Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm honored to be a part of this wonderful series.
Today, I'm going to talk with you about technology and healthy adolescent
development, and as you can imagine, this is an area where things are changing
very rapidly, so I'm going to give you a very high-level overview
of what we're starting to learn, and this is predominantly coming from both our
my work as a co-director of the Winston Center, and that is with Dr. Eva Telzer.
And then I'll also talk about some practical advice, which is coming from a synthesis that was developed
with the American Psychological Association.
But let's dive in. You have probably noticed that things are changing dramatically in the world,
in particular in the ways in which kids' social context is changing. It has,
looked different over the years, but perhaps in no more substantial way than we see now,
where even when kids are interacting with one another,
In real space, they may have less eye contact, less opportunity to interact in dyadic and reciprocal exchanges,
because there's this remarkable, kind of focus instead on a device,
and the platforms and apps that are embedded within that device.
The way that we think about this research is really in the context of understanding adolescence
as an extraordinarily important point for development, in particular brain development. So let me just briefly
of course, we know that the adolescent body is changing over the course of puberty.
But it's, a couple of years before observable signs of puberty on the outside of the body.
that we start seeing tremendous growth and reorganization of the brain,
perhaps around the age of 10 or 11 for many adolescents. And,
the way that the brain is changing is so substantial, other than the first year of life, it's the most
significant period for brain change and growth that we would see across our entire lifespan.
It's particularly important to think about, because that age of 10 or 11
is, also coinciding with when we see many kids
these days getting their first, personal device, or
less structured or less supervised access
to devices. So it's really important to think about what's happening in the brain at that moment.
Now, the brain is evolving into more of an adult brain,
but it's not changing all regions at the same time. In fact,
the first region of the brain that's changing
is subcortical. It's really deep in the brain, it's an area we share with many
other mammals, and it's referred to as the anterior cingulate cortex.
Basically, it's an area of the brain that suddenly starts to get a lot more receptors for oxytocin and dopamine.
And that's important, because even among mice, what we see
is a sudden interest in interacting far more with peers than with adults.
And also, the dopamine piece is leading folks,
to be really especially interested in dominance,
attention, positive feedback from peers among humans.
We see that age in middle school as being the time when
kids suddenly are talking about who's sitting at what lunch table,
their rolling their eyes at their parents, they are very interested in wearing whatever is cool and popular,
and this is all likely related to that increased
receptor, an activation occurring within that region. And this is depicted here by this red line.
What's really important to note is that the prefrontal cortex is actually
one of the last brains to development, so that's actually here. We don't see
full development until around the mid-20s,
and that's depicted here by this blue line, when we would see full
cognitive control, or ability to kind of resist impulses and more carefully
consider and deliberate before engaging in behavior.
Well, what you can see is that there's a tremendous gap that's created then
from around age 9 or 10 all the way into the mid-20s or so,
where we have kind of a supercharged gas pedal when it comes to looking for peer feedback,
and a little bit of weaker brakes.
When it comes to that impulse system really being able to kick in fully, as we would see for adults.
And this period of time probably made sense then lower peer interaction moments, like after school.
as we were a species that had heavy peer interaction
moments, like the school day, and then lower peer interaction moments, like after school.
But now, with technology, kids have the opportunity
to be consistently, 24 hours a day,
getting that kind of peer feedback, and opportunity with the press of a button
to kind of seek more and more of that power and influence and attention.
So we have a little bit of a mismatch between the way that the brain is developing
and the world in which they are now growing up in, starting as recently as just a couple of decades ago.
I'm going to be talking about what we're starting to learn
in this rapidly growing field regarding digital interactions.
It is important to remember that we can't say things about them being all good or bad, because
your experience online is different today than it was yesterday, and
will be from tomorrow. Same for kids, of course, and
and some kids may be on screens for 3 hours, maybe they're reading the New York Times,
and others are on for 5 minutes, and they might be
getting directed to content that teaches them how to harm themselves,
and hide that from their parents. So, of course,
we want to be really thoughtful about the way we think about what's happening
on screen, not how much time they're on screen.
We also want to think really carefully about the all the different ways the kids are interacting with technology now,
including those that are issued to them from their own schools that might or may not be, kind of locked down.
Allowing them to explore all kinds of sites and be engaged in many platforms, not just those that might assist them with their schoolwork.
We want to think really carefully about the way that we think, talk about social media. It is made up of content
that kids themselves generate, or they're seeing from other users in many cases, sometimes from bots.
