Mental Health
Social media figures large here – not only what it’s portraying, but the way it hooks kids in. This section touches on addiction, bullying, self harm and worse.
Aside from content, there’s the fact that more screentime means children are spending less time on activities that are (in real life) sociable and nourishing, or that lead them to pursue a passion. This section looks at the mental health effects of this, and delves into what’s happening on Tiktok.
“…false choice of profits over values...”
Prince William – 2017 met with FB, Twitter, Snapchat, Apple and Google as part of Cyberbullying Taskforce. He wanted them to adopt industry-wide guidelines creating safer online spaces for children. The tech giants didn’t come close to the change he wanted and he was furious. He has since publicly condemned social media giants for the ‘false choice of profits over values.’ He privately offered support to the family of Molly Russell who committed suicide at 14 after viewing images of self-harm online.
Social media channels
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Snapchat
According to Evolve Treatment, and you can read the whole article here,
“Teens can get obsessive about maintaining their streaks* – especially when they’ve gone on for so long. To adolescents, streaks can indicate the strength of a friendship… Some teens have been exchanging photos and videos every single day for years.’
*What are streaks? They are created when two friends have sent messages, images or videos on Snapchat every day. To keep it up, each must respond within 24 hours. Some kids can be juggling tens or hundreds of these at the same time.
Back in 2019, this BBC article headed, ‘Snapchat under scrutiny from MPs over 'addictive' streaks,’ outlined how Snapchat told MPs “it may consider changes to its friendship streaks, which have been criticised for being potentially addictive.”
Furthermore, “It appears the organisation can’t prevent under 13s from joining the platform. Snapchat's Stephen Collins said it was ‘not possible to keep under-13s off any platform" because they can easily get around parental controls.’”
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Instagram
This Sept 2021 article in The Guardian, titled ‘Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals’, states:
Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm.
Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls.
“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020.
Another slide said: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”
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TikTok & More
How about some plastic surgery kids? Read more here.
Or perhaps a little radicalisation before you go down for supper? Read more here.
Or why not just endlessly scroll videos to avoid thinking about anything for too long? Did you know that the Chinese put up alerts to stop children from endlessly scrolling? Do they know something we don’t? Or that we choose to ignore?
Other favourite apps are of course YouTube (Kids can get down rabbit holes and find solutions to problems they didn’t even realise they had)
Then there are REFACE, Omegle, WhatsApp, Discord and Ask.fm. Do your own research into their pros and cons in terms of addictiveness, content moderation and paedo groomer likelihood because for the sake of brevity, we won’t go into each one of these now.
Beware Snapchat Meet Up
Read this on Ineqe.com about Snapchat Meet Up
“We have received reports from parents and young people around a new feature found in popular app Snapchat. This feature allows users to obtain directions to another user’s exact location and address. Since its release, many users have expressed their outrage and have called out the platform for including it without notifying them.
It’s important to note that the ‘Meet Up’ feature does increase the risk of unsolicited house calls from online ‘friends’, loss of personal information, and potential exposure to in-person harassment. In any incident involving serious threat or risk, local authorities should be notified immediately.
Snapchat does not offer any automatic location privacy – Snap Map is on by default. The only form of location privacy available is called ‘Ghost Mode’. This tool allows users to remove all live location features from the app.”
Teen suicides amongst girls have almost doubled
According to this article in the Independent (2020), “suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in seven years...”
It adds, “The number of women and girls between the ages of 10 and 24 recorded as having taken their own lives has increased by 94 per cent since 2012… a record high for England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.”
Lastly, “while suicide among men remains considerably higher, experts have raised concerns about the unprecedented rise in young women taking their lives, highlighting the role of social media.”
Toddlers, the Internet & social media
THE TIMES 2019 - WHY SOCIAL MEDIA COULD BE PUTTING YOUR TODDLER AT RISK
‘The children’s charity Barnardo’s said in a report published today that its mental health support workers, adoption advisers and staff helping other vulnerable children were increasingly concerned at the impact of internet use by children under five years old.’
And later in the article:
‘The charity’s survey of 80 of its frontline staff highlighted concerns about how very young children interacted with social media. These included possible addiction and the substitution of time spent with family with social media use, and were felt to cause problems with mental health and emotional wellbeing. The report added: “Key apprehensions included the failure to develop the skills to think creatively, interact with others socially and manage their own emotions.”’
