Kids’ tech: The emotional costs of always being online
The pandemic’s “skyrocketing screen time for kids has prompted bipartisan questions about children’s online health, addiction, and technology,” said Ashley Gold in Axios.com. At a hearing on Capitol Hill about disinformation and extremism last month, the topic of children and technology surfaced repeatedly with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, which owns YouTube. A recent study from the Association of Psychological Science that “found an increase in suicide-related outcomes in U.S. adolescents linked to increased screen time” has alarmed some parents, including Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R.-Wash.), who told the executives that “your platforms are my biggest fear as a parent.” One lawmaker compared YouTube’s addictive nature to “handing our children a lit cigarette.” The tech companies, though, are not backing off: Facebook is building a version of its photo-sharing app Instagram for kids under 13.
Instagram regularly “incites feelings of jealousy and inferiority” in adults, said Abrar Al-Heeti in CNET.com. “Instagram for kids” will be worse. One U.K. report “found that Instagram is the worst social media platform for young people’s mental health.” And this was a study of teenagers. The “pursuit of public approval and acknowledgment” has consumed today’s adults and teenagers, and it could “soon extend to an even younger demographic” that’s even more easily influenced and less likely to “distinguish reality from polished, filtered images.”
Tech has also been indispensable for a lot of kids during the pandemic, said Brett Molina in USA Today. Yes, parents all worry about their child’s time on the screen. “The struggle to get your child to put down the tablet or video-game controller is real.” Tech, though, has become kids’ outlet to connect with friends. We hear a lot about depression, mental illness, and isolation among kids. But, one parent asked me, “what would’ve happened to our child if he didn’t have that medium, that ability to play games and connect with other kids?”
The question is what kinds of connections they are making, said Casey Newton in Platformer.news. “The internet is increasingly where people search, discuss, and seek support for mental health issues,” especially young people. Surprisingly, though, many companies have no public policy related to discussions of self-harm or suicide. Facebook is “miles ahead of some of its peers” in terms of its guidelines, but its subsidiary Instagram’s policies are “confusing.” Other platforms, like Reddit, have nothing. This is troubling, because “there’s often a fine line between posts that are discussing self-harm and those that appear to be encouraging it.”