But there's also a difference between this content and the content that we see on a movie screen or a TV screen,
and that is the notifications, the likes, the comments.
The profile indicators that surround that content. And research
has shown that actually, showing kids illegal
And dysfunctional content is related to activation of the prefrontal cortex.
But showing them that same content with a like button next to it, indicating that the content got some likes.
Is showing a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, really demonstrating that
it's not just the content, but it's the way that the platforms surround the content
and deliver the content that's changing how the brain is responding to it.
And then, of course, AI is delivering up content and friends that we may have never asked for.
When it comes to AI, we want to start talking about how that's changing dramatically. There's generative AI, there's companion AI, and right
now available at your local Costco, there are AI toys or companions in a stuffed animal or a robot
For kids ages 0 to 6 years old, so we want to think really carefully about that, too.
The research that I'm going to tell you about is therefore not going to focus on all of this as a monolith.
We're going to talk about under what conditions and for which kids, might there be parts
of technology interaction that could help their development, or might be increasing risk.
So, really quickly, I'm gonna go through this way that we've unpacked the question of,
is technology good or bad, into these various different kind of sub-questions. So let's just dive right in.
Yes, it is true that there is potential for these devices to be
helpful to development. Many parents report significant anxiety,
particularly in the U.S, about their kids' whereabouts, and it does seem that geolocation
on kids' devices is helpful primarily for parents.
We know that educational technology can make
memorizing multiplication tables, a little bit more fun.
If it can be gamified than, other ways of doing that.
So school-issued devices can also potentially be helpful.
Social media has had identified, has had some positives.
For particularly those from minoritized communities, because
kids are able to find others with a similar identity
when they might be the only person in their school or even their family with their
sexual or gender identity, their racial or ethnic or religious identity.
And online, folks can find online-only friends, people they know they'll never meet in real life,
but nevertheless report a very close friendship.
I should note, however, that unfortunately, the social media companies now themselves
are no longer social media, because they believe that their users are seeing more content from bots and ads.
than they are seen from the actual friends that they chose. So,
this potential benefit is actually not so much of a benefit anymore.
There is the capacity for us to have greater diversity within our online and offline peer contexts.
And we also should note that when it comes to AI, there are folks who are able to get
information from AI that they might not have been able to get from a licensed, trained
mental health professional, because many people live in a part of the country, or may not have access to the means to be
be able to find a licensed mental health professional.
So this is, something that could potentially, help in the future.
But rather than thinking about, how much time kids are spending online, we should instead be thinking about
why are they online? And research is starting to show that many kids are not, in fact, reading
the New York Times, and they're not going online to get simply information from AI.
why are they online? And research is starting to They're going online for specific reasons. Now, this research is a little bit older at this point, but
it still holds true that the majority of kids seem to be on social media platforms
And they report that they spend most of their time comparing themselves to others and looking for ways to get positive feedback.
That makes sense, from what we just talked about with brain development, but social media allows you to quantify
that positive feedback in the forms of number of followers and likes and notifications.
And those who are going online for these particular reasons are showing increased risk
for depression, for anxiety, and weight-related behaviors. And
although the media has talked about this for females, it's important to note that this is the case now for
males as well. We are seeing that increase in focus
lean muscularity, as well as greater loneliness among boys
too, and an increase in depression and anxiety.
There are some kids who are particularly likely to be exposed to cyber hate online.
These cyber hate includes both cyberbullying, but also
things online that might denigrate an entire group of folks
based on a shared identity, like, as we said before,
racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, religious identity, just as examples.
A very recent study was done that looked at the experiences of African American youth.
And they want the study was able to look at the number of times the number of
things that kids saw each day that presented positive information
about their racial identity, compared to the number of things that showed
negative depictions of racial identity through cyber hate.
Through depictions of racial trauma or algorithmic bias,
which is when algorithms kind of show more of a white default, or a
a tendency of kind of assuming that the best in attractiveness
or coolness or something like that might be someone with a white identity.
Well, the research showed a relatively even split, that kids are, although they can get some information online
that might show them positive depictions about their identity, they're seen a bit more every day. That's showing them negative.
And interestingly, the results demonstrated that exposure to the negative aspects of the cyber-hate aspects
Is account is associated with later anxiety and depression, even when you
account for how much these kids are experiencing offline discrimination, too.
The research also has been showing in the literature that not only those who are members of an identity group being denigrated,
but also bystanders are showing increases in anxiety and depression as a result of exposure to this kind of content.
