By Dr. Lori Butterworth
Back in 1975, I was a typical 12-year-old. After school, my brothers and I played outside until dark. After dinner and homework, if I wanted to call a friend, I would use the phone on the wall in the kitchen within earshot of everyone, often including my younger brother, listening on the phone extension in our mother’s room. Our television choices included family shows on one of the three networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS.
The daily life of a typical 12-year-old today stands in stark contrast to my experience. Forty-some-odd years of biological evolution is minuscule compared to the social, cultural, and technological evolution that has happened since my friends and I ran around our neighborhood without a parent or phone in sight.
Today, kids are facing an unprecedented crisis in their mental health that has left parents wringing their hands about what to do.
Contrary to popular belief, the youth mental health crisis didn’t start with COVID. There was a 134% increase in adolescent anxiety between 2010 and 2018 and a 188% increase in emergency room visits for non-suicidal self-harm in girls between 2010 and 2020.
These alarming trajectories were well on their way before our kids faced nearly two years of COVID-19 isolation. What happened? Social media.
What do we do?
If you haven’t yet had the chance to read Jonathan Haight’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, I recommend you grab it as quickly as possible. In it, Haight makes the strongest case yet for the damage social media is having on our kids. He describes the disastrous cultural shift from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood and how parents have become irrationally fearful of stranger danger in the real world while handing our kids a device that opens them up to predators worldwide.
Recently, I asked a mother why she wouldn’t let her 11-year-old daughter walk the two blocks from school to my office for therapy. Like so many other parents, she shared her fear of someone “kidnapping” her daughter. I asked if she knew how long her daughter would have to stand alone on a street corner before, statistically speaking, she’d be kidnapped by a stranger: 750,000 years! The irony is her daughter has a smartphone.
I’ve heard people say that the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s nothing we can do about kids and social media. I disagree.
Let’s consider the primary function of social media. For most kids, social media is a way to connect with friends, and social connection is a healthy, necessary developmental activity. So taking away your child’s phone while “everyone else” has one, isn’t the answer.
Australia just passed a law banning social media before age 16. Florida recently passed a similar law. But it will take more than government restrictions to move kids away from their phone and back into real-life socialization.
It’s going to take collective action. Imagine if parents across Santa Cruz County banded together in playgroups, neighborhoods, and schools to reduce screen time and increase free, independent time.
Haight suggests four new norms for groups of parents to agree to:
- No smartphones before high school
- No social media before age 16
- No phones in schools
- More independent, unsupervised play
Even better, more and more adolescents are deciding to give up social media themselves. In my therapy practice, three of my teen patients have made the choice to turn off their social media accounts.
Others have had their social media accounts removed by their parents. When this happens, I remind parents to replace the loss of social media with more real-world freedom and unsupervised time with their friends.
Without exception, each adolescent without social media has reported improved mental health. One shared, “I have to admit, I feel calmer now.”
Here are some resources that can help:
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haight
- LetGrow.org provides free resources for helping kids get off their phones and play. Be sure to download the Let Grow Project and Independence Kit.
- At the Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Soquel, we host free Parent Drop-In sessions on the last Wednesday of every month on Zoom and in-person parent discussion sessions about how parents can work together to improve youth mental health.
Learn more at ccamh.org.
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Lori Butterworth, PsyD, MEd, is psychologist and the founder of the Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Jacob’s Heart Children’s Cancer Support Services. She can be reached at [email protected] or 831-222-0052.