When I was a kid, a “social disease” was polite society’s way of categorizing venereal disease. Today, social disease has a different connotation.
When I was a child, television was the bane of society. Sure it provided entertainment, mindless entertainment. In 1961, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Norman Minow, called television “a vast wasteland”. He decried the quality of programs, the violence on tv and its impact on children. This was one of the driving factors that led to the formation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) in 1969 with programming beginning in 1970. Television programs like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers not only taught little ones something, but they were also wholesome and entertaining at the same time.
In my house growing up, television was not allowed to baby sit. “Go outside” is the mantra of my mother’s I remember hearing endlessly. “Make your own fun” was the gentle advice of my grandparents. The idea that I would sit mindlessly for hours glued to a screen was an anathema to those who loved me and wanted the best for me. Read, play sports, ride a bike, engage in activity, socialize with friends were all alternative undertakings that were healthier and more productive. None of those things involved adults either.
There is an epidemic of “social disease” sweeping through our nation’s young people and it’s called the “smart phone”. Kids of all ages are glued to their phones. They’re looking at videos on TikTok and YouTube. They’re engaging on social media. They’re texting. They’re also being bullied, subjected to disheartening and depressing messaging while wasting their time and their minds all courtesy of the smart phone.
According to a Gallup Poll in 2023, teenagers in the United States were spending an average of five hours a day using social media. That’s in addition to any other time spent on communication, cruising the internet or other online activities on their phones. Even if all that time were well spent, and it’s not, that means less face-to-face social interactions and fewer real connections in the corporeal world. The number of high school seniors who go out twice a week or more to interact with friends (a movie, ball game, dance, date or other social activity) has fallen from 82% in 1979 to 57% today (data from Monitoring the Future longitudinal study). Technology also interferes with sleep. It’s “FOMO”, the fear of missing out. It’s the alerts and pings etc. that drive one to pick up the phone or to have fitful sleep because, “What if someone is trying to reach me?” syndrome. Half of U.S. teens were sleep deprived in 2022, that’s up from a third in 2012. It used to be term papers and tests that kept teens up at night. Now it is the latest gossip post or TikTok video via the smart phone that does it. Your child might not be on drugs, but they are on their smart phone – constantly.
Social media depresses people too. More than twice as many teens suffered from depression in 2022 than they did in 2011. Adjusting for other factors, the driving force of this depression is social media consumed from smart phones. Surveys of teen happiness show that they were the most care free in the pre smart phone days of the 1990’s. Some of this change is attributed to the rise of things like school shootings but the bulk of recent teen angst is due to the upsurge of social media and its ubiquity. United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says that adolescent mental health is “the crisis of our time”.
In studies across cultures and around the world, the findings are the same. The more time a young person spends on social media the more morose and depressed they are. Kids who use social media are twice as likely to be depressed as those who don’t, according to these studies.
Social media companies, in internal documents, acknowledge that their platforms are addictive, and then these companies continue to arrange their algorithms to be as compelling as possible while denying publicly that they have anything to do with the current situation of smart phone dependency. It reminds me of the tobacco companies when their internal research showed that cigarettes were addictive and cancer causing while at the same time, they were paying doctors to appear in ads touting the safety of tobacco products. That all ended with the Surgeon General’s warning on packages of tobacco products in 1969 and the banning of tobacco ads on television in 1971. I can imagine the same thing occurring with social media in the coming years.
In 1998, the Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act that said kids had to be at least 13 before their data could be harvested online. It was well intentioned but as anyone who has been online knows, there really is no verification of age for websites. You assert you are of age, and they let you in. That’s all there is to it.
In a 2022 survey of children, 7 of 10 kids in fifth and sixth grade said they had been on social media. Many young people have social media accounts without their parents’ knowledge. There is a Catch-22 to this problem. Much of communication takes place online now and kids who aren’t connected do miss out. However, there is a difference between communication and social media.
Psychologists have suggested that the minimum age for engagement on social media should be 16. In addition to the ills of social media – the negative body issues, the “you’re not good enough” (not the right clothes, type of phone, automobile etc.), depression, bullying etc. – there is the danger of grooming, solicitation and exploitation by nefarious adults.
The age for engagement for social media needs to go up and it can be verified. The Age Verification Providers Association lists twelve ways that age can be verified online. We need federal legislation to mandate that age verification actually be confirmed and enact heavy penalties for social media companies that continue to exploit young people for profit at those adolescents’ peril.
Parents can help too. Children don’t need phones, at least kids don’t need smart phones. If a young child truly needs a phone, then a flip phone will do. There are phones that will make calls, send texts and take pictures without access to the swamp of social media. When a child gets older, say in high school, that could be the time to allow them to get a smart phone. Smart phones should be viewed like vehicles. We don’t allow kids to drive until a certain age for obvious reasons. Denying kids access to social media until a certain age should be equally as obvious for many of the same reasons.
My parents grew up during the Great Depression. I endured endless stories that began, “When I was your age…” What my parents were really doing was telling me that things were different in their day, and they were right. Your kids will tell you the same thing. However, you’re the parent. Their health and welfare are in your hands. That includes their mental well-being. It won’t be fun, and it won’t be easy but limiting access to smart phones and social media are the absolute best thing for your child. Do what you can, they may fight you now, but be grateful later.