A realistic way to protect kids from social media? Find a middle ground

Ahmed Othman is not on TikTok and doesn’t want to be.

He and his younger sister got iPhones when they were in eighth and seventh grade respectively, but without social media, just iMessage. Their parents, who are both computer scientists, spent the next year teaching them about social media and bombarding them with studies on its effects on teenage mental health.

“They were really trying to emphasize that social media is a tool, but it can also be your worst enemy if you pull it off,” Othman said.

Now 17, Othman credits his parents’ deep involvement with what he calls a “healthy relationship” with his phone. That also means staying away from TikTok.

“The algorithm is so powerful that I feel like TikTok might not benefit me,” he said.

Othman, who is originally from Libya and lives in Massachusetts, is an outlier among his peers; nearly two-thirds of them use TikTok, with or without their parents’ permission, according to the Pew Research Center.

Othman’s parents took a middle-of-the-road approach that a growing number of experts say is the most realistic and effective way to teach kids about social media: instead of an outright ban or allowing free play, they recommend a slow, deliberate onboarding that gives kids the tools and information they need to navigate a world where places like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are nearly impossible to escape.

“You can’t just expect kids to enter the world of social media and learn to swim on their own,” said Natalie Bazarova, professor of communications and director of the Cornell Social Media Lab. ‘They need instruction. They need to practice how to behave on social media. They must understand the risks and opportunities. And they have to learn that in a way that is appropriate for their age.”

The harm that social media does to children has been well documented in the two decades since the launch of Facebook ushered in a new era in the way the world communicates. Children who spend more time on social media, especially if they are tweens or young teens, are said to be more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. multiple studies – although it is not yet clear whether there is a causal relationship.

Many are exposed to age-inappropriate content, including pornography and violence. They also face bullying, sexual harassment and unwanted advances from their peers and adult strangers. Because their brains aren’t fully developed, teens are also more affected by social comparisons than adults, so even cheerful messages from friends can send them into a negative spiral.

Lawmakers have taken notice and have held multiple hearings in Congress – most recently in January — on children’s online safety. Yet the last federal law protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook’s founding.

Last May, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has issued a warning saying there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and is urging policymakers to tackle the harms of social media in the same way as things like car seats, baby food, medicine and other products that children use. Parents, he emphasized, can’t do everything, even if some – like Othman’s – try.

Othman first wanted a phone “with all the trimmings, without limitations.”

“But just like now, as the years go by, I really understand and appreciate what they did,” he said.

Of course, the Othmans’ approach may not work for every family. Most parents aren’t computer scientists, and many don’t have the time or expertise to create a crash course in social media for their children.

But even if parents are vigilant, that still doesn’t guarantee that their children won’t fall prey to the pitfalls of social media.

Neveen Radwan thought she was doing everything right when she gave her children phones: putting restrictions on their accounts, having access to their passwords, taking their phones away at night, setting everything to private.

“I made sure everything was very, very watertight,” says Radwan, who worked in information technology for 20 years.

Her daughter didn’t get a phone until she was thirteen. She started using social media in eighth grade. When she was 16, she was diagnosed with anorexia.

“We were in the middle of the beginning of (the COVID lockdowns) and it progressed very quickly because we were at home and she was on social media quite a bit at the time,” Radwan recalls.

The teen, an avid athlete, took to Instagram to find workouts and ways to stay healthy. But soon the algorithm started showing her social media challenges, like “how to stay under 500 calories a day” and “if you want to stay skinny, you need to be able to fit in a baby swing.” Within two or three months, Radwan said her daughter was in the hospital.

Today, Radwan is speaking out about the harms of social media on teens and has joined a lawsuit against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc., which seeks to hold the tech giant responsible for the harm its platforms have caused to children and teens. Her daughter has recovered and is going to college.

While parents are certainly part of the equation, most teens and experts interviewed by The Associated Press pointed to schools as the main place where all children can learn about “digital citizenship,” the umbrella term that balances news media literacy, cyberbullying, social media and now even artificial intelligence literacy.

“We have sex education. We don’t have things like online security,” said Bao Le, an 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “And a lot of kids die of suicide, you know, text message sextortion. So I think it is very important that the school also learns this.’

But while some schools offer digital literacy or online safety programs, these are still scarce. Teachers are already under pressure to teach the regular curriculum while also facing staff shortages and funding issues. Not only that, but children are often encouraged to be on social media if they want to participate in extracurricular activities and other school programs.

Some schools choose to ban phones altogether, but just like parental bans, children often find a way. For example, at schools that collect children’s gadgets in the morning, students say they can get around this by handing in fake phones. To get around the parental ban, they create social media accounts on friends’ phones and computers, or buy burner phones that they can continue using after they turn in their official phone.

‘Hope is not a strategy. And pretending social media doesn’t exist is not a strategy because we are dealing with real life,” said Merve Lapus, vice president of education outreach at the nonprofit Common Sense Media, whose digital citizenship curriculum is used in more than 90,000 schools in the US “Our kids are exposed to it in some form. They hear about it with their friends. The pressure to feel connected hasn’t changed. I mean, these are all pressures that we felt as kids .”

To really connect with kids, he says, it’s best to dig deeper into the pressures they face when it comes to social media, and validate that these are real pressures.

“I think this is one of the challenges of the moment: it only comes into the spotlight when it is problematic,” Lapus said. “And so we frame these tools very easily and very quickly as just problematic tools, and our kids will say, you just don’t get it, I can’t talk to you about these things because you don’t understand.”

Over the past decade, nonprofits and advocacy groups — most of them run by young people born of their own struggles with social media — have emerged to offer help.

Larissa May came to social media a decade ago when she was in high school “without any roadmap” about its dangers or how to use it. May said she was dealing with depression and anxiety that was exacerbated by social media. In college she became “obsessed” with social media and digital marketing, and had a fashion blog that she posted to every day.

“I got to the point where I was spending over twelve hours a day on my phone in my room, more focused on my digital identity than on the world around me, my mental health, my physical health, my sleep,” May recalls. himself. She almost took her own life.

The turning point came when May started seeing a psychiatrist almost every day, with clear instructions on what to do: take antidepressants, start moving her body temples and start socializing.

“However, I spent all day on my phone, which they never addressed, and being on the phone prevented me from doing any of those things,” May said. “And it wasn’t until one day that I got this. You know, at midnight I thought, why can’t I heal? And that was because I hadn’t healed my relationship with technology yet.”

So she closed her fashion blog and started HalfTheStory in 2015, aiming to collect stories from young people like Othman to understand how social media was impacting them.

“And what I discovered was that I was not alone in my struggle,” she said.

Today, HalfTheStory works with young people to build better relationships with technology, on their own terms, starting in middle school, before some kids even have a device.

Until May, abstinence isn’t the answer to teens’ problems with social media.

“What I learn from all our teens is that they wish their parents had more boundaries for them,” she said. “And I think parents are scared because, frankly, there’s a lot of violence and conflict erupting around devices.”