It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to curb kids’ enthusiasm for screen time

Four of Ontario’s largest school boards have launched legal action against some of the world’s largest social media companies.

While school boards in Waterloo Region are not part of the action, boards in Toronto, Peel Region, and Ottawa are involved in the suit, alleging the social media companies have “rewired” the way children think, behave, and learn.

This, in turn, has disrupted how classrooms operate.

None of it should come as any surprise.

The harmful effects of social media are well documented, including research earlier this year from Western University, which shows strong links between screen time and mental-health concerns.

The Western study showed excessive social media use during the pandemic worsened the mental health of our kids, and now it’s imperative that we take the impact on brain development seriously.

Since our brains are still going through dramatic periods of development during childhood and adolescence, kids are especially susceptible to the impact of excessive screen time.

“Children and youth have very active reward systems in the brain,” the Western study explains. “Natural rewards can cause a brief release of ‘feel good’ chemicals in the brain like dopamine. Social media can offer constant levels of rewards that are higher than normal and affect brain chemistry, leading to children seeking out more rewards, even to addictive levels.”

While school boards in Ontario have taken the bold step of suing social media giants for $4.5 billion, our province is not alone in sounding the alarm.

British Columbia is working on new rules around cellphones in schools, with Premier David Eby (a native of Kitchener and graduate of St. Mary’s High School) asking for new guidelines to be in place by the start of the next school year.

Individual school districts will be given some autonomy over how the policies work in their areas, but key elements of the new rules will come from B.C.’s education ministry.

This is similar to what’s happening in Ontario, including in a handful of schools in Waterloo Region’s public board, which are piloting an approach asking that “students put away cellphones during instructional time as well as in hallways during classes.”

So, why the lawsuit?

Well, social media companies are in the business of making money and it’s possible the threat of losing some of that money will be incentive enough for those companies to put controls in place that limit use and prevent kids from becoming addicted.

Or maybe it’s easier to sue the social media companies than it is to sue the parents, whose job it should be to set the rules around healthy cellphone and social media use.

Or maybe taking legal action takes the onus off the schools, which can easily implement cellphone bans to eliminate the distraction of social media while implicitly teaching kids that they can go without their phones for hours at a time.

In the absence of any apparent willingness to take charge of the issue ourselves, it seems we’d prefer to let the courts decide.

Excessive social media use during the pandemic worsened the mental health of our kids, and now it’s imperative that we take the impact on brain development seriously