• Building healthy relationships with technology involves not only protecting youth, but also supporting their positive experiences online.
• Helping middle schoolers navigate the digital world involves strategies similar to those used for their in-person activities: monitoring, spending time on the internet together when possible, educating them about risks, and communicating.
• Ongoing communication is critical. Talk about your values and expectations, ask what young users are doing online, and listen to how they feel about those experiences.
• Parents cannot do it alone. Digital technology companies and policymakers need to ensure that the online spaces where young people spend their time support healthy development while also keeping them safe.

Protecting and supporting youth on the internet are both important

Parents often ask what they can do to protect their children online. This is a good question. But another important question that should be asked is how can we better support our youth on the internet?

As mothers to tweens and teens, we are always looking for ways to protect our children from harm. One of us is also a developmental psychologist who has studied adolescents’ mental health for more than two decades, learning that we need to both protect and support our children – particularly around the middle school years as they make the transition to adolescence and into online spaces.

This is why we recently released a report on what research tells us about amplifying the benefits of digital technology for this age group and calling on technology companies and policymakers to adopt an evidence-based approach to protecting and supporting youth. But even as we urge technology creators to do better, there are steps parents and other caregivers can take to both protect and support positive digital technology use for young people.

Promoting healthy development and well-being with positive online experiences

Early adolescence (from about 10 to 13 years old, or the middle school years) is an important window when positive experiences that support learning and connection can affect development. Going on the internet to create, contribute, or connect can be a positive experience for young people. Online experiences offer new spaces for adolescents to express their creativity, explore who they are and where they fit in, support causes they care about and connect with peers in ways that can enhance their relationships.

Co-viewing, creating, and participating in online spaces can open opportunities for positive joint experiences and allow parents to identify any risks or content that makes them uncomfortable.

Encouraging these kinds of positive experiences online does not require an entirely new set of parenting skills. Instead, parents can use strategies similar to those used when children walk out the door to go to school or hang out at the park with their friends. Parents cannot be everywhere or see everything. But they can find out who their children are with, what they are doing, and how they feel about it, which can reduce problems. This kind of monitoring and communication can also help youth as they navigate the online world.

Keeping youth safe on the internet

Parents should consider some critical issues to ensure their children are engaging with online content safely. During early adolescence, when youth are particularly sensitive to social feedback and belonging, increased exposure to bullying, pornography, unhealthy body images, and harmful targeted advertising can have amplified effects.

Parents should also be aware that some adolescents, for example, those with mental health problems and those who may already be struggling with body image issues, may be more susceptible to viewing negative content on the internet and having negative online experiences than their peers. Knowing your child is key.

Caregivers should also understand that technology use also leaves a digital trace that can follow young people into adulthood by creating a type of permanent record of images and comments that would otherwise be forgotten or excused due to age and immaturity.

Moreover, sleep is critical to physical health, mental health, and learning during adolescence, so families should limit late-night technology use that gets in the way of youth getting more than eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night.

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio. Pexels.

How parents and caregivers can support and protect youth by making the internet a safer place

Parents and caregivers can make the internet a safer place by:

1. Monitoring and being aware
2. Going on the internet together when possible
3. Educating young people
4. Communicating with young people
5. Using helpful resources

1. Monitoring and being aware

Unlike physical places youth may go that are out of parents’ sight, digital technology provides opportunities to monitor where youth have been online, ideally with youths’ knowledge and consent. Parental controls – such as content filters, time limits, and applications that allow monitoring of online activities – can help.

2. Going on the internet together when possible

Viewing, creating, and participating in online spaces together can open opportunities for positive joint experiences and allow parents to identify risks or content that makes them uncomfortable.

3. Educating young people

Parents can explain the potential risks of digital technology use, discussing the importance of keeping personal information safe and of moderating screen time to make room for in-person activities. Developing a family media plan with your child can help start a conversation about the types of activities and platforms children are allowed to spend time on, and will allow young adolescents to have input into any rules that may govern their use.

4. Communicating with young people

Talking to your child about what they are seeing or experiencing on the internet should become part of daily conversations. When youth are exposed to age-inappropriate content or encounter problematic experiences like cyberbullying or social rejection, having an adult to talk to can make a difference. (Common Sense Media offers prompts to start talking, from conversations about activities to more specific concerns about emotional health and negative feelings.)