Six British teen suicides linked to social media
Daily Mail 2019 -London - The teenage suicide rate in Britain has almost doubled in eight years, it emerged on Sunday, as ministers vowed to crack down on the internet giants accused of fuelling youngsters’ distress.
New figures show the rate among children aged between 15 and 19 has risen, despite falling for most other age groups. The Provisional Office for National Statistic figures for last year reveals that suicides are running at more than five in 100 000 among teenagers in England.
The ministers' threat comes after the grieving father of 14-year-old Molly Russell accused Instagram of ‘helping to kill her’ after the schoolgirl took her own life.
Ian Russell, 55, of Harrow, north-west London, said Molly had gone to bed in a good mood but decided to kill herself after looking at troubling images that night. He added: ‘I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter.’
Children & Parents: Media Use & Attitudes
Ofcom Report 2022
According to this 2022 report by Ofcom, a majority of children under 13 had their own profile on at least one social media app or site.
33% of parents of 5 years to 7 years said their child had a profile, and 60% of 8-11s said they had one.
More than six in ten children aged 8-17 said they had more than one profile on some online apps and sites (62%); the most common reason, overall, was having one profile just for their parents, family or friends to see.
Only 42% of parents of 3-17s knew that 13 was the minimum age requirement for using most social media. 38% of parents of 8-11-year-olds said they would allow their child to use social media.
Nine in ten 8-17-year-olds (89%) said they had ever felt pressure to be popular on these platforms, with no difference by gender.
Despite being under the minimum age requirement (13 for most social media sites), 33% of 5-7s and twice as many 8-11s (60%) said they had a social media profile.
Quick takeaways from the report
• Of children aged 8-17 who have experienced bullying, more than eight in ten experienced it through a communications device such as a phone or laptop.
• Children aged 13-17: Respondents were also twice as likely to say that they felt more relaxed online (43%) than they did offline (21%).
• Among 11-16s, only 6% went online only in a family room, while 90% went online in their own room at least some of the time.
Only 35% of parents of children with a mobile phone had a block in place on the phone to prevent access to adult content.
“TikTok is helping young users find videos that encourage eating disorders and radical weight-loss programmes before bombarding them with dangerous material.”
“An investigation found that algorithms deployed by the social media app prey on teenagers with mental health problems, targeting them with videos about self-harm and even suicide. Experts said that the scale of dangerous material on the Chinese-owned app was ‘out of control’ and accused its executives of exacerbating the problem by failing to reveal data about its users.
The videos showed users asking for ‘anorexia coaches or buddies’ to talk them through how to reach a certain weight. Others asked for tips on how to hide eating disorders from parents or how long it is possible to fast without passing out.”
Online Nation 2021 Report
This report reveals that more than a third of children aged 8-17 had encountered worrying or nasty content online, and some may inadvertently be sharing it further. Over a third of children aged 8-17 (36%) said they had seen something ‘worrying or nasty’ online in the past 12 months.
Of the half of 12-15s who said they’d had a negative experience online, the most common was ‘being contacted by a stranger who wanted to be their friend (30%). One in five 12-15s said they had accidentally spent money online that they didn’t want to, and a similar proportion (17%) reported seeing something of a sexual nature that made them feel uncomfortable.’
Mediacom Survey: Connected Kids 2019
We know that poor mental health is on the rise among teens
“Social media is driving ‘hyper-connectivity’, which is likely to be contributing to poorer mental health, with conditions such as anxiety and depression becoming more prevalent among young audiences in recent years.”
Go to p40 for the full report and the stats.
See page 41 for how teens taking back control themselves.
Must Read
Glow Kids
Read chapter 6 of Glow Kids to find out about ‘Electronic Screen Syndrome’ and the excellent work of child psychiatrist Dr Victoria Dunckley. She found that ‘all kids were getting impacted on some level – even those with so-called “moderate” screen exposure were showing signs of “subtle damage” such as chronic irritability, inability to focus, a general malaise, apathy or, oftentimes, a state of being “wired and tired.” She prescribes digital fasts to many children she sees who have been thought to have psychiatric disorders (such as depression, bipolar disorder or ADHD) and often found “complete resolution of symptoms.”’
