Social Media Is Literally Harming Our Youth—How Can We Help?

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Think about the first time (or even a recent time) you posted something on Instagram. Perhaps it was a selfie in a cute new outfit that you finally mustered up the courage to post. Perhaps it was a photo of your diploma that you proudly received last weekend. Or maybe it was a photo of your perfectly risen homemade sourdough loaf. An hour or two goes by, and you open up your notifications, just to find that your post didn’t receive any likes. Ouch. Sure, we might brush it off and tell ourselves, “Whatever, who needs likes anyway." We feel a small blow to the ego, but a blow nonetheless. 

Now, let’s rewind back time a bit, back to when we were 12 years old. The only difference is we’re already living in the age of social media. Now, imagine that exact same scenario playing out. Yep, in our tweenage years—when emotions were in overdrive, the external validation of our peers meant everything to us, and fitting in wasn’t as easy as it should have been. That blow we felt earlier hits a little harder, leaving a longer-lasting imprint on our self-esteem.

Welcome to the next generation of kids and teens. That temporary feeling we just experienced is something they’re all too familiar with right now (perhaps more often than we think) in our screen-heavy, content-centric world.

That’s where Get Media Savvy comes in. Founded by award-winning journalist, former New York Times staff writer, media ecologist, and author Julie Scelfo, Get Media Savvy is a nonprofit organization working to fight media chaos and build a healthier media environment for kids and families using pop culture. As a parent herself, Scelfo was moved to start Get Media Savvy after reporting on the youth mental health crisis and seeing suicidality affect children at ever-younger ages.

She recognized how a multitude of factors—including absent regulations and the lack of widespread media literacy—had created an unhealthy, unsafe media environment. Now, her coalition works to create a widespread cultural shift so everyone recognizes the existence of the media environment and its central role in human affairs.

Host Minaa B. of The Verywell Mind Podcast sat down with Scelfo to get the scoop on how exactly they’re helping to create healthier places online for kids to hang.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Minaa B.: Thank you for being a part of the show today. I am really excited to chat with you because I think in our current climate, being a really digitally focused society that we're in, I think this is a wonderful conversation for users, people who engage in the internet as well as parents. Can you tell us about what [Get Media Savvy] is and what made you start this initiative?

Julie Scelfo: Absolutely. So Get Media Savvy is an organization that's working to fight media chaos and build a healthier media environment for kids and families. And the reason I was moved to sort of convene this coalition of people to work together was because, after many years of reporting on mental health and, in particular, youth mental health, I reported basically the worst story I had ever worked on in my career, which was about growing rates of tween suicide.

But we are now in a situation in the United States where the number two cause of death for 10-year-olds is suicide, meaning more kids die from suicide than from any disease or from birth defects. And that's really troubling to get to that level of mental health problems. There are some really profound issues in our society and in our behavior, and we really need to make some changes. I realized there needs to be big cultural changes. And so I brought together people who are working on different facets of the problem so we can begin talking about and creating shared interventions and language in order to galvanize the country at large.

Minaa B.: Can you speak to what exactly is happening where 10-year-olds are dying by suicide? What are they possibly being exposed to, and how is engaging on the internet or even having social media impacting their mental health and wellbeing?

Scelfo: Sure. So, we need to be careful when we talk about suicide. The cause of a suicide is never just one thing. So, I don't want people to be alarmed. It's certainly not the case that social media alone is causing these suicides. But one of the things that is very easy to forget is that social media is completely unregulated. There are no federal regulations limiting what can be on the platforms. The product manufacturers have done, frankly, a really lousy job of providing parental controls that work. And so when your child goes online, they are exposed to a wide range of really what is NC-17 content. And this includes messages that are violent, messages that are racist, sexist, and just images and words and ideas that maybe kind of crack at their self-esteem. So this whole issue of likes, you know, we as adults go on social media, and when we don't get a lot of likes or responses... It doesn't feel good.

Imagine if you are 10 or 11 or 12, 14, and you post something and you don't get a response. It can really begin to affect your feelings about yourself. So what we are seeing at scale is that the normal ways that children grow and develop healthy self-esteem, healthy emotional skills, even some foundational academic skills are being eroded because the habits that we used to have, which were primarily in-person communication, spending time with other kids, spending time outdoors playing, are being replaced by these online behaviors and activities that are eroding healthy development.

