Florida recently passed a bill banning kids under 14 from creating accounts on sites like Instagram and TikTok. Social media has caused an alarming spike in depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide among American teens, research shows. Experts say COVID exacerbated a mental health crisis, which already began with smartphones.
The rise of the smartphone during the 2010s shifted childhood away from play-based experiences, where kids interacted face-to-face, to a phone-based lifestyle that largely lives online, says Zach Rausch, a research scientist at New York University and co-author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
This phone centrality has devastated kids' capacity to learn and flourish, Rausch points out. In 2009, about 50% of American high schoolers used social media daily, and that number rose to 75% in 2012. Conversely, a 2022 Pew Research report found that nearly half of teens were online almost constantly.
“They're spending seven to nine hours on average per day, on screens, for entertainment, and just about five hours per day on social media platforms,” Rausch says.
All that screen time means kids aren’t doing one of the most important activities for health: interacting in person.
“Time with family, time doing almost absolutely everything, is being pushed out because these platforms are specifically designed to maximize engagement. They're designed to keep users hooked to their phone throughout the day. And so we're constantly being pulled away from the real world, where we develop skills.”
Raush emphasizes that it’s important to remember what it’s like to be a teenager — that means trying to fit in with friend groups and undergoing physical and emotional changes.
“It's a very insecure time, and our brains are not fully developed, and we're super sensitive to social cues. So what happens when social media changes from before 2010 — it's typically more about social networking … you can post pictures of cats or whatever (with your friends), you're on a laptop. Now, you have new kinds of platforms, where you have a front-facing camera on your phone, you are platforming yourself to an audience to be judged, so likes and retweets. And now you can compare your numbers to your friends’ numbers. And it's not just with your friends, it's now with the whole world. This is what's changed. It’s that we’re all now standing on a stage, 24/7, being judged by the world.”
While online spaces can provide a much-needed community for marginalized groups, Rausch says apps like Instagram and TikTok were not created with those ideals in mind: “They are not designed for the wellbeing of really anyone, and especially not kids who are already struggling. So TikTok, for example, is not designed to foster human connection. It's designed to keep you hooked, to watch very short videos of people over and over again.”
So what can help kids and parents? Rausch offers four recommendations: no smartphones until age 14, no social media until age 16, a push for phone-free schools, and a return to play-based lifestyles for kids.
The fourth recommendation might be difficult to achieve, but he points out, “At the same time that kids were moving on to this immersive virtual world, we were clamping down on kids' abilities to be out and playing unsupervised out in the real world.”