Parents have worried about the impact of technology in recent years, as the cold light of smartphones increasingly follows teenagers from their bedrooms to school and back again. Facebook researchers secretly study how its app erodes girls’ body images, doctors explain TikTok-induced tics, and prosecutors and lawmakers warn social media companies of harming children No wonder he has promised to hold him accountable for his actions.
But in the background, a quiet scientific debate is taking place about whether social media really causes harm. Although a few researchers argue that digital technology is a strong causal factor in increasing rates of mental health problems, others argue that the risk of harm to most teens is small. They argue that this has the same effect on well-being as wearing glasses or spectacles. One group calculated that they were eating potatoes regularly.
Now, the authors of the paper describe a large, multi-year study that provides an unusually detailed and rigorous independent expert analysis of the relationship between social media and adolescents’ feelings about life. announced.
Researchers analyzed survey responses from more than 84,000 people of all ages in the UK and identified two distinct periods in adolescence when heavy social media use accelerated ratings of life satisfaction. One is around puberty, girls are 11 to 13 years old, and the other is 14 years old. For boys, she increases again until age 15, and for both sexes, he increases again around age 19.
Like many previous studies, this study found that the relationship between social media and adolescent well-being was fairly weak. Still, it suggests that there were specific periods in development when teens may be most sensitive to technology.
“We actually thought that the relationship between social media and happiness might differ depending on age, and we found that this is indeed the case,” said the University of Cambridge experimental psychologist who led the study. said scholar Amy Orben.
For most adolescents in the United States, screens are a big part of their lives. A recent study found that 9 out of 10 American teenagers own a smartphone and spend hours a day watching videos, playing games, and communicating on social media. I also spend my time staring at my smartphone.
As social media use among teenagers has exploded over the past two decades, so have rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, and scientists are wondering if these notable trends are related. I think that there is.
Some have suggested that social media may have an indirect impact on well-being by displacing other activities important for mental and physical health, such as face-to-face interactions, exercise, and sleep. . For example, heavy social media use appears to disrupt sleep patterns in adolescents.
Still, studies that have investigated a direct relationship between social media and happiness have not found much.
“There are literally hundreds of these studies, and almost all of them show fairly small effects,” said Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies. .
Dr Hancock, who was not involved in the research, said what was interesting about the new study was its scope. This included two studies involving a total of 84,000 people in the UK. One of his studies followed his more than 17,000 adolescents over time, from the age of 10 to the age of 21, and found that their social media use and life satisfaction ratings increased year by year. It showed how things have changed.
“The scale alone is impressive,” Dr. Hancock said. He added that the rich age-based analysis was a major advance over previous studies, which tended to lump all adolescents together. “Adolescence is not a period of constant development; it is a period of rapid change,” he says.
The study found that heavy social media use during early adolescence predicted lower life satisfaction one year later. For girls, this sensitive period was between ages 11 and 13, while for boys it was between ages 14 and 15. Dr Oben said this gender difference could simply be because girls tend to reach puberty earlier than boys.
“We know that adolescent girls go through a lot of development earlier than boys,” Dr. Oben says. “There are a lot of potential contributing factors, including social, cognitive, and biological.”
Both the boys and girls in the study reached a second stage of social media sensitivity around age 19. “This was very surprising because it was very consistent between men and women,” Dr. Oben said. At that age, many people go through major social upheavals – like going to college, starting a new job, or living independently for the first time – which may change the way they interact with social media. , she says.
Although the new report was based on a richer data set than previous studies, it was still missing some information to help interpret the results, experts said. For example, it is not ideal for him to wait a year for an answer. The survey also asked how much time participants spent communicating on social media, but not how they used it. Talking to a stranger while playing a video game can have a different effect than texting with a group of friends from school.
Taken together with past research, this finding suggests that while most teens are not significantly influenced by social media, a small minority may be more harmed by it. It suggests that there is. However, it is impossible to predict the risk for individual children.
“What does that mean for your 12-year-old? It’s hard to know,” says Michael Jensen, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Given the small effects seen in the study, “very few children will go from normal functioning to clinical depression,” she says. But “that doesn’t mean no one does.”
Dr. Jensen noted that the study also found an association in the opposite direction. In other words, across all age groups, participants who felt worse about their lives spent more time on social media a year later. This suggests that for some people, technology may be a coping mechanism rather than a cause of depression.
All of these experts said they are often frustrated that public discussions about social media and children too often exaggerate the harms of the platforms and ignore the benefits.
“There are risks such as peer influence, contagion, and drug use,” Dr. Jensen says. “But it can also bring many positive things, including support, connection, creativity and skill acquisition,” she added. “I think we often focus so much on risk that we overlook that.”
audio producer kate winslet.