8 Reasons Social Media is No Good for Kids
Take it from a high school teacher: social media has seriously messed with adolescence.
Social psychologist and author
’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, offers an incisive look at the impact of the digital world on childhood and adolescence. I think parents should read it.There’s a case to be made that the title is a bit alarmist. Fair point – except there is cause for alarm. Take it from a high school teacher. Teaching offers a unique window on adolescence. And if you’re in it long enough to witness multiple ‘mini-generations’ of kids, you get a keen sense of cultural change over time.
I’ve been coaching and/or teaching teenagers since I was one myself – I started coaching at 18, in 1997. That means my career happens to have aligned almost directly with the mainstream emergence of the internet. I’m conservative when it comes to making broad declarations, but I’m confident making two here: First, nothing in human history has caused such seismic cultural change on a global scale in so short a time as the internet. (Though, the emergence of AI may render that statement outdated within a few years.) Second, social media has radically transformed adolescence.
And royally screwed it up.
Haidt makes a vital distinction I agree with: the problem isn’t the internet itself, or even smartphones. These have, of course, transformed life in all kinds of ways, much of it for the better. But it’s social media platforms and the business models driving them that have proven to be a powerfully corruptive influence on kids. And sadly, despite perhaps a nagging intuition that there’s something amiss, many parents seem unaware of either the scope or scale of the problem.
I suspect that’s why the book has been on The New York Times bestseller list for quite a while – 6 weeks at the time of this writing. It has obviously struck a nerve. But Haidt is also taking quite a bit of flack for having the temerity to point out what should be obvious to any responsible adult. Those who seek to deconstruct his research on technical grounds might be missing the broader point. Even if his numbers were off by a wide margin (I’m not suggesting they are) his point remains essentially intact and relevant.
I’m not sure everything Haidt asserts should be taken as gospel. I can see challenges, both philosophical and practical, that would make implementing some of his policy suggestions difficult. But his recommendations to parents are spot on – and they might help stave off the worst effects of the digital landscape for today’s young kids.
One of his central arguments is that more parents would happily impose stricter limits if they didn’t feel so alone in doing so, resented for consigning their kids to the digital sidelines while everyone else is playing. If the perceived norm is for middle schoolers to have iPhones and social media accounts, it’s harder for any one family to hold the line. In my opinion, therein lies the true strength of Haidt’s work – not his calls for (reasonable) regulatory changes, but rather that it might create enough collective awareness on the part of parents to redefine what’s perceived as normal. And thus to spark, to use his term, ‘collective action.’
Haidt’s latest work reminded me of a post I wrote in 2021 drawing from my experience working closely with an internet-equipped generation of teenagers. I remain more convinced than I was then that kids should not have smartphones (at least not fully-featured ones) until high school – and that social media is a minefield for kids of any age. Here’s that post, slightly updated.
Social media has its uses. In fact, you’re probably reading this because it found its way to you via one platform or another. Staying in touch with distant friends is easier than it would be without it. But when it comes to young kids, the usefulness and benefits of social media are overshadowed by the liabilities.
As a veteran high school teacher, I have watched the internet transform adolescence over the past twenty years. Among the adult population, social media is a mixed bag at best. But for kids, including teens? Despite (perhaps) some limited benefits, on net it’s bad news. Here are eight reasons why.
1: It’s relentlessly addictive. It’s bottomless and exploits the dopamine feedback cycle. It creates a craving to click. If you use it, you know it. I’ve felt that draw on a visceral level in my forties. I can imagine the pull it must have on a teenager still developing a pre-frontal cortex.
2: It’s a time vortex. Because it’s so addictive, it’s easy to spend hours per day lost in the endless feeds and rabbit holes. Numerous studies reveal that it isn’t unusual at all for teenagers spend, cumulatively, several hours per day absorbed in social media—instead of with family, friends, or other pursuits.
3: It harms sleep. Anyone who works with kids knows how vital adequate sleep is, and also how many factors already interfere with it. Piling on with melatonin-suppressing screen exposure and mental stimulation is compounding the sleep deficiency problem.
4: It erodes independent thinking. It is algorithmically designed to exploit cognitive heuristics, bolstering tribalism amidst echo chambers. As a teacher dedicated to inquiry and diversity of thought, the general tendency it engenders toward reductive ideologies scares me.
5: It amplifies uninformed opinions. Much—maybe most—of what kids are consuming is produced not by older, wiser adults, but by their peers or a few sophomoric influencers. Much of it is impulsive, emotionally charged, and lacks context. If you hadn’t heard, kids are a bit impressionable.
6: It’s a gateway to porn. This wreaks havoc on adolescent psychosexual development, creating process addiction while desensitizing kids to depraved stuff. Teenage boys with smartphones have little chance of avoiding a porn habit that warps sexuality. While teenage girls consume far less porn, they bear the burdens of a hyper-sexualized culture with twisted expectations.
7: It contributes to insecurity and anxiety. Plenty of research indicates that social media has detrimental effects on kids’ sense of self-worth. But you don’t need a PhD to know that a constant stream of curated imagery against which to compare oneself will compound a teen’s insecurities.
8: It jeopardizes future opportunities. Kids have lost the innocence of being able to make mistakes in private. Teenagers say and do impulsive things. Social media publishes and shares the ugly underbelly of adolescence. As kids navigate these tricky years, they do so with the added anxiety of knowing their worst moments might be digitally preserved in perpetuity. Screen shots are forever.
I was fortunate to be raised in a pre-internet era, and maybe you were too. My formative years were not shaped by an onslaught of ill-informed, ideologically-driven, subjective content sprung forth for all to see from the more impulsive moments of emotional fervor or careless impulse. I wasn’t exposed to a limitless supply of explicit content. I was never in danger of publishing a careless or impulsive thought or image for all the world to see and judge me by. When I did something stupid or risky, I wasn’t surrounded with cameras connected to live feeds available to the entire world.
Today’s kids are not so fortunate. We can’t shelter kids forever, but we can up to a point—and parents owe it to our kids to hold the line. When the time is right to allow them to venture into the online landscape, we have to help them understand it.
Inevitably, they’ll ask us why we use it if they shouldn't. This is, frankly, as simple as making some straightforward analogies. There are many things limited by age, such as voting and driving, to name just a couple. We shouldn’t be fear mongers or alarmists, but we should share the abundant data about the effects of social media with them.
Yes, we can acknowledge that like the internet as a whole, social media presents an array of opportunities. At the same time, we can help them understand why social media won’t add much to their life, but will probably take at least something away, and should be used only in moderation, carefully. We should appeal to their intelligence and their desire to grow in healthy ways by arming them with knowledge and understanding.
If we don’t, they’ll resent us for it later—and with good reason.