Should children be on social media? Too late, they already are

Two months ago, Daisy Greenwell and Clare Fernyhough set up a WhatsApp group to discuss how to stave off their young children’s demands for smartphones. After they posted about their plans on Instagram, other parents wanted in. Now their group, Smartphone-Free Childhood, has more than 60,000 followers debating how to keep their children away from the demon devices – a debate they are naturally conducting on smartphones of their own.

In a contentious debate two things are fairly clear. First, smartphones and social media have become a big part of childhood. By the age of 12 nearly every child has a phone, according to research in Britain. Once they get one, social media is how they spend most of their screen time. American teens spend nearly five hours a day on social apps, according to polls by Gallup. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are most popular .

Are the phenomena linked? The timing is suggestive: mental health began to slide just as smartphones and social apps took off, in the 2010s. Some studies also suggest that children who spend more time on social media have poorer mental health than lighter users. But such correlations do not prove causation: it may be, for instance, that depressed, lonely children choose to spend more time doom-scrolling than happy ones do.

“The really convincing causal evidence we have is quite limited,” admits Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University, one of the authors of the 2018 study. But, he argues, most points in the same direction as the circumstantial evidence around timing. “If you put all that together, I think it’s enough to say there is a substantial probability that these harms are large and real.”Much remains uncertain. The best randomised experiments have been done on adults, who are not the main objects of concern.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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