And among those who are seeing lots of this positive
depiction, that doesn't buffer the effect. So, another way of saying that is that
the bad stuff kids are seeing is harming them, creating risk. The good stuff isn't making it any better.
So, if you've
ever looked at an adolescent's feed, you would be quite shocked, because it's very, very different
from our adult feeds. Sometimes we kind of look at our adult feeds and just assume, well, kids are probably just seeing a kid version of that.
That's not true. They're seeing very different things. The number of predators that are targeting youth
is, very dramatic, and it is very frequently happening, especially to those
identifying as female, that they see that within their feed, even though as adults we may not.
In addition, we also know that kids are getting
exposure and direction to content that is
literally teaching them how to engage in disordered or
illegal or dangerous behaviors, and in many ways.
Encouraging them to engage in this behavior.
So, YouTube has since changed their policies, but you can see that data
from a while back was showing that a remarkably high proportion of those,
videos that were talking about non-suicidal self-injury, or how to,
cut or otherwise harm one's own body tissue without suicidal intent.
These were not, cautionary videos, these were actually encouraging folks. And,
helping kids to feel that they were part of others who were engaging in the same behavior, but then punishing them
if they said that, actually, I don't want to do this anymore, I want to do something that's more adaptive to deal with my stress.
Then people in the communities would say, no, we're gonna make fun of you online, we're gonna exclude you, you know,
you have to be just like us, you have to be a cutter.
YouTube, as I mentioned, has changed their policies, but other platforms have not, so this is still
happening on some of the most popular platforms for youth today.
It very much mirrors a very similar issue that's happening when it comes to eating disorder type of content,
referred to online sometimes as Pro-Anna, referring to anorexia behavior, where kids are encouraged to post up
art, like poetry, to put up Thinspiration photos of unhealthy
body shapes, and also to create social communities in which one must follow the rules of anorexia,
type behaviors in order to remain a member of the club. These are,
remarkably common among here at UNC Chapel Hill, we talk with undergrads
about this all the time, and over 50% of undergrads say that they have been exposed to this
by the time they graduate high school, even when they have never asked for it or anything like it.
Very briefly, it's probably no surprise if you've ever, as you've probably experienced this yourself.
But the process of psychological overgeneralization leads us to kind of assume that
even just a little bit of information online might reflect the values of many.
If you've ever visited the comments feature of an article you are reading online, you might see
remarkably, radical comments in that section, things that maybe you would very
disagree with, and even as adults, we might have the tendency to think, ugh, that's probably half the country that
feels that way. We rarely say, wow, there's a particularly radical person who commented on this article as an individual.
We usually assume that that reflects a large group of other people that might feel the same way. Well,
teens do it too, and they do it even more, perhaps, because they have less exposure to kind of broader
values or social norms.
This was an interesting study at the beginning of research in this area, still back on Facebook,
but clearly demonstrating that the more that 8th graders were exposed to posts with likes
that said positive things about drinking, the more that those teens found themselves assuming that most of their peers thought
it was okay to drink 5 or more alcoholic beverages on a single
occasion. It's a pretty high number for adults, but pretty dangerous.
for 8th graders. And sure enough, once they had perceived that about their
peers, that led to their own first episode of heavy episodic drinking
at that very young age. Really demonstrating how it
is that, the online forum is changing social
norms and creating heightened susceptibility to peer influence, especially among teens, perhaps.
This process could also be used to promote adaptive behaviors, community service, doing homework, really standing up for one another.
It appears, and it's hard to know, but the algorithms that are being used are opaque. But, we do
know that those things that address our feelings of fear or,
or anger are more likely to motivate engagement. And it may be, in fact, not a coincidence
that the platform's algorithms seem to favor things
that promote the unfamiliar fear and anger, because that will lead to more engagement on the platform. So,
although this process could work for good, it rarely, rarely happens that kids are being fed those kinds of images that might lead to positive outcomes.
So, interestingly, when you look at the research that looks at how kids themselves feel
when they're using their devices and when they're online,
you'll find that kids actually report high levels of positive affect
along with simultaneously, high levels of negative affect at the same time.
And this kind of bittersweet or mixed feeling about social media
in some ways has to do with what researchers have now started to call digital stress.
Digital stress comes from at least four different sources, and I think you can all relate to this.
One is just how many different apps are now beeping at you and sending you notifications, telling you you have
someone that's trying to reach you or demand a response from you, and it's just a lot to have to deal with, especially
when kids might have less time on their devices, and they're trying to handle all of their notifications at once.