This page on Dr Dunckley’s site is compelling reading: Screentime is Making Kids Moody, Crazy and Lazy:
Modern life
Cases are growing of girls being coerced into sending ‘nudes’ then these being shared around school or worse, on revenge porn sites. One tragic case is that of Amanda Todd but there are others where girls have been left deeply traumatised and at worst, also resorted to suicide. We’re not putting links here but an online search will corroborate what we are warning about. These three articles illustrate some of the real life issues.
Boys too have been driven to suicide from online bullying, for example Ryan Halligan.
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Read The Article - The Times 2019
The study of nearly 10,000 British schoolchildren aged 13-16 found that girls who checked social media multiple times a day had a 38 per cent greater risk of suffering psychological distress.
For the study, published in the journal The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, researchers analysed data from three sets of interviews with teenagers from 1,000 schools in England, who were contacted aged 13 in 2013, and then in 2014 and 2015.
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Read the article - The Times April 2022
“It comes as no surprise to me to hear that the STEER education consultancy has said that the mental health of teenage girls is “at a precipice” – believe me, I know this all too well. With academic pressures, social media and the more recent “Everyone’s Invited” movement allowing sexual assault survivors to share their stories, it’s clear that the burdens faced by teenage girls are unparalleled.”
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Read the article - The Times 2022
Melanie Philips writes: ‘Psychological disorders among teenagers of both sexes have been increasing in nearly all developed countries since the Second World War. Drug and alcohol abuse, actual and attempted suicides, depression, anorexia and other eating disorders have all risen and are rooted in various aspects of western modernity.
In her 2018 book iGen about young Americans born after 1995, Jean Twenge noted a dramatic rise in suicides, attempted suicides and depression in this group. Saying they were “scared, maybe even terrified” and were “both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile”, Twenge ascribed a great deal of this angst to the use of smartphones.’
This video, Modern parenting fuelling mental illness in which Professor Jonathan Haidt talks about how modern parenting plus the effect of social media is so destructive for Gen Z. His advice: no social media till age 16. No phones in bedrooms overnight. Strict screentime limits.
Must read
The Independent report on a study by researchers at the University of Warwick that found that gender inequality, sexism and body image pressures are other driving factors behind the trend, specifically, that “Poverty and social media are key factors in mental health problems that make teenage girls significantly more likely to self-harm than boys.”
The study polled more than 11,000 14-year-olds. It found girls tend to spend more time on social media than boys, that “can create the idea other people have wonderful or better lives. There is also the issue of the early sexualization of girls and the notion of the perfect body.”
It adds that “Researchers said 14-year-old girls in the UK are at greatest risk of self-harming among those in mid-adolescence, which spans from the age of 10 to 14.”
In an alarming trend, teenagers are altering their photos and asking surgeons to turn the results into reality - The Times July 2018
“Dr Pippa Hugo, of the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, southwest London, says as many as nine in 10 teenage girls in some schools digitally enhance images before sharing them.
This is the climate of unrealistic beauty standards in which young people are growing up. More shocking is the knock-on result that the young, used to seeing themselves airbrushed and retouched by technology, are seeking surgery to recreate the effect in the flesh.
The first time I observed this I thought it was a joke. Sitting near two teenage girls taking selfies, I watched them morph their baby faces using filters on the Snapchat messaging app and heard one say: “I wish we looked like this in real life.” I didn’t realise then that some young people were taking such images into clinics, asking to have that “work” done.
Now plastic surgeons claim patients are requesting surgery that recreates their photoshopped selfies. Tijion Esho, a cosmetic doctor, has coined the term ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’ to describe the worrying trend... Esho has had people as young as 14 approach him making similar requests. ‘It breaks your heart,’ he says.”.
CHILDWISE report looks at TikTok usage
“The app allows children to endlessly scroll without an end until you choose to stop. Everything is short so your attention doesn’t need to last beyond around 30 seconds. Children are spending more of their free time online and TikTok has been really important for kids this year as use of the app surged under lockdown,” says Simon Leggett, research director at CHILDWISE.
This 2021 Ofcom report “…many children also spent hours consuming short snippets of content. TikTok videos last a maximum of 60 seconds, but are often much shorter, and many children described them as ‘blurring together’ during long sessions on the app.