5. Using helpful resources

Parents and teachers can access a growing list of resources to help support children online, including:

• The One Mind PsyberGuide provides a teen-specific guide to online mental health applications.
• Common Sense Media resources support parents navigating traditional and new forms of media engagement.
• The American Academy of Pediatrics has a guide to creating a family media plan.
• Teens and Tech Center provides education and resources for parents, educators, and teenagers.

Designing technology to support young people

Even with parents’ best efforts, it is impossible to oversee children’s every online interaction. As parents, we have limited influence over how our children’s data are handled and stored, the types of targeted advertising they are exposed to, and the features intended to encourage them to stay on the internet for long periods of time.

Talking to your child about what they are seeing or experiencing online should become part of your daily conversations.

We expect that the physical spaces where our children spend time, like community parks, sports fields, and classrooms, help them grow and learn while keeping them safe. Digital spaces should be the same. Some lawmakers are working toward this.

For example, last year, California passed a bill that will require digital technology companies to protect young users’ privacy and personal data, limit dangerous content, and maintain default settings that prioritize safety. New York is considering similar legislation. While changes that would enhance safety are important, companies and policies must also consider regulations and design features that intentionally promote positive development in online spaces where youth congregate.

What do caregivers need to know about equitable access to digital technology?

Research is clear that children in families and schools with fewer resources receive less guidance tailored to learning as they begin to navigate the online world than do their peers in families and schools with more resources. Adolescents from minoritized and marginalized communities – such as youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth – are at the greatest risk for experiencing harassment and victimization online, even as they report positive experiences like finding “spaces of refuge” and community on the internet that may not be available to them in their physical environments.

Although discussion of technology tends to focus on limiting screen time, too many students are unable to access the basic benefits of technology, particularly for learning and education. Black and Hispanic students and those from families with lower incomes are more likely to have limited access to devices and the Internet than their peers.

Photo: Omar Ramadan. Pexels.

To help address these gaps, many school districts are working to provide free or reduced-cost WiFi to students. Families who need help to afford reliable Internet access and connected devices can contact their local school district or apply for the Affordable Connectivity Program.

In addition, digital technology companies and policymakers need to establish digital solutions and innovations that make the online world a place of opportunity rather than posing added risks for our most vulnerable youth.

Conclusion

Early adolescence brings new opportunities for building connections, education, and healthy learning and exploration. If we focus the conversation around “teens and tech” only on protection, we may miss opportunities to meet young people where they are and build online environments that match their needs.

Parents and caregivers have an important role in helping our children develop a healthy relationship with digital technologies. That includes talking directly with them about potential risks of online interactions and how to moderate digital technology use, providing oversight where possible to see what children are doing on the internet, and setting limits to ensure that technology does not interfere with sleep and other activities important to well-being. Most importantly, it means building strong relationships with our children so they tell us what is going on and when they are struggling.

But we cannot do this on our own. It is time for the owners, designers, and creators of the online spaces where young people spend their time to step up and build environments that support young people while also keeping them safe. We need to ask different types of questions so we learn not just how to protect but also how to support our children’s healthy development in an increasingly digital world.

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There’s little evidence that screen time harms adolescents’ mental health, and the pandemic highlights how we should look for its benefits.

Young people have been making big sacrifices around the pandemic. Adolescents’ brains are wired to learn through social interaction, and their bodies are designed to respond to it. They have a heightened sensitivity to reward from their friends, with whom life seems so much better. Yet for reasons of safety – predominantly that of others – they have had to set so much of this aside.

Thankfully, they still have social media and networking sites to connect remotely and safely. COVID-19 is making digital technologies more vital for young people, having pushed them almost overnight out of schools, sports and theatres and into their homes, where the only way to connect with peers may be via phones and computers.

As a result, the pandemic has flipped the script on screen time. Hours online have skyrocketed now that young people are using screens more for school as well as for entertainment. That shift is making us talk about a critical but neglected issue – not the tired, ill-evidenced debate about hours of screen time, but how time spent online can be used to benefit young people’s well-being.

Mental health issues predate mobiles

This conversation is helpful because it is false to say that this generation is in a crisis brought on by phones and screen time. For decades, one in four or five young people have suffered a mental disorder. That problem will not suddenly be solved by switching off phones – if only the answer were so simple. Though rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness have been rising in recent years, today’s young people are a resilient lot with plenty of strengths. They are doing better than other generations: more likely to graduate from high school, less prone to violence or to using drugs and alcohol.

