Excessive use of digital devices harms the health of minors

According to the Pew Research Center (PRC), 96 percent of American children and teens use social media daily, and nearly half say they use it “almost constantly.” The situation appears to be similar in many other countries around the world. While experts have not yet been able to confirm a direct link between social media use and poor mental health, there is growing evidence of a link with anxiety, depression and loneliness.

Some parents of children who have committed suicide, died from an overdose or after participating in an online challenge point to social media as the cause.

Some social networking platforms already offer options to disable sensitive content, but a bill would require tech companies to enable these options by default for accounts of minors, if and when it passes into law in the United States.

The bill, known as KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act), passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 91 to 3. On the same day, the Senate also passed the Children’s and Adolescent Online Privacy Protection Act, which would prohibit tech companies from collecting data from underage users.

The KOSA would require companies to disable all content related to online bullying, illegal drug sales or sexual exploitation from children’s accounts. It would also ban features that encourage “addictive behavior” and predatory marketing practices.

According to Wired, proponents of the measure, including the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit focused on accountability, saw the bill as an important step toward holding tech companies accountable for the ways their products affect children.

“Too many young people, parents and families have suffered the terrible consequences of the greed of social networking companies,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, said in a statement in June. “The accountability that KOSA would bring to these families is long overdue.”

Others, like the digital rights nonprofit Center for Technology and Democracy, argued that the law, if passed, could be used to prevent young users from accessing crucial information on topics like sexual health and LGBTQI+ issues. That led some organizations that typically push for accountability in Silicon Valley to side with the tech companies and their lobbyists in trying to defeat the law.

The problem worries parents and teachers. Life in social networks and beyond seems to know no boundaries for digital natives, Flavio Calvo, doctor of psychology, teacher, speaker and author, with extensive experience in youth ministry, told Diario Cristiano, the Spanish edition of Christian Daily International.

“Today, for adolescents and children, there is a new socialization that takes place through social networks, or rather social media. What used to be normal for us to do in normal life (I put normal in quotation marks), children today do through networks. Whether it is forming friendships, playing sports, playing online games, etc. Followers on TikTok and other social media are just as important as friends. So for us adults, there is a difference between the virtual and the real, which does not exist for a teenager and a child. For them, the virtual is real,” said Calvo.

According to educator Estuardo Salazar Gini, Continental Director for Latin America of the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the problem is a consequence of the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his comments in Diario Cristiano.

“The phenomenon of addiction and the influence of social networks on the psyche of minors as presented by the PRC should, in my opinion, be studied in conjunction with the pandemic experience. I am referring to the long months between 2020 and 2021 when quarantine was in force, with forced isolation when screens were the only means of contact. That aggravated the dependency that was already unhealthy, but there it became an epidemic worse than any virus. We protected them from one virus, so they could contract another that turns out to have a more destructive and deadly power,” he stressed.

Diario Cristiano conducted a short survey among parents and teachers, with three questions. 11.1% of respondents indicated that there is no problem between social networks and the cognitive development of adolescents, while 88.9% of respondents admitted that they find it problematic that their children interact with social networks.

As for their experiences in the family, the testimonies are all similar and can be summed up in one sentence: “Distraction and lack of personal socialization.” Although some respondents spoke about setting boundaries, in particular waiting until a certain age to allow them to have their networks and manage them without supervision.

Laura Stigliani, a graduate in psychopedagogy, told Diario Cristiano that “what should have been very productive turned out to be very aggressive.”

For Salazar Gini, “the post-pandemic generation of students will test the full capacity of educators not only to recover what was not achieved, but to do so under much more complex circumstances.”

“The impact of this phenomenon on the educational experience has made the work of schools even more challenging. The pandemic has left us with a significant learning deficit, to which we now add the pathologies of poor mental health, insecure self-esteem (because we are constantly looking for confirmation) and having acquired a diet of entertainment that complicates the work of teachers. Lack of focus is no longer an exclusive profile of those diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder),” said the director of ACSI.

