TECHNOLOGY
USING COMMON SENSE
Social media RED FLAGS By Ilana Lowery
KIDS ARE USING MEDIA more than ever. The average child between the ages of 8 and 18 spends more than 60 hours per week with media and technology — much of that time is on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Discord and Snapchat. A 2021 Common Sense Media report found 38% of tweens were using social media that year, up from 31% in 2019. About one in five said they use social media daily, an increase from 5% two years prior. As for teens, 84% of them said they are using social media and they were spending about an hour and a half a day on it, compared to an hour and 10 minutes in 2019. Not surprisingly, media use has grown faster since the start of the pandemic — over a two-year period — than it had over the previous four years, according to Jim Steyer, Common Sense founder and CEO. “But this report goes a few steps further by exploring the content behind those numbers: how kids are spending that time, and how their engagement with media makes them feel. And that is where the findings become a lot more nuanced,” he said. According to the report’s author, initiation into social media is trending younger (at a relatively modest rate thus far), and while the
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time devoted to social media among teens may be increasing, enjoyment is not. For example, 84% of teens surveyed said they use social media, but only 34% of them said they enjoy social media “a lot.” “And social media use is going up among tweens, a group who are technically not supposed to be using social media in the first place,” Steyer said. It’s this group who were more likely to say they enjoyed using social media than they did in 2019. While face-to-face social skills are very important, social media can strengthen relationships, and it can be used to do good — reach out to volunteer, create community and be inclusive. “During the pandemic, social media has been an especially important way for tweens, teens, and adults to stay in touch,” said Michael Robb, senior researcher at Common Sense. There has been growing concern from some experts about the possible negative impact of social media on young peoples’ mental health, but other researchers have pointed to possible beneficial impacts, especially during the pandemic, he said. In fact, research has found that for a majority of teens (those who are not vulnerable), social media makes them feel
better, not worse, about themselves. But let’s be realistic. We are acutely aware that all of us, including our children, are faced with an overwhelming amount of digital “noise” on social media. For kids, that digital overload shows up in a number of ways and affects how children act, feel, behave and think or process information. To help parents and caregivers navigate the social media environment, Common Sense has created a list of social media red flags that parents should know about: Age-inappropriate content examples: Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat Friends can share explicit stuff via messaging (for example, sexting), but the bigger concern is whether an app features a lot of user-generated content that isn’t appropriate to your kid’s age. Your teen may not even need to follow users who are posting explicit stuff to come across it. Public default setting examples: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter Many apps allow a user to have a public or private profile, only shared with friends; however, some apps are public by default, which means that a kid’s name, picture, and posts are available to everyone. RaisingARIZONAKids.com
