The rise of smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence is changing the way kids grow up.
Some studies have linked young people’s use of digital technologies to higher rates of mental health challenges, such as anxiety and depression, while others have highlighted that teens are using online spaces in ways that benefit them.
In four separate discussions at the American Psychological Association’s annual conference, experts weighed in on the effects of digital technologies on adolescents’ social-emotional and mental health.
Digital technology is affecting how kids develop
Adolescents are more sensitive to social media than adults because they’re in a developmental period with heightened sensitivity to social cues and rewards, said Eva Telzer, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They’re also in a stage where their executive functioning and prefrontal cortex are still developing.
The way social media is designed—feeding on adolescents’ need for social rewards—makes it challenging for tweens and teens to turn away, find a “pausing point,” and move to something more meaningful or enjoyable, when there’s a continuous loop of really engaging content, she said.
Social media has also given adolescents “options for dual-space, blurred boundaries of interactions with people that they don’t even know,” said Linda Charmaraman, a senior research scientist for the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. It has also made it more challenging for adolescents navigating their own self-awareness and awareness of other people around them, she added.
Adolescents are more sensitive to peers observing them, Telzer said. There’s a concept called imaginary audience, where we think everybody cares about us and is watching us. Before social media, that imaginary audience might be the adolescents’ classroom of peers. Now, that imaginary audience is their entire social network—friends, family, friends of friends, and possibly even strangers, she said.
On the other hand, the online world might be a third space for some teens, Charmaraman said. It might be the only space they feel comfortable exploring or expressing their identities and it could be life-saving to have this safe space, she said.
Kids of color experience a different online world from white peers
“In the early to mid-2010s, the racial landscape that adolescents navigated online became increasingly more treacherous,” said Brendesha Tynes, an education and psychology professor at the University of Southern California.
Teens are seeing more “race-related traumatic events” online, Tynes said, such as videos of unarmed Black people being shot by police and immigrants being detained in cages. Teens are also experiencing algorithmic bias, such as selfie filters that favor European features or their accounts being suspended for talking about Black issues, she said.
At the same time, Black adolescents are often leading the way with online trends and content creation, Tynes said.
To help teens navigate the digital world, Tynes recommended developing “critical race digital and AI literacy,” which she defined as being able to identify, critique, and cope with algorithmic bias in technologies and eventually create better technologies.
Discussions about the harms of technology should not overshadow other serious concerns
The effects of social media and the digital world on teens “takes up a disproportionate amount of the discourse,” argued Lisa Damour, a senior adviser to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
Imagine a pie chart of what impacts youth mental health. Digital technology is a fairly small slice, Damour said. The bigger slices include genetics, parental mental health, what’s happening at home, school pressures, and marginalization, she said.
Digital technology intersects with some of those factors, but “the worry is that when [it] is the main conversation about young people, we’re not paying attention to other things,” such as sleep and ensuring teens have good working relationships with adults, Damour said.
If technology is getting in the way of what’s important for kids’ overall healthy development, then that’s when it makes sense to discuss ways to regulate their screen use, Damour said. That could mean creating a rule where the phone doesn’t go in the bedroom because it interferes with their sleep, she said.
Damour also recommended asking teens what they like and don’t like about digital technology and working with them on how to limit the bad things.
Students should play a bigger role in creating healthier online experiences
Nikki Iyer believes young people should be part of creating a better online experience.
“We are the ones who know what it’s like to exist and grow up digitally and to grow up in this social desert,” said Iyer, the co-chair of the youth-led coalition Design It For Us and an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Today’s teens and young adults might be the most connected generation, but they’re also the loneliest generation, Iyer said.
“There’s so many people around you all the time,” Iyer said. “You’re on the train together. You’re in parks. You’re in cafes. But everyone is looking down, and that is a horrific way to grow up as the social creatures that we are.”
With Design It For Us, hundreds of young people are working together to create safer social media, Iyer said. They’re advocating “age-appropriate design” and better regulation of specific features designed to keep people engaged, such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and targeted advertising.
“Our goal is to get as many young people as we can at the table so we can get policy that actually reflects what we want to see,” Iyer said.
