Parents have pushed schools to limit students’ technology use over concerns about their mental health and overall well-being. A new national survey suggests they have largely the same concerns about teens’ social media use, much of which happens outside of school.
What can educators take away from the results?
Overall, parents say social media hurts teens’ sleep (41%), productivity (38%), and mental health (24%), according to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,458 U.S. parents of teens ages 13-17, published in April. In contrast, when it comes to forging and maintaining friendships, more parents believe social media helped teens rather than hurt them (22% versus 13%).
“Teachers have concerns about what is or is not happening at home. Parents have concerns about what is or is not happening at school,” said Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island and a researcher focusing on media and digital literacy, including how children use social media and its effects. “Data like this is super important as a finger on the pulse.”
The survey comes as a growing number of states are pushing to regulate tech companies to restrict children’s use of social media. New York joined California and Minnesota late last year in passing a law that requires social media warning labels for platforms deemed to have addictive features.
Additionally, earlier this month, the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General published a recommendation to limit screen time for children—both in school and out of school. The office suggested a total screen time of up to two hours daily for children ages 6 to 18.
In the Pew study, parents were also asked how comfortable they are with their teens using specific apps. Overall, TikTok evoked the most parental concern. Twenty-nine percent of parents who said their teens used TikTok said they were uncomfortable with the app, followed by Snapchat (26%) and Instagram (16%).
The concerns around social media also differed by household. Higher-income parents are more likely to say social media sites hurt their teens’ productivity (41%) than their counterparts with lower incomes (about 30%). Higher-income parents (those in households earning $75,000 annually or more) are also more likely to say their teen uses social media too much.
In a conversation with Education Week, Hobbs discussed how parents’ concerns over social media affect teachers and what resources schools can provide to parents.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are these data relevant to educators?
Kids spend most of their waking lives connected to media in some form. Educators understand that parents are partners in the learning process, so educators also struggle with their observations about kids’ attention and lack thereof, their motivation to complete schoolwork, the intensity of their social relationships, and the risks that digital media has.
The social class differences related to media consumption were the most interesting because that isn’t always broken down. I’ve been doing professional development with Massachusetts K-12 teachers, and hearing about this tech backlash emerging—that parents don’t want kids to be plugged into Google Classroom all the time, they don’t want every lesson to have a YouTube video—shows there seems to be some sensitivity to digital learning.
As a media literacy expert, I’ve always seen that the most active parents in the media literacy space are the ones with mothers who have a master’s degree.
How can schools use this information?
Parents’ ignorance can lead to fear, and so one thing that schools can do is try to create opportunities for dialogue and discussion.
Sitting with a group of parents, where a parent in the group says, “I’m really enjoying the book community on TikTok, and I’ve been getting a lot of great recommendations about things to read, ”other parents can look at that and react, “Oh, there are good things on TikTok,” and help reshape people’s stereotypes about tools.
There’s a group of parents who may say, “I don’t know anything about TikTok, I never used it.” Parents should recognize that these platforms have a lot of different content on them.
Part of their job as a parent is to help a student make good choices about how to use, not just whether to use, the device. It’s all about the content students are engaging with.
How prepared do educators feel to address concerns parents raise about teens’ use of social media?
School leaders in Massachusetts have told me about how the crisis mentality is unfortunate, because it is the only time these topics ever get brought up—it is in response to a fight in the cafeteria, and it turns out that it was inspired by some gossip and false statements made on social media.
That leads parents to have a lot of fear, and it also leads students to feel like fingers get pointed and they are blamed, and that is not really helpful to education. If you’re trying to educate kids about social media, blame and shame are not the place to start.
Have educators noticed changes in parents’ concerns over technology and social media in the past few years?
People’s frustrations with the inability of the government to engage in appropriate regulation of social media platforms—they’re frustrated with the social media industry, and the platforms themselves stepping away from content moderation practices that would have limited access to the more harmful aspects of social media. So, in the face of government and platforms not being responsible, schools and teachers have to step it up, and they did.
Concerns about adolescents and social media have been around for 15 years. I do feel the one new angle is the attention issue. That topic has been in play since even before the internet. Parents, school psychologists, and media scholars were concerned about the way in which television and visual media were shortening kids’ attention span. In the last 12 to 18 months there has been more parental concern about kids’ attention span being poor.
Parents and teachers both realize that attention is a scarce commodity in an information age. Attention is going to be the new problem to be solved through education.
I recently finished a media engagement in Cambridge, Mass. The surprise for me was the preschool teachers. They tend to be anti-media—the idea that play is learning.
This group of preschool educators in Cambridge wanted to help parents develop healthy habits of using media wisely for learning, co-viewing, communication skill development, and language education.
That was a huge “aha” moment for me because that is a real shift away from the “just say no” approach. It’s far more acknowledging of the fact that parents are looking for guidance around what to do.
