30
votes
Adolescents' screen time displaces multiple sleep pathways and elevates depressive symptoms over twelve months
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- Title
- Teens with high screen time more likely to be depressed, sleep poorly
- Published
- May 18 2025
- Word count
- 421 words
It's only a matter of time before we come to our senses and find a more effective way to control the scourge of social media for teens. We ban them from cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis and other addictive and harmful products, is social media any different?
I appreciate parents who recognize the harm and dont allow their kids unsupervised access to the interwebs at an early age. When I see a 1 yr old in a stroller with a cell playing a youtube, I cringe.
I think theres a massive component of leading by example. Because banning somthing for children just makes it aspirational. A right of passage. Like when I was young there was a smoking ban for kids but it was still everywhere. A lot of adults smoked. Many teenagers too and made it seem super appealing. I associate many uncles and cousins with that smoke smell. Hell my great grandmother used to send us down to the corner store for her smokes and after a while, it was not strange to sell cigarettes to us. So of course I picked up the habit young and not completely kicked it (down to a few a year).
But in 2001 they really clamped down on the local laws and went really hard in 2009. And all the smokers and stores took it pretty seriously. Was never done in public. Not really shown on TV shows. Super agressive warning lables. No more TV or signage ads. Within 15 years smoking very much fell out of favour among kids and many adults that grew up through the change. I was very often the youngest person in those smoking corners of shame at every place I worked.
And then Vapes came along with a ton of marketing towards young people and now we're back at square one. Insanely addictive, accessible and customizable. So many places reek of it. Saw a mom with a toddler in her arms get a cartridge from the gas station. And when me, the clerk and some other random guy gave her looks, "Its not illegal". We are really doomed to spiral.
My own kid has made it clear the media addiction is a far worse style of vice. It's a small victory that she's only navigating a touch screen at five years and not five months. There's also catching the cocomelon effect early and cutting all the hyper-stimulating shows before it became an issue (can we nominate Miss Rachael for a Nobel prize please). But now she can very quickly mirror our behaviour. From language to attitude to our screen habits. So even though I don't use much socials besides here and YouTube, my kid can constantly see me working and on calls and on my PC and spending my free time on the Steam Deck. The other day we sat down for a movie and she went to get the deck because she'd rather play that. It's not some massive failure in her development or my parenting. But it makes me feel like something needs to change on my part because just saying No is going to send a mixed message.
So I feel it's not going to help just banning kids if they're just going to see it as another aspirational vice. Like drinking or gambling (god I really want to rant about child gambling too). It's also not going to help if we keep loopholes that allow parents to expose their kids to social media for validation and profit. And even if it's just one country or a blanket ban of the major platforms, there's still the rest of the internet and just about anything with a retention motive will become a short-form-media mill.
A ban for kids is just the start. We need international standards to stop companies building infinite attention machines for everyone's sake.
Fully agree. I’ve thought for a while now that when/if I raise a family, I’ll make a point of engaging with hobbies, making things, reading books, etc when the kids are present and encourage my partner to follow suit. If they see us doing those things instead of twiddling on our phones, they’re likely to pick up on that and want to do the same.
Of course I don’t have much influence on what they see people doing elsewhere (at least not without becoming a controlling helicopter parent, which brings its own basket of harms), but setting norms at home that the adults abide by too I think goes a long way.
I don't see a way to do it that doesn't involve the government prohibiting it and somehow whether in coordination with a company or otherwise, requiring identity checks before using the internet.
Which folks oppose for understandable privacy reasons. But I just don't see how else you successfully do it.
I don’t understand the argument that we need to ban children/teens from accessing social media. That isn’t the problem. It’s the constant access via smartphones that leads to serious problems. I mean how many teens do you see accessing TikTok from laptops/PCs? Surely banning young people from having phones is a much more realistic strategy for a government (and potentially more affective)
I was responding to this, not advocating for one path or the other.
I don't know if banning smartphones is the answer either but kids already use their parents' phones, what will the penalty be for providing a child your phone to use?
Not banning from using a phone but from social media. They can wikipedia all they want :)
If social mores change, it would be the same as giving your kid cigarettes at age 12 is viewed today - sure, you can do it but everyone is going to think you're a terrible parent knowing how much harm it will do.
I was responding to this about phones. Where I responded to you about social media was above.
When I was in middle and high school, this was a pretty common practice for those who had stricter restrictions on cell phone use. Although that was 7-8 years ago, and given how social media sites make their desktop experience worse in the hopes of moving traffic to cell phones, I don't know how true that still is
If I look into my dystopian crystal ball, and extrapolate from the current generation who seem to have no qualms about having zero privacy and saving their entire lives in "the cloud", I see a future where every device has a biometric access control. No ability to open a social media site without an iris scan or fingerprint. We're halfway there already, just have to link it to one's age and voila! no social media til you're 18. Definite privacy issues but with an authoritarian government, all things are possible.
I don't see any other way you successfully ban kids/teens from using social media.
Maybe leave it legal for the user but a fine for the companies? I don't see the political will for that either.
I'm open to another method, and I'm not advocating for this one, I just don't see the solution people are looking for, especially one similar to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, etc.
Just to clarify what they mean by screen time (excerpt from the study), it's not only social media, but it's also not every activity where you're using a phone/computer/console/etc.... Or even the screen, coding is apparently safe \o/.
I'm very disappointed in a research paper playing this loose with words.
A link to the study can be found here.