Why it Matters
From Jonathan McKee (expert on youth culture & author of several books) on his site becomingscreenwise.com
A brand new media use report just released from Common Sense Media. (we will have a link to the full report on our website). It’s usually an every 4-yrs data collection, but they did a special 2-yr one b/c they wanted to gauge in particular the effects of the pandemic.
This org (Common Sense Media) uniquely differentiates between tweens (8-12 yr olds) and teens (13-18 yr olds) when it collects data. So if you’ve got kids of these ages in your house, lean in. What they found will probably resonate with you.
- Total entertainment screen time has gone up more in the last 2 yrs than in the 4 yrs before that. Tweens went from 4 hrs, 44 min/day to 5 hrs,33 min/day. Teens jumped from 7 hrs, 22 min/day to 8 hrs, 39 min. That’s pretty much 3/4 of the time they’re awake. More than 8 hrs/day is a full time job.
- Watching online videos is a fav activity of tweens & teens. 77% of teens watch online videos every day 62% on social media, and 49% watching TV. Kids are taking in way more YouTube & TikTok than Netflix. Most parents don’t’ have a great understanding of what kind of content comes from these platforms.
***8/10 young people want to be an “influencer.” The draw to be an instaceleb or TikTok star is huge. That’s an overwhelming majority of young people extremely motivated to do anything to get more likes & followers. We all know what’s most likely to make that count go up.
If our young people are spending this much on daily screen time, what content are they soaking in? What opinions are they forming? In your own home, do you know what your tweens are soaking in for an average of 5 ½ hrs/day or your teens for an average of 8 ½ hrs/day? I think we THINK we know. I also think we’re completely naïve. (we believe what we want to believe, what we wish to think….our kids would never do/watch/post ________________).
A word about Video Games
We mentioned our own experiences with our boys’ video gaming in our previous episodes. We were kids in the 80’s when the concept of video games was first gaining ground. Primitive Atari, PacMan, Frogger, Centipede, Galaga…all in the mall arcade area.
Now, with the rise of Minecraft and Roblox and a host of multiplayer games, the industry is a beast, & with the competitions and development opportunities, some younger kids who are pretty good at the games can actually get sponsors and make money. (Way more appealing to some than mowing people’s yards every weekend for some extra cash.)
More than 2/3 of kids ages 9-12 play Roblox, the newest popular massive multiplayer game. Parents need to know that in games like these, there are gateways predators use. The online chat features within these games are used by groomers to lure kids into conversations. EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU’VE GOT THE PARENTAL CONTROLS SET. They know how to open the locked doors. Even if you say you’re limiting their time, a LOT can happen in one hour/day.
Groomers are experts. They start a chat, very patiently. Then introduce to friends, then go to another platform like TikTok and do more work there.
I want everyone listening to go to an Instagram account. It’s Lisa Neeleman Wilson (@lifeaccording2lisa). She’s a health influencer, but also a mom of NYJets QB Zach Wilson and younger kids. She’s got an Instagram post (video that’s about 20 min long) from Feb 28 where she talks very openly & with a lot of vulnerability about her 13 yr old daughter’s experience being groomed/lured on Roblox. Every parent needs to watch it.
Roblox has sex rooms, with gang rapes in parks. You can get to links in different levels that go to porn links.
She has had so many responses from hundreds of parents who (as Satan loves it) come forward with their own similar heart breaking stories. Also stories from kids who are in their 20’s now… whose parents set limits & how they got around it all. These are our kids. 1/7 being groomed right this second.
I want my kids to like me. It’s such a battle when we try to pull back/set limits. My kid is so mad at me. They need to make choices on their own. They need their independence. (This is not the place for it.)
IT’S HARD. It’s hard dealing with the push back. Mean moms just love their kids.
When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him. Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.
A Word About Social Media
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-dangerous-experiment-teen-girls/620767/
Social-media platforms were not initially designed for children, but children have nevertheless been the subject of a gigantic national experiment testing the effects of those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm.
Adolescent girls’ rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.
The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.
From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.
National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010. But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.” Of course, teens had long been texting each other, but from 2010 to 2014, high-school students moved much more of their lives onto social-media platforms. Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens. Girls who use social media heavily are about two or three times more likely to say that they are depressed than girls who use it lightly or not at all. (For boys, the same is true, but the relationship is smaller.) Most of the experiments that randomly assign people to reduce or give up social media for a week or more show a mental–health benefit, indicating that social media is a cause, not just a correlate.
acebook would have you believe that merely cutting back the time that teens spend on social media will solve any problems it creates. In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:
While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.
Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones. This framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.
But social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.
Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.
Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.
When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play. (Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.) The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter. Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates. Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.
What are you modeling with your own habits?
(In the first 2 parts of this series, we talked about some actions we can take OURSELVES for our own mental health/weaning from screens. How we can regain some of our lost focus by going outside (w/o a phone), READING (w/o a phone nearby).
**Turn off your notifications. You can time your notifications to be sent all at once at specific times/day so they’re not pinging all day long and getting you amped up with all those dopamine hits. (Bob’s experience of this after one morning!)
