The Science on Social Media and Youth Mental Health Is Incomplete — So What Can Parents Do?

On August 20, over 950 viewers tuned in as Dave Anderson, PhD, vice president of public engagement and education at the Child Mind Institute, moderated a roundtable discussion on what the research says about the perils and promise of social media for our kids. The panel was made up of Pete Etchells, PhD, who studies evidence-based approaches to screen and social media policies at Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom; Candice Odgers, PhD, a researcher on social media and mental health at the University of California, Irvine; Mitch Prinstein, PhD, ABPP, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association; Kelly Ninh, a rising college freshman and research intern at the Child Mind Institute; and Jessica Schleider, PhD, who develops online, single-session mental health interventions for underserved youth at Northwestern University.

This conversation is part of the Child Mind Institute’s webinar series on Technology and Youth Mental Health, which asks how tech might be used to improve mental health outcomes for all young people. The series is made possible by our partner and funder, the State of California’s Department of Health Care Services.

Dr. Anderson began with this big question: Is social media causing the youth mental health crisis? “Stress is one of the strongest predictors of mental health difficulties for youth,” Dr. Prinstein responded. “If you ask kids where they’re experiencing stress, they’re talking about academic pressures, school shootings, climate change and existential threats. So, it doesn’t seem like we can jump to the conclusion that technology is the cause.”

Then why are social media and technology so often held up as the culprits? It’s the lack of robust, replicable scientific research coupled with our gut feelings about tech, Dr. Etchells said. Much of the research seeking to explain the negative trend of youth mental health since 2012 is “atheoretical,” he said — searching for links between mental health and the environment without a plausible theory as to why one causes the other. “Eventually you’ll get a statistically significant finding and run away with it and say, ‘Look, this is the one, everybody! You can’t deny this!’”

“It’s just the wrong way to do the science,” Etchells continued. “But this sort of narrative plays into that fear that we’ve got — that there’s something not right about technology, that it feels unnatural and unwholesome.” Partly, he said, adults are biased towards thinking that social media is harming kids “because we’ve all developed bad habits with our tech.”

But “just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean that one causes the other,” Dr. Prinstein added.

Other fears play into the dynamic. Dr. Odgers commented on the tendency to focus on the perceived negative effect of social media on girls. “There’s nothing more terrifying to society than little girls becoming women,” she said. Conversations about “saving” young women by banning access reflect “bigger structural issues about how we support young people coming of age in this world,” she continued. But, in reality, social media allows youth the opportunity to create communities based on shared identity that “are so much more diverse and rich” than what was available just 20 years ago.

Dr. Schleider agreed: “The groups of young people who often need social media most for these connections are the first ones to lose access to critical resources when we put up walls,” she said. “So not just young girls, but sexual minority and gender minority young people often don’t have anywhere else to go for community understanding and connection. It’s a crucial resource and refuge for a lot of kids — and the most disenfranchised kids are the ones that are going to be harmed first by controlling social media access from top down.”

(Other groups including Black and Latinx youth use social media at higher rates than their white peers to access information and care; learn more in our conversation with Amy Green from Hopelab, also part of the Technology and Youth Mental Health series.)

The panelists agreed that parents and caregivers need to understand the risks and rewards of social media for each individual child and support their development and autonomy accordingly. “We need to see past the phone and really see our kids and what they need,” Dr. Odgers said. “That’s going to differ across kids within a family and might differ across how they’re doing” at each developmental stage. At the same time, tech companies and social media platforms need to be “accountable for things they know are likely causing harm,” Dr. Prinstein said, and to support collaborative, open research to improve the science.

Providing the youth perspective, Kelly Ninh summed up the panel: “A lot of my friends and peers are experiencing negative mental health effects right now, and almost none of them have mentioned that social media is the sole cause. They say that, yes, it is kind of an exacerbating factor that can worsen certain symptoms and certain effects, but none of them have ever reflected that this is the main thing that is leading to all of their problems that they’re facing right now.”

At the conclusion of the event, the panelists suggested resources that youth, parents, and professionals can use to help kids navigate social media:

• Mitch Prinstein: Common Sense Media curriculum on digital literacy and citizenship
• Candice Odgers: the blog TechnoSapiens and an op-ed from Ian Russell, who argues for tech reform after his daughter died by suicide
• Pete Etchells recommended the research of the other panelists; he also has a new book, Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better)
• Jessica Schleider: free, online single session interventions providing mental health tools for youth
• And articles on screen time, social media, and mental health at the Family Resource Center on childmind.org

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