Minaa B.: When we talk about our social infrastructures in American society and a lot of communities not necessarily having access to playgrounds, green spaces, also just thinking about safety and community violence, where the more we're exposed to social and environmental trauma, the more we isolate and hide inward. And now, you know, a lot of parents are just relying on technology to entertain their children. Or, like I said, if you are in a neighborhood with poor social infrastructure, you don't have resources to allow your child to engage in play and curiosity. And so, how is technology honestly impacting childhood development?

Scelfo: Minaa, that is such a good question and there's so much to unpack there, because what's happening is we have multiple overlapping problems that are really affecting our kids. So I wanna start by saying, this is not my opinion. What the research tells us is, it has been very clear for a very long time. So we've known for a long time what attributes provide a healthy environment for children to grow, and that's a safe, supportive, nurturing home. That's a safe shelter, access to food and medical care, access to healthy air, plenty of time with other children to play, and an educational environment that's enriching, has lots of books and with a skilled, uh, teacher and caregiver who can provide a nurturing, developmentally appropriate set of educational materials.

Technology is not designed by educators; it's not designed by child development experts. It's designed by corporations that want to get you or your child to spend as much time as possible online so that they can sell advertisements, harvest your data, and sell that data to get profits. So, to start, technology is not a replacement for loving care from an adult. It's not a replacement for peer interaction. It's not a replacement for learning basic literacy skills. 

What's happened is in our society, we have the most disparate income that we've seen, like almost since feudal times. Or actually I've read one report that suggested it's worse than feudal times. So we have working people now that are working two and three jobs just to be able to provide food. They're not able to tend to their children, or give them the attention that they deserve. So to answer your question, the way in which screen use is affecting child development is really varied and is happening in lots of different places.

It's affecting what's happening in schools because many schools are now adding technology products to the classroom even though there's no data that shows they're helping children's educational outcomes. But it does make things a little easier for teachers and administrators.

Minaa B.: I have a platform on various social media channels, and I still feel the effects that you explained, right? There's this false reward. We're engaged with likes, we are building our self-esteem around likes and views and all of these things. What are the risks involved when parents are now glued to their devices, and how is that impacting childhood development from that perspective?

Scelfo: Minaa, you hit the nail on the head with that question because the research that's coming out now is really pointing to the fact that just as we've always known, children do what their parents do, not what they say. Right? So, if we're all addicted to our devices, our kids are gonna follow in our footsteps. But we realize that until we, as parents, get our behavior under control and that we learn to model healthier use of technology and set limits and prioritize interpersonal in-person, face-to-face interaction, we're not gonna be able to help our kids.

You know, there is no parenting mistake that I personally haven't made. I have three sons, they were born within five years of each other, and it was at the same time that all of this technology was invented. When my oldest son was born, there were no iPhones and Mark Zuckerberg worked at a small company called the Facebook.

And by the time I had my second son and went to take him to pre-K, every parent in the neighborhood was on Facebook. They were literally training their children to smile and be photographed every day at school drop-off. You know, before that we only took pictures on special occasions and suddenly children were being photographed constantly. My third son, who's now a teenager, is growing up in a world of TikTok. And even though I banned TikTok from his phone, he still sees TikTok all the time because his friends send it to him.

He also goes on YouTube, which now is running shorter and shorter videos. Instagram has short Reels because everywhere in our society on technology, it's kind of a race to the bottom with trying to get people's attention.

The situation is not actually hopeless, though. As a parent, one of the things you can do is set some limits:

Carve Out Phone-Free Times at Home

Scelfo: So, in our house, we do not even get our phones until after breakfast. That sounds really wild and crazy, right? 

But it was because my husband was so accustomed to checking his Blackberry first thing when he got up, but that actually took away from the only time we had with him. You know, he worked late into the night. And so my children only got to see him for one hour before they went to school. So, if you can, carve out times that are cell phone-free times in your house.

Get Back to Basics With Print Media

Scelfo: I mean, another thing that we've begun doing in my home is that we are very careful to make sure we read print reading material. My husband and I both read for a living. We read on our devices all the time, but the children don't know we're reading a legal brief or a scientific report or the newspaper when they see us staring at our cell phones; they think that we're just online.

