Social media reducing children to mentality of ‘three-year-olds’

SOCIAL media and video games are creating a generation of children with the mental and emotional immaturity of three-year-olds, one of Britain’s most eminent brain scientists has warned.

Baroness Greenfield, a senior research fellow at Oxford University and former director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, said she was concerned children were losing their ability to think for themselves, empathise and communicate with each other.

Instead, they were being bombarded with instant gratification through social media and gaming, which meant that, like three-year-olds, they would need “something every moment to distract them so they can’t have their own

inner narrative or thought process”. “What I predict is that people are going to be like three-year-olds: emotional, risk-taking, poor social skills, weak self-identity and short attention spans.”

Lady Greenfield, whose 2014 book, Mind Change, warned that social media and video gaming were rewiring children’s brains, cited as evidence a recent study by Harvard and Princeton universities that found students preferred to give themselves an electric shock rather than face 10 minutes alone simply thinking.

“There’s a much deeper issue than I wrote about in 2014 in that people are now needing constant stimulation. They’re no longer able to go into their own mind, think laterally and have their own thoughts.”

Instead, she said, children should do activities with a beginning, middle and an end such as reading books, playing sport or gardening, which cannot be rushed, rather than “multitasking where everything happens all at once”.

In Mind Change, Lady Greenfield predicted that children would become more narcissistic with lower self-esteem and higher depression rates. “I do feel vindicated. I wished I had not been,” she said.

She backed regulation to force social media and gaming firms to do more to protect children from online harms, echoing The Daily Telegraph’s campaign for a statutory duty of care.

Social media is also having an impact on the number of girls self-harming, according to reports in The Times.

Hospitals are treating almost twice as many girls for self-harm as they did 20 years ago, with the number of hospital admissions reaching 13,463 last year.

Jon Goldin, the vice-chairman of the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said there were a range of factors to consider including: “exam pressures, social media ... with fear of missing out and comparing yourself unfavorably to images you see online”.