Children’s mental health under attack by the smartphone

Wellbeing of younger people started to take a dip in 2012 when one of the world’s most powerful devices became widely availableThe smartphone is an amazingly powerful, versatile and useful tool. When married to social media, it is threatening to produce a worldwide collapse of youth mental health. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

In broad terms, social media is digital technology allowing the sharing of ideas and information, including visual and text, through virtual networks and communities, featuring user-generated content encouraging engagement via likes, shares, comments and discussion. More than five billion people use social media worldwide. The largest social media platforms are Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok.

The percentage of American teens socialising with friends twice or more per week was fairly steady over the past 50 years until 2008 when it started to decline, falling very steeply from about 2012. This percentage dropped from 80 per cent in 1976 to 55 per cent in 2021 for 17 year olds. The percentage of 13–17 year olds sleeping less than seven hours a night stood at about 35 per cent from 2003 to 2013, when it sharply took off, rising to 50 per cent by 2022.

Twenge has considered other possible causes of these disheartening teen wellbeing statistics, eg anxiety over global warming, college debt, drug-use etc but none of them fit the bill. There is no doubt that use of social media on smartphones has a huge negative influence on the lives of teenagers. Bans on radio/TV advertising of tobacco, strict age limits on cigarette sales and smoking bans in indoor public areas were introduced. These efforts gradually succeeded – in the UK smoking has continuously declined over the past 50 years by about two-thirds. A similarly hard battle will be called for to control social media use among young people.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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