Bad for Young Minds – So Give Them More

 

Bad for Young Minds – So Give Them More

“But everybody has one!”

Studies roll out, in medical publications and in testimony before various congressional committees, that excess exposure to the “norms” of social media, while having some connective and informational value, is generally more harmful to younger minds. According to the Mayo Clinic, “social media use can also negatively affect teens, distracting them, disrupting their sleep, and exposing them to bullying, rumor spreading, unrealistic views of other people's lives and peer pressure… Other studies also have observed links between high levels of social media use and depression or anxiety symptoms. A 2016 study of more than 450 teens found that greater social media use, nighttime social media use and emotional investment in social media — such as feeling upset when prevented from logging on — were each linked with worse sleep quality and higher levels of anxiety and depression.”

Negative self-images, impacting all younger followers (particularly girls), for example, have led to serious and debilitating emotional damage as Tik-Tock perceptions of “attractive” have shown. The main tool for disseminating social media is, of course, the smartphone. And today, teens and tweens who have smart phones spend more time using them to address social media and texting than they do sleeping. Education often slips between the cracks too.

According to Ellen McCarthy, writing for the May 10th Washington Post: “Fifty-three percent of American children have a smartphone of their own by age 11, according to a 2019 report by Common Sense Media. By the time they’re 16, 89 percent of kids have one. An earlier report by Common Sense Media found that 50 percent of teenagers felt addicted to their smartphones and that 59 percent of their parents thought that was the case. All of this has coincided with a startling increase in mental health challenges among adolescents, which some psychologists believe might be tied to the adverse effects of social media use.”

McCarthy illustrates one psychiatrist’s frustration treating anxiety in stressed out teens: “[Adriana Stacey] often urges those patients to delete just one app. Baby steps. But to some young people who land in her office, the thought of not keeping up a Snapchat streak is almost unfathomable. ‘I’ve said, ‘We can’t go any further with your treatment until you get your phone use down,’ and they just don’t come back,’ she says. ‘That’s how strong the pull is for these devices.’…

“So Stacey, a mother of four, made a decision: Not her kids…. ‘If they want one when they turn 18 and they have a job and they can afford it, that’s their choice,’ she says... Stacey is a hard-liner in a war being waged in homes everywhere as grown-ups attempt to limit smartphone use that they believe can be harmful to kids, even as they struggle to establish healthy habits with their own phones. And, big surprise, the parents aren’t winning. Because it’s not just their children they’re up against, but also a tech industry pushing products that insiders say are designed to be addictive and a society that has largely capitulated to the norms and urges and expectations all those phones and apps have created.”

Even the ability to create and maintain friendship for teens and preteens these days is often predicated on full access to a smartphone, for everything from scheduling to acculturation and communication. As one person quoted by McCarthy put it: “Part of what makes me uncomfortable with this whole thing is that it just feels like there’s no choice,” says the mother. “Because everyone feels like the world is just going this way.”

At a later stage in life, social media – also traveling mostly by smartphone – is the major form of communication that is distorting our entire political system. Lies and mythology, transmitted from social media to individuals only to explode a death-defying litany of blatantly false conspiracy theories, which are relied on by adult voters, are the new normal. Instead of enlightening and connecting us, ubiquitous digital communication is warping young minds and dividing our nation into fractious and angry sweeps of irreconcilable differences.

There are two basics that we had assumed would be an intricate part of social media are sorely missing: responsibility and accountability. Until those defects are rectified, no amount of swearing fidelity to the First Amendment or political razzle-dazzle are going to create a livable and functional society where people simply differ but still get along… without artificial sources of stress and discomfort. In short, what we’ve got just does not work. That creating the necessary responsibility and accountability – let’s even add transparency – needed to create a healthy and reality-based society literally challenges too many political incumbents, particularly those with autocratic beliefs, that fixing the problems eludes the most rational minds in the nation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect that by the time society truly understands what we might lose in pursuing a comfortable life, it all may be lost because we acted way too late.