Youth Mental Health & Smartphones
Emma Buck ??
Supplying schools with innovative teaching & learning resources | Coach & Facilitator | Mental Health First Aider | Runner & CrossFitter | Pitchside Parent
The theme for this year’s Youth Mental Health Day is #ControlYourScroll. I happen to own a teenager who isn’t yet allowed social media, and I also happen to struggle with my own social media addiction as an adult. Something that isn’t that uncommon these days, but few of us are yet to recognise or own up to, let alone do anything about it. Youth mental health, and smartphone usage is a regular discussion in our house so I’m bringing the conversation to this article.
When I was little, my parents smoked in the car with me and my brother in the backseats, windows barely open. By the nineties everyone knew smoking was bad for you, but everyone was still doing it, just casually ignoring the risks. This is called cognitive dissonance, a tactic we use a lot throughout our lives when we disassociate with what we are doing so we can avoid feeling bad about our actions. These days, there are still smokers but not everyone is doing it, and certainly not around children. I think the same thing is happening with mobile phones right now. We know they aren’t good for us, but there’s this ‘everyone’s doing it so I’m going to ignore the risks’ mindset…
Born in 1989, a millennial, I am part of the first generation that had a mobile phone as a child. I was 10 when I got my first one, all it could do was text, call, and play the most incredible game; Snake. However, I am also the last generation to experience the old-fashioned childhood, we came home from school, grabbed a snack before disappearing for the evening and only returned when the streetlights came on, our parents didn’t have a clue where we were, and our phones were rarely on us in person for our parents to reach us. However, when we came home from the streets, we sat down in front of a desktop, dialled up to the internet - once we convinced our parents to get off the phone of course, and we all logged into MSN Messenger to carry on chatting way past our curfew. As I entered adult life in 2007, I got my first “are you on The Facebook?” question. By age 21 Instagram entered the chat, and scrolling became the norm.
My eldest child turns 14 this weekend, it was only 21 years ago when I turned 14, but the world has changed A LOT in that time, especially technology and how we consume information. It’s impossible not to be a part of the digital world in one way or another these days. The problem is, as a society we are yet to clearly differentiate between the IRL (In Real Life) world and online world. Here in the UK, and other parts of the western world, our children are on target to be the first generation of children to not live longer than their parent’s generation. Despite science advancements and better education than ever before, 2024’s children have the worst physical and mental health (check out Bill Bryson ‘s The Body for more on this!). There are a lot of factors that contribute to this, but we’ll stick to the mobile phone and social media theme for now.
stem4 , the charity behind the Youth Mental Health Day, have put together a guide for young people which you can download here. In the guide, they’ve provided lots of really useful tips on how young people can control the content they consume, who they talk to online or follow, and how to better manage time. I highly recommend downloading it and I won’t try to reframe the content for this article. Instead, I think we can take a step back a little further. Think prevention rather than cure.
There are currently talks about whether social media should be banned for children under 16 altogether. Some apps already have age limits (most are 12+) but it’s easy to get around age limits on apps, and there’s plenty of apps that can help young people to do things online without their parents knowing. The most eyebrow-raising app I came across on my son’s phone was called Calculator. It looked just like the normal calculator app. But it wasn’t, the initial calculator page that opens on the app was actually where you’d input a pin number to then enter a private browser… Sneaky huh?!
Earlier this year, we saw 20 of the 24 primary schools in St Albans join together to make their schools smartphone free and urged parents to not let children have smartphones until the age of 14. This was a big hallelujah moment for myself as a parent because I can heavily influence my son’s phone usage at home, but it was becoming increasingly challenging to keep him away from his phone at school. Every lunch time all of his friends would play games on their mobile phones, and he felt compelled to join them. I hoped his school would follow this new trend - and to my delight we got the letter in July to say from September all mobile phones would be banned at school and must be switched off in their bags throughout the school day.
This Christmas, my middle child will get her first mobile phone at 11 years old. We’d like to do it even later but chose to do it in the last year of primary school and frustratingly for my children, this has meant they are pretty much the last out of their peers to get a phone. There’s a wealth of evidence out there now proving the damage smart phones are doing to children’s mental health and the younger they are when they have access to these devices the worse their mental health is. But we’re in this weird phase that’s difficult to parent it when so many parents are still ‘smoking in the car’. Smartphone Free Childhood are leading a Parent Pact campaign so that parents can make a pact to delay giving their child a smartphone.
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Today’s youth are already battling with their mental health, along with being at risk of grooming, cyberbullying, and so many more problems created by having access to smartphones at such a young age. 10 years ago we didn’t know what damage they could do when we started giving our children them, which is way campaigns like #ControlYourScroll need to exist. But now the evidence is overwhelming. So, for our younger children, we can take preventative steps to protect their mental health for years to come. Hopefully the links I’ve provided throughout this article will give you the knowledge and tools to ensure social media is not a contributor to ill youth mental health in the future.
Extra Resources:
https://www.casy.org.uk/ (Notts & Lincs only)
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2 个月Such an important theme! Navigating social media can be tricky for both teens and parents. Sharing our struggles can help create a more open dialogue about mental health and balance.