A Child Psychologist says—Here’s What To Do if Your Child Sees Something Violent Online

They’re hard to avoid lately. Violent content is circulating online, sometimes hitting our kids’ screens before we even know what happened. Many are graphic and tagged with minimal warnings, if any. Even young kids can stumble on these images and videos, especially when something’s trending, or when multiple copies of a video are bombarding the feed, overriding even the most stringent parental controls.

It’s natural for parents to think, How do I block this completely? But in today’s digital world, even the most thoughtful rules and filters can’t catch everything. 

Instead of focusing only on prevention, we need to understand how our children process disturbing content if they come across them and know what to do afterward. Because as someone who speaks to parents and teachers daily, I know it’s likely your child will come across unsettling photos or videos at some point.

A Child’s Brain When They See Something Disturbing

The part of the brain that detects danger—the amygdala—can’t always distinguish between something happening in real life and something viewed on a screen. Its job is to detect and react to threats.

To the amygdala, a violent video watched in your bedroom can feel like a violent event is happening in your bedroom. It sounds the alarm: adrenaline and cortisol flood your system, your heart rate speeds up, your digestion slows, and your body mobilizes to face the danger. 

The problem? Bedrooms are supposed to feel safe. But if something terrifying appears there (or in any space that should feel safe), and yes, that means even virtually, it can scramble those safety cues. That’s when we see sleep disruptions, anxiety, irritability, or sudden changes in behavior. 

How To Handle Your Child Seeing Disturbing Content Online

Luckily, there are ways for parents to help their kids handle violent images they may encounter on social media or hear about through friends.

Don’t assume your kid will just tell you

You might think if your child saw something that scared them, they’d say so. But many don’t. Little kids, especially, may engage in magical thinking. They don’t always understand what they saw, but they do feel their own stress response. And they might assume they did something wrong.

Older kids might understand more but feel too embarrassed or worry they’ll get in trouble. That’s why it’s important not to wait for them to bring it up. 

Be direct. You can say something like, “There’s been some scary news today. Did you see anything about it?” Or even: “I heard a video is going around. Did anyone show you something upsetting?”

Even if your kid hasn’t seen a specific video or photo, you’re not opening a can of worms by bringing it up. You’re opening a door.

In my work with schools and parenting classes, I’ve learned that even if a child didn’t see the video, they’ve usually heard about it. Their friends are talking about it on the playground, at lunch, or in the group chat.

It’s better they hear about it from you, with calm facts and an invitation to ask questions, than from a classmate who’s still trying to make sense of it themselves.

‘Just don’t think about it’ doesn’t work

When a child has seen or heard something disturbing, the most common response I hear from adults is: “Try not to think about it.”

Here’s the thing. That’s not just unhelpful advice and it’s impossible. We can’t not think about something on command. If I say, “Don’t picture a pink elephant,” guess what just popped into your head?

Telling a child not to think about something usually makes them think about it more. It focuses their attention on the very thing they’re trying to avoid. Then they’re failing on two counts: they’re not following your advice, and they’re still feeling stressed out. 

Ask them to retell their experience watching it

The best thing to do when a child sees something disturbing is to talk about it. For school-aged children through adolescence, you can have them reiterate what they saw. Ask them questions, such as, “Where were you?” “What else was going on?” and “What could you see, hear, smell, or feel?”

This helps the brain locate the memory in time and space. It cues the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that understands context, perspective, and safety—that this event is over. It’s not happening right now. It was something they saw on the school bus, at lunch, or at a friend’s house. They weren’t actually in the room where the frightening event took place; they were watching it on a screen. The amygdala needs that update, so that it can stop setting them up for hypervigilance. 

Sometimes, kids need to tell the story multiple times, until it gets boring. That’s the best way to process it. Turning a visual image into a story that can be filed away helps the brain contextualize information. The brain will then be able to calm down.

After talking, try a simple grounding activity to calm the nervous system even more:

• Name three things in the room that are round, two that are square, and one that’s a triangle.
• Suck on an ice chip, and feel the sensation of cold as it trickles down your throat.
• Breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, and exhale for four. 

These small actions help shift the brain from fear to safety. 

Watch for signs of distress

Not every child or teen will struggle after seeing violent content. But some will. Often, when kids don’t talk, they show. Signs that something’s unsettled them include:

• Trouble sleeping
• Nightmares
• Irritability or quick temper
• Withdrawal
• Heightened startle response

If you see these signs, stay calm and open. Blanket punishments or heavy restrictions around phones or friends can backfire. Kids won’t come to you if they think they’ll get in trouble.

This is especially true for parents who carry trauma themselves. We tell ourselves, My child must never go through what I did. So when something scary breaks through, it feels like a personal failure. That fear can quickly turn into shame or anger. The impulse to criticize, lecture, or clamp down hard comes from a place of pain. But those reactions can shut the door just when your child needs it most.

 

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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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.”