“The pandemic has flipped the script on screen time as hours online have skyrocketed.”

But this pandemic will challenge them. Previous downturns and shocks have affected young people’s mental health for years afterwards. Parents and teachers should be prepared for more mental health issues and a spike in young people looking for supports online, given that many of their offline supports have been taken away.

Screen time and adolescent mental health

My research focusses on adolescent mental health, particularly depression and anxiety, in the digital age – the facts, fears and what we should be thinking about for the future. We have synthesised recent findings from multiple studies. They reveal only small, and often conflicting, associations between screen time, social networking, depression and anxiety. In short, a plethora of studies around screen time has unearthed little of clinical or practical significance and failed to throw much light on the direction of any cause and effect relationships between screen time and mental health.

Indeed, our research, by tracking young people on their mobiles, has found that the days when they are more connected – when they use social media more – are the times when they are happier and experience less depression. Others who have followed adolescents over time have found that social media use does not predict later depression, but earlier depressive symptoms do predict future social media use. It may be that when teens are depressed and anxious, they engage with social media differently.

Photo: Beryl_snw. Creative Commons.

Social media can be a lifeline for young people. Ideally, mobiles can be a just-in-time therapist in the pocket: texting services and crisis text lines have proved themselves in suicide prevention. The digital world offers opportunities to connect with young people who never pass through mental health services. But we have failed to capitalise on opportunities by, for example, designing just for adults and children and not investing in the types of online, peer-to-peer coaching that can appeal to teens as authentic to their ears.

Parenting is similar online and off 

Where does all this leave parents? The good news is that although mobile phones are pervasive among this generation, the fundamental needs of children and adolescents remain largely unchanged. Young people still require social connection and peer engagement. They need supportive parenting to protect them and help them to manage risk. Just as when they are offline, so too in their online activities they need monitoring and scaffolding by caregivers with whom they can openly communicate.

Families experience much conflict about the amounts of time young people spend online, but they have few conversations about how they spend that time and why. More often than not, the conflict itself is the problem, rather than the screen time. Parents should find out what young people are doing online. Mostly, they are watching videos, connecting with friends from their offline networks, and managing basic tasks around school and meeting up. We can ask young people about their day online, about whom they have been with and what they have seen. Ask your kids to walk you through their digital day.

A good question to ask both yourself and your child is: Are you there to connect, create or contribute? These are the activities that, young people say, provide the most rewards. Ask whether social media is supporting their well-being and happiness. It probably is. If parents switch off a young person’s screen, they should pause and ask what they are shutting off. Is it just a screen, or is it their child’s connection to an important network, to friends and ways to manage anxieties? Parents should know that their fears about too much screen time are not supported by evidence that it leads to clinical depression. We need to learn more about how the digital world influences our children, but the conversation so far has been dominated by fear rather than facts.

“If parents switch off a young person’s screen, they should ask whether they are shutting off their child’s connections to friends and ways to manage anxieties.”

Parents have opportunities to co-play online with young people. I do not enjoy Fortnite (although the dances are growing on me!), but I play it with my son to make sure that it is safe and to see why he is so drawn to it. Kids often love to share what they have learned, so there are chances to collaborate and for them to teach. Maybe that means taking time out of your day to co-create a TikTok video or become friends with your child on Instagram. Your child might have a second account just for friends, but that’s OK: we also want young people to have privacy and a space to connect without us looking over their shoulders.

See the child, not the screen time  

We tell parents who worry about screen time to check other issues first before shutting off their screens. Are the kids getting enough sleep? Are they having time with their friends? If these things are going well, then screen time probably is not a problem. Also, remember that digital use evolves as adolescents get older. It can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning and requires support. But as they move through adolescence, they begin to figure out what activities are most rewarding and how to stay safe as they navigate on their own. Once young people reach college age, many will use digital tools to stay connected to friends and family they see less often. They often report streamlining their digital lives to be less dramatic and more aligned with their interests and goals.

If they are struggling in offline activities, then online activities might also be a problem.  For example, if bullying is taking place offline, then it is more likely that there will be an online issue. Teachers and parents who have their eyes on young people offline are often not surprised to discover that they are also experiencing problems online. A simple principle offers good guidance: see the child, not just the screen time.

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