to keep us coming back."
Dr. Erickson says the addictive nature of social media is much like falling in love: getting a post with a lot of likes triggers a chemical reaction in our brains.
But Dr. Erickson says there are healthy ways to use social media, and it starts with asking four questions:
1. How do you feel when you use social media?
"Many young people talk about how their feelings rise and fall with the number of likes they get on a post," Dr. Erickson said. "Despite the benefits of keeping up with long-distance friends and family, many young people say they often feel like they don’t measure up to how others look or what they say or do on social media. Both young people and adults may see people they know doing fun things together and feel left out or rejected. And too many kids experience the sting of cyber-bullying or rumor-spreading on social media."
2. What things does social media squeeze out of your life?
"Recent surveys of teens show that they often identify pressure to succeed in school as a top source of stress," Dr. Erickson explained. "But many kids say that spending so much time on social media interferes with their good intentions to stay on top of homework and preparation for exams. Extensive use of social media also interferes with sleep, in-person contact with peers, time outdoors, physical activity, music, art, reading books for pleasure. This is true for kids and adults."
3. How are the platforms targeting you and us?
"Much is coming to light recently about how social media platforms gather and use information about all of us and how that shapes the algorithms that determine what social media puts in front of us," Dr. Erickson said. "Neuroscientists are studying how those decisions affect our brains (e.g., triggering a dopamine response that makes us want more). Kids who are old enough to be on social media are old enough to join parents in learning more about how social media platforms use us to make money for them. A major developmental task for adolescents is to establish increasing autonomy, so they resist the idea of parents and other adults trying to control them. What if we engage our kids in resenting and resisting the control social media companies have over them?"
4. What strategies could we use to manage social media in a healthier way?
"As parents, we certainly have a right to set limits on our children’s involvement with social media and device use in general," Dr. Erickson said. "But if we want our kids to learn how to make and sustain healthy choices for themselves, how much more effective to hear the ideas they come up with themselves! Possibilities might include setting no-device times for the household (such as mealtime or after a certain time in the evening), not having devices in the bedroom at night, turning off notifications so that the beeps don’t tempt us to grab the phone. Or how about blocking out time on the calendar each week for interesting outdoor activities and/or face-to-face get-togethers with friends, leaving devices behind?"
Get more parenting advice and insights from Dr. Marti Erickson and her daughter Dr. Erin Erickson in the weekly parenting podcast, Mom Enough.
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