The importance of checking social media for adolescents’ well-being: a preliminary study from the BeMe Health district of North Carolina (Appl. D. C. Telzer and Deborah M. Adler)
Social media provides adolescents with new ways to measure social approval, including how many likes they get after posting, or how long they have to wait before receiving feedback. For some people, being able to constantly track feedback from peers could heighten anxieties about self-worth or amplify the impact of judgements from peers. Some researchers have proposed that digital innovations, such as games or social-media platforms including TikTok, might even impact adolescents’ development of a sense of self, how they perceive others’ opinions of them or what habits they develop around social-media use14,16,17.
I don’t want to say that intensive use is not concerning at all. In a previous study, we showed that there are three groups of users: at-risk users who show 2– 5 addiction symptoms, and problematic users who show 6–9 symptoms. More than 30% of children in the Netherlands are middle at-risk. We can see that adolescents have more problems with sleep and school. Our research indicates that an adolescent’s addiction symptoms increase their likelihood of experiencing issues. There is still cause for concern when a few symptoms are present, despite the low percentage of adolescents showing problematic use.
For other indicators of well-being, the findings were more nuanced. For example, in countries where intensive use was common, because the percentage of intensive users was high in the adolescent population, intensive users reported more life satisfaction than did non-intensive users. In countries where intensive use was uncommon, intensive users report less life satisfaction than do non-intensive users.
During that period, the students who reported checking their social media more regularly showed greater neural sensitivity in parts of the brain like the amygdala, Telzer said. People who looked at their social media less frequently were less sensitive in certain areas.
Whether it’s the brain changes of the chicken or the Egg, there are steps that caregivers can take to help teens use caution around social media.
Telzer and her team studied 169 sixth and seventh grade students in rural North Carolina to determine how habits around checking social media impacted their development.
It is important not to worry too soon, she added. The study established a strong correlation between social media habits and greater sensitivity to feedback, but it cannot say for sure if one is causing the other, she added.
The chief medical officer of BeMe Health and child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital said that social media has several ways to get feedback from peers. The study was not done by the man.
Doing so can help young people connect more deeply in person, feel more present and “separate from the constant, often anxiety-provoking, influx of information about the world and other people’s lives,” she said.
Chaudhary advised that families take a four-step approach to teens’ social media use: help them evaluate how they are using it, ask how social media serves them, encourage them to identify changes they want, and make a plan to get there, she wrote in a 2021 story.
And even for young people who like to spend time online, there are ways to do it that don’t pose some of the potential risks social media does, she added.
It may be time to rethink how much time you spend on platforms that are not leaving you feeling calmer, refreshed, and in a better headspace.
Depression, anxiety and suicidality have all sharply increased in adolescents over the past decade1. Young people are spending a lot of time online. Partly because of fears that there’s a link between these trends, governments around the world are under pressure to do more to regulate technology companies.
All these arguments make sense. But in our view, there is another gap: researchers have not systematically interrogated, using large-scale data sets or experiments, how the relationship between social-media use and mental health changes with developmental stage.
We looked at longitudinal data from two UK data sets. For up to seven years, 17,409 participants were asked about their social media use and life-satisfaction in online questionnaires or in interviews. At the time of the first surveys, the participants’ ages had ranged from 10 to 21.
Several developmental-psychology studies have shown, for instance, that adolescents — particularly those in early to mid-adolescence — place increased importance on being able to interact with their peers, and on what their peers think of them12. Other studies suggest that although young children tend to view themselves positively, as they become adolescents, their ideas about themselves come to more closely align with what they perceive others to think of them13,14. Still more work has shown that being rejected or not being included has a greater impact on mood for those in early to mid-adolescence than for people older than 2515.
In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, most young people move from primary schools to secondary schools, where social networks are larger and more unstable, when they are 1118. Being able to access peers through social media pathways that are available, highly public, permanent, and lacking social cues, such as facial expressions and body language, could be particularly helpful at this time. When young people leave school for jobs, it is the same. In early and later adolescence, young people become more independent and social pressures increase.