Every generation has angst over what a particular cultural shift is doing to the minds of our youth.
When I was a kid in the mid-’80s, it was Tipper Gore and the Parents’ Music Resource Center coming after rock and rap for what they considered explicit and obscene lyrics, leading to the first “Parental Advisory” label going on a 2 Live Crew album.
Decades later, the focus now is on social media and its effects on the mental health of young people.
Given the frequent overreach and cyclical nature of these moral panics, it would be easy to roll your eyes at today’s concerns over social media. But unlike the profanity or racy lyrics that were supposedly corrupting young minds when I was a child, today’s fears over social media have a much stronger basis in reality.
The Seattle Public Schools jumped deep into the middle of this debate a few weeks ago when the district sued social media giants Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and others, arguing the companies were contributing to the youth mental health crisis. The Kent school district followed suit shortly after.
San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of “iGen,” which focused on Gen Z and the impact of social media on young people, said there is much reason for concern.
In the early 2010s, we began to see some alarming trends in mental health for teen girls, in particular. Hospital admissions for self-harm in 10- to 14-year-old girls tripled over the following decade and suicide rates among that age group doubled. Twenge’s research showed major depressive episodes among 12- to 17-year-old girls increased 52 percent as well. There was not a correlating increase in other age groups.
Disrupt the power
In Washington, between 2015 and 2021, the number of hospitalizations nearly doubled among youth whose primary diagnosis is psychiatric, The Seattle Times found.
Correlation is not causation, but Twenge said of the rise of social media, “It’s tough to think of any other events or occurrences that happened in the early 2010s, and kept going in the same direction for more than a decade.”
Twenge is not suggesting we should ban cellphones, but there are some commonsense solutions to disrupt the unrestricted power of social media over our children’s psyches. Some ideas include enforcing the 13-year-old age minimum; restricting teen access to social media in the middle of the night; and limiting the amount of social media teens consume on a daily basis.
For marginalized communities who find support and common cause on platforms like Instagram, Twenge said there are ways to preserve what is healthy, while reducing what is not.
The pockets of social media that oppose toxic messages are still massively outnumbered, however. Case in point, even after Instagram and Facebook tried to limit access to certain weight-loss content, it’s still widely available. An Instagram search last week found the hashtags #weightloss and #diet were used a combined 160 million times, but the hashtag #bodypositivity and #bodypositive a total of 29 million.
Maia Roundtree, 18, a senior at Seattle’s Franklin High School, doesn’t think mental health challenges facing teens will be solved by simply suing social media companies. Since middle school, she has been involved in groups like Powerful Voices, which supports girls and gender-expansive youth in developing their voices.
Roundtree said it’s not enough to take away social media if you aren’t planning to replace it with other forms of support.
“If we have more spaces where teenagers and youth are allowed to be who they are, unapologetically,” she said, “then I think that that’d be a holistic, healthy, progressive way to go.”
Naomi Ishisaka is The Seattle Times’ assistant managing editor for diversity, inclusion and staff development. Her column on race, culture, equity and social justice appears weekly on Mondays. nishisaka@seattletimes.com.