We know our tech is addictive because it was MADE to be so on purpose. (Social Dilemma) Once upon a time, RJ Reynolds recognized that to get a larger market share for cigarettes, it needed ad copy that appealed to younger demographic—hence, the birth of Joe Camel. I watch shows like Call the Midwife or anything set in the 40’s/50’s/60’s and we’re SHOCKED at the constant smoking. Everyone, everywhere. Pregnant moms in the hospital and their doctors by their bedside. How ignorant people used to be, we think! (It’s the same hard-headed righteousness we apply all the time –we would NEVER be a prideful Pharisee, we would NEVER have been as ungrateful as the Israelites, such a denier as Peter, such a betrayer as Judas….We always think we’re “above” or “beyond” the ordinary folks portrayed as the messer-uppers. But that’s us, folks. We are they. Them R us.)
In a “this is kind of like that” moment, are we seeing any similarities here with screens?
(documented mental health issues, especially in our daughters. Addiction, loss of focus, “tech neck”, TikTok disruptions (like the tourettes syndrome spike in teen girls, the bathroom destruction in schools—Tara’s experience at local high school)
[From: The Addiction Inoculation by Jessica Lahey] Temple University psychologist studied Impact of peer groups on risky decision making in adolescence. 3 groups, ½ male, ½ female, from 3 difft age groups (13-16, 18-22, and 24+). They all played a computer game called “Chicken” where players have to choose whether or not to stop a car they control once a light turns from green to yellow. Object is to get as far as possible w/o running into a wall that appears when the light turns red.
They played the game alone, with the same age peers and with peers waiting outside the door. Players took significantly more risk when others were watching them play. Their peers weren’t cheering or egging them on, just there, watching quietly. The adults took same amount of risk whether alone or with peers.
Interesting part: The finding holds even if the researcher lies and tells them there’s no one watching. As long as they believe they’re being watched, they’ll engage in riskier behaviors. This explains a lot about the stunts they do for YouTube and TikTok. The very idea that another kid MAY watch them somewhere is enough to egg them into lighting their farts on fire, eat Tide pods, or destroy a school bathroom.
I know our teachers know what we’re talking about.
There’s a wrenching article by an assistant principal I read recently, pleading with parents to step up.
I can’t begin to describe how much time I spend every day dealing with issues that stem from unsupervised cell phone usage by our students. In the situations where I have to search a student’s cell phone, I often get sick to my stomach at what I find (highly inappropriate photos, videos, messages, social media usage, etc.). The things our students are willing to try and be a part of at such a young age gets worse and worse every year.
When I call parents to inform them of what is going on I always ask them how often they look through their kids’ phones. The shock gets even worse when 90% of them say hardly ever or never. And then they get upset at me, accuse me of lying to them about their kids’ roles in certain situations, or expect me to somehow fix the situation.
Parents, it is your number one job as a parent to get in your kids’ way at all times. Kids do not deserve privacy without accountability. You own their devices, not them.
How do we as parents “get in their way?”
Have a family dinner as much as possible (NO PHONES) where you talk. Current research suggests parents spend an average of 8 minutes a day in conversation with their kids. Can 8 minutes compete with 8 ½ hours of input from YouTube & TikTok? Hard no.
Check their devices randomly & often. Goes beyond browser history. Look at all those colorful icons on their home screen. Go deep. They’re not putting everything front & center. What Apps are the most downloaded in the App store? It’s your business to know what they are & how they’re used.
Create opportunities for your tweens/teens to have experiences. If you’re pulling back or delaying screen time in your family, then fill that space with something else! What can you as a family say YES to? What’s your bigger YES?
Introduce Technology SLOWLY. Remember when you were starting solids with your baby? We’re concerned about reactions. Allergies. What are those sweet potatoes gonna do to their tummy? Same idea.
Delaying is MUCH MUCH easier than pulling back!
Once something is introduced, have LOTS and LOTS of conversations. (more than the 8 min/day)
Plug them in at a designated time at night. In a place where only you can get to them. (They’ll sneak down at night & use them while you’re blissfully passed out from your exhausting day)
No phones/screens/devices in bedrooms or behind closed doors. (Can they engage in stuff in the middle of the kitchen while you’re busy with dinner or other kids? Yes.)
Even with all this, some kids will sneak and get burner phones or switch SD cards. They can find an old phone with no service, but still gets internet. Their friends will help them and they’ll rebel like crazy even when you as a parent are trying so hard to do all the things.
Don’t stop trying to get in their way. Don’t give up. What are you fighting for? Who are you fighting for?
CONTROLS:
@screentime (Apple’s way to keep parents in control)
@familylink (similar to screentime but better; doesn’t work with Apple)
@Bark (monitoring software that alerts parents when there’s a concern)
@ourpact (great option if you have some iphones and some not. Works well with screentime)
@qustodio (allows parents to monitor posts & messages, browsing history, etc.)
ACCOUNTS
@betterscreentime
@familytechuniversity
@protectyoungeyes
@savethekids
@collinkartchner
@everyschoolorg
@fullynested
@healthyscreenhabits
PRODUCTS
@gabbwireless (safe, minimal phones & watches for kids). Use code brooke for discount
@troom1 (safe phones with more options and parent control portal). Use code brooke for free phone or discount
@pinwheel (similar to Troom1, safe phone with options)