So we're very careful to still get print subscriptions to have times that are just for books. We actually have started, and we don't do this all the time, and we need to do it more, family reading hour, and we all get a book, and we just sit together. And it's the most wonderful thing to just be present with your family and do something that's not about shopping, that's not about being entertained. It's not about being online and just connecting. So, as parents, you know, we definitely do need to be more reflective of our own behavior and think critically about what example it's setting for our children and how we can help them become healthy users of tech.

Minaa B.: We see a lot of parents creating accounts for their children at a very young age. And then we also see that children are now becoming influencers or child stars via YouTube or even Instagram because their parents are the ones positioning them and really creating this content, with their name and their likeness and their image.

So, with the information you know about technology and just being media savvy, are there also things that you can share with parents who maybe do have their children growing up to be content creators and influencers, and they're utilizing their child's name and likeness to I guess in many ways help their child develop a platform or engage in entrepreneurship? 

Scelfo: Any adult who has been in the public spotlight at all understands there's a wide array of risks, considerations, um, variables that affect your life by having your information public. So because we're now in the digital age and so much is public, people think, "Well, there's nothing I can do, I might as well just put it out there." But I actually disagree. Because I'm a journalist, as all of these things, um, became available to us, I've been very cautious. I do not post pictures of my children publicly. I want them to be able to grow up without feeling like their lives are entertainment for other people or product that I'm selling. I also want them to be safe and to be able to make mistakes and not feel uncomfortable that images of them or experiences of theirs might be viewed by other people and judged, you know, adolescence is hard, and it was hard growing up in a time when there wasn't social media.

Cut Back on What You Share Publicly

Scelfo: I admit that I love seeing pictures of my friends' kids online. I love keeping up with my friends who live on a different coast. I love seeing my nieces and nephews who are growing up in other states, but I have encouraged those family members not to share them on social media platforms because those images are public and can be used by anybody. But to instead make a private email group, um, share that in a private chat. And so, you know, you as an adult can make choices about how much of your child's information to share. And I highly recommend, um, starting with the maximum amount of privacy and discretion for your children and going from there, as opposed to sharing everything and then deciding later, "Oops, that wasn't a good idea."

Minaa B.: I've seen a lot of, um, young children who are now 18 suing their parents, as you shared, for sharing their private information online. And as we all say, children can't really consent to having an Instagram profile. You know, it's their parent who is making it. And so it's really interesting hearing this information, and I do hope it's really helpful. I'm sure some people are also listening in and wondering, "Well, are there any positive aspects of technology that can help enhance a child's ability to socialize or build community?"

Scelfo: So there are studies that show in very specific limited situations, there can be positives for social media. But in general, for most children, if they spend their time forming communities online and they don't develop interpersonal real-life communities with other kids, what we are seeing is that their social-emotional growth, their ability to interrelate to other people, is actually being reduced. They are actually not developing the emotional resilience they need to grow up in a healthy way and to be able to form attachments and skills for navigating life. You know, being a human is hard, human-ing is hard. It is hard to go through life and learn to be part of a group, learn how to not always get what you want, accept rejection, and tolerate frustration. And the best way we know, the proven way we know to develop those skills, is through interpersonal interaction.

Minaa B.: I think the more we shed light on that, the more that we can engage in a more harm-reduction approach, where we realize reducing our time on social media can really help with our own ability to socialize and build community. I'm curious to know for parents who are listening how they realize that some of the things that you're sharing, the harmful effects of social media, they actually see it manifesting in their child.

They realize that their child is constantly glued to their phone. They're always on social media. Every time they engage on social media, it clearly impacts their confidence, it impacts their self-esteem. I even hear some people say they feel outcasted if their parent says, "You can't have social media." And now you're like, "Well, everybody in school has an Instagram platform. And now that impacts my self-esteem because I'm the only one who's not allowed to be on social media." And so that is even triggersome for some children. What are some tips or practices that you can give to parents to, one, help their children build high levels of self-esteem around how they engage on social media if they're going to utilize it? And what are some other tips or practices that you think parents should know if they are going to allow their children to have social media platforms?

