Sharing – Is social media as bad for mental health as we think? New study challenges screen time fears
While politicians were running off to ban anyone under 16 from social media despite the conflicting research, that research continues. It is still finding data that doesn’t match the panicked narrative that we all saw, though:
Heavier use of social media and video games does not in itself worsen teenagers’ mental health, despite widespread concerns, a new study has found.
There are two points to be made here.
- The mental health crisis does not have a simple root cause; there is no reason for anyone to think there is a simple fix. We want to think about whether smartphones, social media, violent games, etc., are the reason for the mental health decline for teens, but it’s much more complicated than that. Many of those causes are societal – things like climate change, bullying, political unrest, violence, war, poverty, etc., all contribute to the mental health struggles. They require more work to fix, however.
- We do live in a time when scientific literacy seems to be missing, even among very smart people. Let me give you an example of how we don’t always read past the headline.
While we were rushing to ban social media, kids’ mental health was already improving:
Young People’s Mental Health Is Improving. Tech Alarmists Take Note
How can that be? If smartphones and social media were to blame, how could it be turning around when that hadn’t changed at all? Again, there is no simple answer, but it was happening. Also, from the same article, in reference to the headlines about giving young children smartphones being the definite factor:
For instance, a study heralded as showing that the age of first smartphone ownership was linked to negative well-being actually showed grand differences based on where in the world we were looking. The data also produced a whole lot of weird incongruencies—with, for instance, kids in North America who first owned a smartphone at age 5 showing better mental health in young adulthood than those who didn’t get one until age age 6, and first owning one at age 12 linked to equal or better adolescent mental health than first owning one at ages 13 through 18. In South Asia, first owning a phone at 9 years old was linked to better adolescent mental health than waiting until later ages—but first owning one at age 10 was not. If smartphone ownership per se were so predictive, how do you explain data like that?
You can see how it’s not simple. Mental health across a generation of individuals defies every attempt at a one-size-fits-all narrative, because we are not all one size. On the other hand, our brains want a simple narrative because what they want more than anything else is a reason to think that this won’t happen to our kids or us. So we run to simple solutions like bees to a hive. Sometimes that causes us to miss a lot of the details.
Let’s hope we continue to see improvements, but understand that there are a host of things we can and should be doing that don’t involve social media at all.