“They’re killing each other!” Stigliani exclaimed about what often turns into a violent fight between teens. “The bullying that happens on Instagram is unbelievable, or on TikTok,” he said. He attributed it to an addiction they can’t break on their own, perhaps due to the inability to distinguish digital from analog, as Dr. Calvo mentioned earlier.

“Also because of these online video games that are very addictive, teenagers can’t put them down. For example, you’re in class and they’re playing. They can’t stop because the time of the video game is pressing on them. So they can’t stop. Maybe they started playing during recess and they have to continue because if they don’t, they lose, and if they lose, they lose to someone else and they fight, insult each other and the violence escalates and results in the bullying that I mentioned earlier,” said the psycho-pedagogue.

Dr. Calvo agrees with Stigliani’s view and said that adolescents “are emotionally very affected by the reactions they have in networks. That is why cyberbullying and other problems have increased enormously because of their viralization. For all these reasons, they have a very strong emotional impact on teenagers who cannot leave the digital world. A teenager outside the networks or a child outside the networks has no social life.”

The survey includes statements that confirm Calvo’s assessment. “My children do not have accounts on social networks that they manage themselves. This does not mean that they do not log in with other people’s phones and connect to YouTube for everything, which is also a social network. If they can, they open my Instagram account and watch reels and stories to an excessive extent. My husband has opened a YouTube channel for them where they create content on their mobile devices that my husband uploads and reviews. This has definitely created an obsession in them to count every follower, every ‘like’ and every comment,” said one of the survey respondents.

In his professional journey, Stigliani meets students who are also obsessed with vices such as online gaming, a plague that Calvo cited when he said that the problem “is not only in social media, but also in games, in PlayStation and certain online games. Because, for example, those who groom are much more involved in online games than in social networks,” which is part of an intertwined and increasingly evident problem. Both focus on connectivity.

“There are children in the third or fourth grade who gamble online. In these casinos they are not legal, they are online but they do not register whether it is a minor who plays or an adult,” said Stigliani, who sometimes finds himself in the classroom with all kinds of situations caused by the use of mobile phones.

From a social point of view, Calvo believes that a major issue is the age at which minors are allowed to use mobile phones. “The truth is that it is appropriate for children under 12 not to have their own mobile phone. But the reality is that children have mobile phones at increasingly younger ages. Often, if you do not give them a mobile phone at 9 or 10 years old, you are leaving them out of their socialization.”

When asked about what to do, or how to go about guiding and mentoring children and adolescents, Dr. Calvo said that “the adult has to be there from a place of discovering together what is good, what is appropriate.” He said that “this can be done well if it is done from the beginning. That means when a child is 14, 15 years old, you are not going to be able to check who their friends are on Instagram or TikTok. Then it is too late. But when they start having their first cell phone, you have to start mentoring them in certain things that are appropriate. For example, only accepting people you know, or paying attention to what kind of conversations they are having.”

From a pragmatic point of view, Stigliani said that there are educational institutions where teachers and parents have agreed together not to allow the use of mobile phones in the classroom. And as a rule, they leave the devices in a box or in a closet during the time they are in the classroom. “Logically, this practice causes displeasure among children, because for them, like many adults, everything has to be counted or shown. As if it is not in the networks, it does not exist. And that is how they live it,” he said. “The interesting thing is that they finish what they are doing and then, as a reward, they give the mobile phone back when they have completed the entire activity, and they are all happy.”

From a parental perspective, some parents in the survey indicated that it is important to limit the time spent using digital devices: cell phones, video game devices, tablets, etc. One parent brought it up to the point: “Take away the electronic pacifier and help them kick a ball, jump rope, and ride a bike with their friends.” Also, “generate a lot of dialogue and teach them by example that you can unplug, detox, and that real life doesn’t fall apart because (you put the device away),” said another respondent.

Estuardo Salazar Gini said that “the emotional and mental profile of the 21st century student is something we are not prepared for. The tools of psychology, sociology or anthropology are not enough to manage this phenomenon effectively. To save this generation, we need the power of the Gospel, the love of Christ and the wisdom of God.”

Originally published by Diario Cristiano Internacional