We must do better to protect our children

I recently ran into someone whose child had been admitted to our hospital's eating disorders program — a program that has seen a 40 per cent surge in demand in the last four years.

Like many parents with a child in hospital, this parent was tired and worried, but also feeling like they had been unable to protect their daughter from the barrage of online technology that had contributed to her illness.

It's great to see all levels of government act to level the playing field. A parental “no” can't counterbalance a $250-billion industry that deploys the most sophisticated technology to get into our kids' brains. While there's no silver bullet, each piece of government action, like the federal Online Harms Bill, to protect our kids will help parents and child health.

We need more independent, peer-reviewed scientific research to better understand why some kids are more susceptible than others. But we know a lot already.

In Canada, the growing mountain of evidence includes research from Dr. Gary Goldfield, a senior scientist at the CHEO Research Institute, Dr. Goldfield published a study in the fall of 2023 that linked heavy social media use to increased psychological distress among adolescents, with younger adolescents being the most vulnerable.

He has also published studies that found cutting social media use in half for just three weeks led to feeling better about appearance and body weight.

For high-risk groups, especially a young person with emotional distress, reducing social media use could also help treat and prevent body image and eating-related issues, his work has shown.

We can learn a lot from the decades-long struggle to protect kids from the harmful effects of tobacco. Some people can smoke and never develop lung cancer, while others develop lung cancer without having smoked. As we move toward more individualized precision medicine, we can better pinpoint whose genetic makeup makes them more susceptible to lung cancer.

But even if we don't know all the genetic drivers, we know people who smoke are about 20 times more likely to develop cancer. That's why we try to protect our kids from getting hooked.

Prevention trumps treatment, though, and waiting for all the evidence means playing Russian roulette with our kids' health.

We know enough to know social media is contributing to the youth mental-health crisis. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in his book The Anxious Generation, “We have overprotected our children in the real world, and under-protected them online.”

In the effort to protect kids from the reach of the tobacco industry, we learned we must stack up several initiatives by all levels of government to make a difference: public and parental education; smoke-free public spaces and workplaces; marketing bans; targeted taxation; public health warnings and more.

It takes collaboration to make a dent. It takes will, drive and determination for governments to make a real difference. Our kids need us to stick with it.

Alex Munter is president and CEO of CHEO, the national capital's pediatric health and research centre. He was head of the City of Ottawa's health committee when Ottawa became the first major Canadian city to enact a workplace and public spaces smoking ban in 2001.