“There’s nothing I specifically like on there, I just keep scrolling, it’s addictive.” Jack, 16
Are you wondering how the algorithm works? Here’s an insight:
“TikTok typically favors videos that are easy-to-digest, have a seamless loop, and cater to users who have a short attention span.”
According to this 2022 Ofcom report, Tiktok is being used by
16% of 3-4 year olds
51% of 8-11 year olds
74% of 16-17 year olds
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• TikTok was the platform used by the most children and for the greatest amount of time. A lot of the children’s behaviour online was increasingly passive.
• Continuing a trend we have seen for a few years, the children were posting less, watching more and often seeking to avoid actively choosing what they watched, happy to be served a narrow range of content.
• Many preferred the decision-free conveyor belt of short videos on TikTok, even saying “YouTube is long” because it required too much decision-making.
• Some children were struggling to pay attention to longer-form content, struggling to focus on a single activity, and were compulsively multi-screening.
• Children consuming news through non-traditional media is a continuing trend, but this year there was an increase in children both consuming and posting content on social media that might be described as about ‘social justice’.• For some children, their engagement with news topics on social media slipped into conspiracy theory territory.
• This avoidance of decision-making was echoed in wider repetitive behaviours. The narrowness of the content that children were consuming on social media was also reflected in the narrow and repetitive behaviours some of the children were showing in their other media activities. They were often reluctant to try new things, or didn’t explore other options once they had alighted on something they liked.
• Many children in the study were encountering content that was inappropriate for their age or that had the potential to cause harm. Twelve of the children had encountered some form of content that had the potential to be harmful. Although this was more common among older children, it also included younger participants, including Suzy (10) and Amira (11). This was often in the form of content that was not age-appropriate, and in some cases linked to potentially more serious themes, like self-harm.
• These children were encountering a mix of material, including content of a sexual nature, offensive content and content promoting unhealthy body image and self-harm, on a range of mainstream popular platforms including Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. For many of them, encountering this type of content wasn’t something they gave much thought to, as it just felt like part and parcel of being online.
• They were being served (content) by platforms, and in some cases felt unable to change what they were seeing once it was on the screen.
• They were able to actively explore ‘niche’ communities and corners of the online world which seemed to have a greater proportion of potentially harmful content.
• In a few cases, children saw adverts that were obviously inappropriate for their age. Some children felt frustrated that they weren’t able to control some of what they saw on social media.
• Several children referred to this, with TikTok’s For You page and Instagram’s Explore pages mentioned as the places where the children most frequently encountered content they didn’t want to see. These children reported being surprised by what they saw on these pages, even if they knew that the content they were served might be a result of their previous activity.
• Suzy (10) actively disliked what she was being served by these, and other, social media platforms. Suzy was really frustrated that she kept seeing “weird” things on her For You page. In her second interview she showed us some of the videos she was seeing on her For You page that she didn’t like. This included a video titled ‘Woman exposes man who r@ped her’ and videos of girls made up to look as though they had been injured or beaten. She wanted to know if there was a way to ‘reset’ her TikTok so she would only see ‘normal’ content again.
• Most younger participants had either easily circumvented social media age restrictions, or were entirely unaware of them
• Almost all the participants who were using social media had begun to do so before they turned 13 (the current minimum age to sign up for the majority of social media platforms).
• Most of the younger participants who were using social media had made an account by providing a fake date of birth. This was described as something completely normal and easy to do – a necessary step to allow them to keep up with what other people their age were doing online.
Boredom is useful
How else are they going to reap the rewards of curiosity, and develop character, resilience and interests? Let them grumble, and let them find something to do, indoors or out.
A last word from Norman Doidge
“Privacy and mental health are inextricably linked, especially for young people. You need periods of privacy to form a self and an identity, a task not completed until at least the late teens. Having an autonomous, spontaneous self is the result of a long psychological process where you have time to ‘step back’ from the crowd, and from your parents, to reflect. It requires time to let that self – your true feelings, your own quirky, uncurated reactions – emerge, spontaneously. The new phones foster enmeshment with parents, and the world, and hamper individuation, the process of becoming a unique individual, because kids are overconnected.”