Ahmed Othman is not on TikTok and doesn’t want to be.
He and his sister got iPhones in eighth and seventh grade, respectively, but there was no social media, just iMessage. Their parents, both computer scientists, spent the next year teaching them about social media and bombarding them with research on its impact on teen mental health.
“They really try to emphasize that social media is a tool, but it can also be your worst enemy if you do that,” Osman said.
Osman, now 17, attributes his “healthy relationship” with his phone to his parents’ deep involvement. This includes staying away from TikTok.
“The algorithm is very powerful and I feel like TikTok might not benefit me,” he said.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that Osman, who is from Libya and now lives in Massachusetts, is an outlier among his peers. Nearly two-thirds of his peers use TikTok with or without their parents’ permission.
Osman’s parents took the middle ground that a growing number of experts believe is the most realistic and effective way to teach children about social media: They recommend slowly and thoughtfully guiding children to use social media tools instead of Outright ban or allow free reign.
“You can’t expect kids to jump into the world of social media and learn how to swim on their own,” said Natalie Bazarova, a communications professor and director of Cornell University’s Social Media Lab. “They need to be coached. They need to practice how to behave on social media. They need to understand the risks and opportunities. They also need to learn this in an age-appropriate way.
Very few guardrails
The harm social media is doing to children has been well documented over the past two decades, since the launch of Facebook ushered in a new era of world communication. Multiple studies have shown that children, especially teenagers, who spend more time on social media are more likely to experience depression and anxiety — although it’s unclear whether a cause-and-effect relationship exists.
Many people are exposed to age-inappropriate content, including pornography and violence. They also face bullying, sexual harassment and unwanted advances from peers and adult strangers. Because teenagers’ brains are not fully developed, they are more susceptible to social comparison than adults, so even happy posts from friends can send them into a negative spiral.
Lawmakers have taken notice and have held multiple congressional hearings on children’s online safety (most recently in January). Still, the last federal law aimed at protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook was founded.
Last May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that there was insufficient evidence that social media was safe for children and urged policymakers to regulate things like car seats, infant Items such as formula and medications also address the dangers of social media and other products used by children. He stresses that parents can’t do everything, although some – like Osman’s parents – try.
Osman initially wanted a mobile phone with “full functionality and no limitations.”
“But like now, years later, I really understand and appreciate what they were doing,” he said.
when it’s not enough
Of course, the Ottoman approach may not suit every family. Most parents are not computer scientists, and many don’t have the time or expertise to give their children a crash course in social media.
But even if parents are vigilant, there’s no guarantee their children won’t fall into social media traps.
Neveen Radwan thought she was doing everything right when she gave her children cell phones: restricting their accounts, accessing their passwords, taking their phones away at night, putting all Content is set to private.
“I make sure everything is very, very, impeccable,” said Radwan, who has worked in information technology for 20 years.
Her daughter didn’t have a cell phone until she was 13. At 16, she was diagnosed with anorexia.
“We were in the early days of[the coronavirus lockdown]and it was going very fast because we were all at home and she was on social media a lot,” Radwan recalled.
An avid athlete, the teen took to Instagram to find ways to exercise and stay healthy. Soon, however, the algorithm began to challenge her social media posts, such as “How to stay under 500 calories a day” and “If you want to stay slim, you need to be able to fit in a baby swing.” Two or three months later, Radwan said her daughter was hospitalized.
Today, Radwan spoke out about the dangers of social media on teenagers and joined a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc., seeking to hold the tech giant accountable for the harm its platforms cause to children and teenagers. Her daughter has recovered and is attending college.
Are schools the answer?
While parents are certainly part of the equation, most teens and experts interviewed by The Associated Press pointed to schools as key places where all children can learn about “digital citizenship,” an umbrella term that includes news media literacy, cyberbullying, community Media balance and now even artificial intelligence literacy.
“We have sex education. We don’t have anything like online safety,” said Bao Le, an 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “A lot of kids die from suicide, you know, text blackmail. So I think it’s really important that schools teach that.
But while some schools offer digital literacy or online safety programs, these programs are still rare. Teachers are already under pressure to teach regular classes while also dealing with staff shortages and funding issues. Not only that, but children are often encouraged to use social media if they want to participate in extracurricular activities and other school programs.
Some schools choose to ban cell phones altogether, but just like parents banning cell phones, kids usually find a way. For example, in schools where electronics are collected from children in the morning, students say they circumvent the problem by handing in fake phones. To get around parental bans, they create social media accounts on friends’ phones or computers, or buy burner phones that they can continue to use after handing over their official phones.
“Hope is not a strategy. Pretending (social media) doesn’t exist is not a strategy because we have to deal with real life. “Our kids are being exposed to it in some form. They’re hearing about it with their friends. Things. The pressure to feel connected hasn’t changed. I mean, these are the pressures we felt as kids.
To truly connect with kids, he says, it’s best to gain a deeper understanding of the pressures they face on social media and verify whether those pressures are real.
“I think that’s one of the challenges right now, and it only becomes a focus when something goes wrong,” Lapps said. “So it’s very easy, very quick for us to view these tools as problematic and our kids will say, you just don’t understand, I can’t talk to you about these things because you don’t understand.”
Nonprofits step up efforts
Over the past decade or so, nonprofits and advocacy groups — many run by young people who have experienced the struggles of social media — have emerged to offer help.
Larissa May stumbled upon social media a decade ago while in high school with “no road map” to understand its dangers or how to use it. May said she was dealing with depression and anxiety fueled by social media. In college, she became “obsessed” with social media and digital marketing, running a fashion blog and posting on it every day.
“I was in my room on my phone for over 12 hours a day, focusing more on my digital identity than the world around me, my mental health, my physical health and my sleep,” May recalled. She almost took her own life.
The turning point came when May was seeing a psychiatrist almost every day and she was given clear instructions on what she needed to do: take antidepressants, start moving her body to sleep, and start socializing.
“Yet, I’m on my phone all day long, and they’ve never solved that problem, and it’s preventing me from doing all these things,” May said. “Until one day I thought about this in the middle of the night, you know, why can’t I heal? It’s because I haven’t healed my relationship with technology.
So she shut down her fashion blog and started HalfTheStory in 2015 with the aim of collecting stories from young people like Othman to understand how social media affects them.
“I discovered that I was not alone,” she said.
Today, HalfTheStory works with young people to build a better relationship with technology on their own terms, starting in middle school and before some kids even have a device.
For May, abstinence is not the answer to teen social media issues.
“What I’ve learned from every one of our teens is that they want their parents to give them more boundaries,” she said. “I think parents are scared because, let’s be honest, a lot of violence and conflict breaks out around devices.”