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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Five Ways to Silence Your Toxic Inner Critic

We all have that inner critic. Sometimes, it’s the push we need to work harder, go further, be better. At other times, though, it chips away at our self-belief until we feel incapable of doing what we want/need to do. It tells us we’re stupid, fat, worthless. That nobody likes us anyway. That we are undeserving of love or respect. That we are smaller – so much smaller – than we actually are.

And, understandably, all of this can have a hugely negative impact on our mental health.

As Fearne Cotton recently noted in her Happy Place podcast: “We all have this inner voice that sits there on the tip of our tongues desperate to get out…

“Sometimes it’s really loud and everyone hears it, and other times it just niggles in the back of your head… [and] occasionally the voice will say, ‘hey, you’re actually OK at this’ – which is very rare. Very, very rare.

“As humans, we’re all looking for that voice. And whether it’s loud or quiet, it’s there. I think we have to kind of acknowledge that it does exist. It is there.”

Keen to learn more, I reached out to psychologist Dr Kalanit Ben-Ari to ask her about what is the best ways to recognise and deal with negative self-talk.

What is Negative Self-Talk?

Basically, negative self-talk is any inner dialogue you have with yourself that may be limiting your ability to believe in yourself and your own abilities, and reach your potential.

“Negative self-talk is often the little – or not so little – voice in our head comparing us to others, putting us down, criticising, judging, and inducing self-doubt, shame and guilt,” explains Ben-Ari.

“Often this voice repeats itself over and over again, with no resolution.”

What Are Some Examples of Negative Self-Talk?

Negative self-talk is unique to the individual, but judgemental and critical statements make up the bulk of it.

Watch out for variations on these common expressions:

• “It’s all my fault.”
• “Nothing looks right on me today.”
• “Why can’t I be like them?”
• “I never should have…”
• “They must think I’m…”
• “I know I look awful today.”
• “I’m such an idiot.”
• “I’m not worth it.”
• “I can’t do it.”

Where Does Negative Self-Talk Come From?

As part of Stylist’s Love Women campaign – our pledge to celebrate all women – we surveyed Stylist readers in a bid to investigate how both traditional and social media impact women. The survey found that both have a profound effect on our self-esteem, leading to a damaging comparison culture when we don’t feel we live up to the images we see on our screens and in magazines.

Here are some of the most shocking results:

• 14% of women have high levels of self-esteem
• 83% of women say social media negatively affects their self-esteem
• 40% of women compare themselves with other people’s successful careers
• 39% of women compare themselves with women they think look pristine without effort
• 58% of women say that social media has changed how others view them and how they view others

On top of this, some 44% of our readers can’t help but compare when we see others having amazing experiences; for others it’s career success (40%) or bench-marking where they’re at in their life compared to their peers (38%) that makes them feel inferior.

And all of this, in turn, causes us to be more self-critical.

How Does Negative Self-Talk Affect Us?

Studies have linked negative self-talk with higher levels of stress and lower levels of self-esteem. This can lead to decreased motivation as well as greater feelings of helplessness. And this type of critical inner dialogue has even been linked to depression.

“When the majority of this talk is negative, it can directly affect the brain’s neurocognitions, hormones and nervous system,” explains Ben-Ari, “which consequently can affect our confidence, raise anxiety and cause undue stress.”

How Can I Overcome Negative Self-Talk?

If you find yourself spiralling as a result of negative self-talk, Ben-Ari says that there are five things you should do:

1. Notice: be aware that your guest (the inner critic) has shown up. Something as simple as acknowledging this could be the key to stopping a negative self-talk spiral in its tracks.
2. Observe: leave your mind and observe your thoughts, feelings and physical reactions from this voice. You are not your thoughts. You can take a step back and observe, noticing the effect they are having on you. Pay attention to your heart-beat, warmth, breath, tensing of the muscles. In noticing these changes, you can start to lessen the effects.
3. Accept: accept the situation with self-compassion. Remind yourself, “I’m not perfect, I’m a human being and I have my own vulnerability. I try my best. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out how I wanted it to, but this is what it means to be human. I am not alone with this.” When we put too much energy into avoiding or rejecting a thought, the opposite can happen, so allow it to occur and accept it if you cannot change it.
4. Replace: make it a point to imagine yourself saying this to a treasured friend. If you know you wouldn’t say it this way, think of how you’d share your thoughts with a good friend or what you’d like a good friend to say to you. This is a great way to replace the negative self-talk with a positive, accepting or compassionate voice.
5. Question: be curious to explore why you had a particular reaction and open up your own dialogue with the voice, and turn it on its head.
6. Do. Move. Act: being active is crucial to breaking the cycle of negative self-talk. Moving your body, playing music, dancing, singing or taking action towards a new goal can shift you and your energy in the right direction.

Ben-Ari adds that, if negative self-talk is affecting your quality of life, you should seek professional help.

“If you feel overwhelmed by everyday experiences, or experience anxiety and low energy as a result of negative self-talk – or it’s affecting your quality of life, the quality of your relationships with others or your own well-being – it might be time to get some outside help,” she says.

“Negative self-talk is often rooted in past trauma and professional support can offer a great deal of healing and growth.”

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement