Why social media and screen time can be bad for children, but rarely as bad as parents fear
Every modern parent has the “screen time” worry.
It’s hard not to feel guilty when you put your toddler in front of an iPad so you can get some washing done, or let them watch endless loops of bizarre YouTube videos of someone playing with Thomas the Tank Engine toys or Elsa dolls.
My own kids are slightly older, and now the concern has morphed into how long the eight-year-old spends playing Fifa on the Switch or whether the Disney+ princess programmes the six-year-old stares at her age-appropriate.
This does not, as I understand it, get easier with time. At least our children are still too young to have seriously started demanding phones of their own. But it will not be long, in the grand scheme of things, before they are using TikTok or whatever has succeeded it by then to interact with their friends. “Social media”, a catch-all term for everything from WhatsApp DM groups to YouTube, is a central part of modern adolescence.
And in recent years, there has been growing concern that screen time is harming young people’s mental health. Social media, in particular, worries parents: whether it’s by creating a new avenue for children to bully each other, or by presenting unrealistic images of happy lives and perfect bodies.
Every so often, widely publicised studies come out that seem to find worrying trends – studies that, for instance, find that “depression, self-harm, suicide and unhappiness” all increased dramatically in US adolescents, especially girls and young women, after 2012. That study explicitly links the rise to social media.
These fears have led to all sorts of reactions, from major articles with headlines like “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” to Sunday Times investigations suggesting that social media is behind a rise in teen suicides. In 2018, the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, even compared the risk of social media to the well-established dangers of eating too much sugar. Worries like this are partly behind legislation like the Online Harms Bill, currently working its way through parliament.
But what’s been difficult has been getting good scientific evidence that screen time in general, or social media in particular, are causing these harms. So the field has been left open to speculation and fearmongering.
This week a study came out in the journal Nature Communications. It tried to answer some questions that parents and others will have about what effect social media has, if any, on adolescents’ mental health, and looking to see if there are times when young people are especially vulnerable.
It found what appears to be a real link between mental health and social media, but it’s a complicated one, and not as dramatic or frightening as some might suggest. But it also reveals the limitations of the research into screens and mental health, and what we need to do to get better information.
Before we talk about what it found, though, it’s worth explaining why it’s so difficult to do good scientific work in this area in the first place.
Screens are not one thing
“‘Social media’ and ‘screen time’ are pretty useless terms,” says Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University who is writing a book about our relationship with screens and technology. “They cover a whole variety of things.”
His point is that “screen time” isn’t a simple thing. It would include Skyping family members, or playing Mario Kart with friends over the internet, or watching Match of the Day, or watching hardcore porn. These things are not like each other. And “social media” isn’t much better. Me doomscrolling through Twitter is not the same as a teenager making TikTok memes or a 65-year-old posting in a neighbourhood Facebook group.
More than that, mental health isn’t a simple thing, either. Are we talking about “psychological wellbeing”, which is something like how happy or sad you are feeling, or how satisfied with your life, as reported on a questionnaire? Or are we talking about diagnoses of clinical mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety? Those are very different things, and are measured differently.
“If you look at 100 different papers in the area,” says Etchells, “you’ll find people talking about 100 different things.” For scientists in the field, he says, it’s “panic-inducing” to realise “the vast scope of what we’re trying to do. You ask a seemingly simple question: ‘there’s this technology out there, how’s it affecting our mental health?’ But it’s all a big mess.”
And it’s very hard to show what is causing what. Most studies on these topics just look at a snapshot: thousands of people answer a questionnaire, which asks them questions about their social media use and their mental health: how satisfied are you with your life, with your appearance, and so on. And then they look for correlations: do people who use more social media tend also to report being less happy?
But if they do, what does that mean? If someone is using social media a lot, and they’re also unhappy, is social media making them unhappy or – equally plausibly, on the face of it – are they using more social media because they’re unhappy? Most people have surely had the experience of staring at their phone because they’re not in the mood to be sociable.
And to complicate the matter even further, people’s memories aren’t very reliable. A 2019 study found that if you ask people how much they look at their phone, and at the same time use an app to record how much they actually look at it, the two numbers aren’t very strongly linked. Self-reported data isn’t useless, but it needs to be treated with caution.
That’s why a lot of scientists, like Etchells, are very wary of much of the existing research. Despite some eye-catching findings, the studies are often not reliable, and more careful work frequently finds much more ambiguous results. Famously, one 2019 study found that the correlation between social media use and wellbeing was only about as strong as the correlation between regularly eating potatoes and wellbeing.
Ages of wonder
The new study did two interesting things. It looked at a wide range of ages, tracking the effect of social media across adolescence and in fact most of the human lifespan, and it considered whether social media use came first and changes in wellbeing followed them, or the other way around.
First, it looked at survey data from 72,000 people across the UK, from age 10 to 80. It asked people how much they used social media, and how they rated their satisfaction with life. But because it had such a huge sample size, it was able to break it down into age groups – you could see how 10-year-olds responded, and 11-year-olds, all the way up to 21-year-olds, and then broader categories for older age groups. It found that for most of the population, there’s a “Goldilocks effect”: that is, people who use lots of social media tend to be more unhappy; people who never use it or who use it very little tend to be more unhappy; people who use a moderate amount tend to be the happiest. (If it seems surprising that young people who never use social media are less happy, imagine if you’d been cut off from a major means of communicating with your friends as a teenager.)
But that’s not true for everyone. For young teenage girls, aged 13 and 14, and to a lesser extent for 15-year-olds of both sexes, there’s a more straightforward relationship: on average, the more they use, the less happy they are.
This is important. “Adolescents” aren’t a monolithic block. A 12-year-old boy is a very different animal from a 19-year-old young woman, for instance. If there are times when social media can have a more profound effect, it’s important to know.
Andrew Przybylski, a professor of psychology at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the study, speculated that it might represent the onset of puberty: girls tend to go through puberty somewhat earlier than boys.
Cause and effect
The second part of the study tried to give an insight into what was causing what. As we discussed, it’s easy to imagine that unhappier people spend more time on social media, rather than that social media is driving unhappiness.
So what the researchers did was look at young people’s social media use and life satisfaction at one time, and then again a year later. The idea was that, usually, causes have to come before effects. If we saw that social media use went up only after life satisfaction went down, then that would suggest that social media couldn’t be making people unhappy.
And that is, in fact, exactly what they found – most of the time. Young people who were unhappy one year tended to use social media more the next year. But at ages 11 to 13 for girls, 14 and 15 for boys, the relationship works both ways. Unhappier adolescents of those ages do use more social media, but those who use more social media seem to become less happy, as well.
That’s also true for both sexes at age 19. Dr Amy Orben, a psychologist at Cambridge University’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the lead author on the study, suggests that this later age could be because of life changes, such as leaving school.
How much to worry?
These effects are small. Even at its strongest, the relationship between social media use one year and life satisfaction the next only explains about 4 per cent of the difference between people’s scores on wellbeing questionnaires. And for most ages, social media use doesn’t seem to affect life satisfaction at all, rather it’s the other way around.
“This doesn’t constitute advice to parents that their children should abstain from social media,” says Przybylski. “It’s clear from the data that abstinence isn’t necessarily great, either.” That makes sense: if most children are communicating with their peers through social media, then cutting them off from social media means cutting off a lot of communication with their peers.
The fact that the results are small doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about – for one thing, we’re talking about averages. “We’re stuck in this tyranny of averages,” says Orben.
“There’s such massive individual variation.” Even if the average adolescent isn’t harmed, people’s personal experience might be that social media is really harmful for them or their child: there have been plenty of individual horror stories.
“If someone says that social media is really hurting – or benefiting – them in some way,” Orben says, “I won’t smack my study on the table and say no.” And more than that, mental health is a complex and multifaceted thing, and perhaps small differences can have larger outcomes later on.
But for now, she says, “it would be wrong to say more than that social media probably plays a tiny role among many factors.”
What happens next?
All the scientists I spoke to agree that we’ve reached the limits of what we can find out by looking for correlations between self-reported social media use and mental health. Przybylski in particular is trying to encourage social media companies like Facebook to share anonymised user data so that we can see more precisely what’s going on. Orben says that one of her PhD students is working on links between clinical depression and social media, rather than life satisfaction.
For now, there is a lot of noise and confusion and concern, but still not a huge amount of solid data behind it. It’s not entirely clear that there is a major epidemic of mental health issues in the UK – it may well be that people are simply more willing to talk about them and seek help for them, which would show up in the statistics as an increase. But if there is, it’s not – at the moment – clear that social media is causing it.
“I’m talking as a university lecturer rather than as a psychologist,” says Etchells. “But I have conversations with students about mental health. Lots of students are struggling with their mental health because of their finances, or because they’re struggling with coursework, or because they can’t access support services. Screens just don’t come into it.
“Social media is an easy thing to point to, and we’ve all seen stories of when it’s gone wrong, but life just isn’t that simple.”