Delay, Delay, Delay

Scelfo: The surgeon general said that he doesn't think there's any child under 13 who should be on these platforms. I agree. And many of the experts I talked to actually think that we should wait even longer. I made my kids wait until they were 12 to get a phone. I regret that I didn't know about Wait Until 8th.

I think that's terrific. I think delaying their access to social media is definitely the way to go. Limiting their access to social media. And if and when you decide to give them access, I would think very carefully about which platforms you let them use.

And also spend time with them to see what they're seeing. You won't be able to see all of it. Kids have learned how to override parent filters. Many of them have Finsta accounts or second accounts where they're seeing information they don't want you to see. But the more time you can spend with them seeing what they see, the more you'll begin to be able to help them try to make sense of some of the memes they see, some of the jokes they see, and help them understand which things really aren't funny and aren't meant to be jokes.

Play Up Alternative Hobbies

Scelfo: Another thing that parents can do is think about what else their children could be doing when they see their kids on social media. When children are very young, we want them to develop what one researcher calls broccoli brains. You want all of their neural synapses to grow in every direction, to be stimulated with their senses, with their mind, with their bodies in how they play, their creativity, what materials they have access to, and all the creative play that comes from using blocks. And even just being out in the woods. And when they're on devices, it shapes their brain in just a very singular direction. It trains their brain to have a certain type of response, and their brain goes on to continue craving that kind of response. And when they get it, they're very frustrated.

Take Advantage of Parental Controls

Scelfo: It's something that is very challenging to do 'cause these tech companies make it hard, but make sure you use whatever parent controls are available to you. That includes making sure you shut down the internet at night; that makes sure that you don't allow your children ever, ever to take their screens into their bedroom.

You think they're asleep; they're not. Your child is up texting at 10:00, 11:00, midnight, 1:00. All you need to do is keep their phone with you for one night, and you will see which of their friends are sending messages. So keeping the phone away from the child and out of their bedroom allows them to get good sleep, allows them to have time and space to think and engage in other activities. And so it's really about setting healthy boundaries.

Minaa B.: For parents who have smaller children, can you speak to what some positive or maybe negative implications can come from having their children learn through this format where they feel they might be too busy to engage with their child and so they let them watch Miss Rachel, and they might be saying, "Well, all she's doing is singing, you know, (laughs), um, Mary had a little Lamb. Or all she's doing is reading them a book, so there's no way that this could be harmful." Is there anything you can speak to about that?

Go Old School

Scelfo: Absolutely. You know, we are what we eat. And that is true not only in food but of the media content that we take in. And it's also true of our experiences. Whatever we do, we become, and those are habits that we continue to practice. So, having your child listen to music and songs is a wonderful thing, but there is no reason you need to do that through a screen. And if you do it through the screen, you're actually inadvertently training your child that they need a screen and that they need to get access to that information from a screen. So one thing you can do is go old school, you know, go buy a CD. You can get them cheap now for a dollar and, you know, play some sweet honey in the rock. Play some, you know, um, Pete Seeger music and put on your own adult music for them, um, sing to them.

You know, if you're cooking and you can't play with your kid, you know, you can be singing along and let them listen to you. So all of that type of stimulation, um, like auditory stimulation without the visual stimulation, is going to serve their early childhood development needs better than the screen time.

I'm sure Ms. Rachel's great. I'm sure she is providing some educational benefit to kids. But I think the idea that we need to give them a screen for them to be nurtured and educated is actually the wrong idea. And that we all collectively need to just limit the amount of screens we're putting in our kids' lives.

Encourage Play

Minaa B.: Hmm. Limit, limit, limit. I think that's the big takeaway from this episode, really figuring out ways that we can reduce, um, our interactions with the internet, social media and just technology in general. And really getting back into the concept of play. Play with our hands, play with our minds, thinking of dramatic play, like you said, giving them the empty cardboard box and see what they make of it and sing a song while utilizing it.

Scelfo: I want our children to grow up and to be listeners to your podcast and have the attention spans to be able to sit still for an hour and think and read and reflect. And if we keep giving them short content that constantly interrupts themself, or if they get the slightest bit bored, they swipe right, and they don't continue to listen or to read or to look, they're not gonna have the basic skills that they need to be quality media consumers, quality thinkers, and also adults who are capable of investing in deep relationships. So, you know, I'm really looking at the long horizon here.