Remember, because of the adolescent brain, they are very interested
in peer feedback. It's not a silly thing that they're doing just as kids.
They are biologically primed who care deeply about peer feedback, and they want to be part of the social conversation the next day.
So it is a very real thing if they feel that they're missing out
on the information that is happening in their social worlds. They also get yelled at by their friends, we hear, if they don't like one another's posts and respond to them right away, or if they leave someone unread.
They also get yelled at by their friends, we hear,
if they don't like one another's posts and respond to them right away, or if they leave someone unread.
So they feel that they can't walk away from their devices, or they literally will suffer relationship consequences.
And when we ask even young adults, our undergraduates here at UNC,
how long do you spend looking at your own post after you've posted it, just to make sure it's getting positive likes and favorable comments?
We hear that it's not uncommon at all for kids to spend about 30 minutes
staring at their own post and not doing much of anything else, because they're really concerned that they might get canceled.
When we look at kids in high school, just under 700 of them,
we find that 45% of them report that these factors lead to so much digital stress
that it's interfering with their daily roles and routines. And the more digital stress they report in one year,
the more depression they're reporting a year later. So, much like other interpersonal stressors, this is a
a really important part of kids' interpersonal life right now, and it's a part that's making them very, very stressful.
A lot of times, adults will be confused about this, and I'll say to them, well, just imagine that in the 80s,
you walked out of your house, and there was sky-writing over your community
that said something about the popular kid is talking about you and showing photos of you to a whole bunch of others
that go to your school, you too would be very curious and feel it's very important to know more information about that. And that's
very similar to what it's like for kids today.
Okay, so moving on, it's really important that we think not only about the ways that technology use is changing kids' social contexts,
but also how it's taking kids away from other parts of their development
that they should be engaging in instead, and perhaps most important would be sleep.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine asks that, suggests strongly, in fact,
that we get 8 to at least 8 hours of sleep during our adolescent years.
In the United States, we are doing a terrible, terrible job of this.
In the ninth grade, less than half of kids get the physician-recommended amount of sleep.
And by 12th grade, less than a quarter of kids are getting
what they should be getting. Now, if you've looked at the literature on sleep and psychology,
you know that sleep is related to everything. It's been looked at. It is related to poor sleep is related to more obesity.
It's related to mental health difficulties, irritable, risky behavior, more emotional volatility or
emotion dysregulation. It's related to grades, it's even related to more, driving accidents the next day.
So, it's really, really important to get sleep. Meta-analyses are showing
that the number one reason why kids are not getting the recommended hour of sleep is
their screens. A lot of kids have their screens in their bedroom, sometimes in their bed,
or even on their nightstand while they sleep. Well, this is the worst possible
combination of things. Obviously, the longer they're on their screen, the less they're going to bed.
But and the less sleep they're getting. But also, the blue light from the screen is interfering with melatonin
so it's changing the quality of sleep and, affecting the duration of sleep. And if kids keep it on their nightstand.
Many of them report that they wake up, they look quickly to see what they got,
before they roll over and fall back asleep, and that means those wake events are longer.
This is really important because research shows
That the more those disruptions and duration, sleep duration is affected.
the smaller their brain is growing in terms of white matter. So, in other words, they have less white matter in the brain.
This is incredibly important. White matter is the part of the brain that is changing our ability to think like a child to more like an adolescent,
leads to faster processing, which leads to more complex kind of thought that's possible.
So, really important.
A lot of people talk about screen addiction. I'm not going to use the word addiction, it's just
something that scientists sometimes quibble about, but what we instead do,
and we do this in our lab as well, is we take the DSM and we look at substance dependency, and change out the words
for substance, alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, instead to social media. This is literally the criteria
for a substance dependency, and, with social media instead.
We ask kids these questions, and this has been done by many other investigators in many samples around the world.
These questions are asking about things like withdrawal symptoms, tolerance symptoms, the perception of addiction,
and how much you've tried to stop and you just can't. It's gotten out of your control.
50% of kids in samples around the world now report at least one symptom of clinical dependency
on social media. And our recent, research, nearly, over 95% of adolescents reported they're spending more time on there than they can. Half
of adolescents were reporting, withdrawal symptoms.
And one quarter perceived themselves to be moderately or severely addicted to social media. This may be no
surprise. About a year ago, the New York Times released documents that were part of court cases against platforms like TikTok and Meta.
You may be able to see here that within those TikTok documents, it says, teenagers in the U.S. are our golden audience.
The product itself has baked into it compulsive use.
You can see here that in the documents that were released from Meta, it said that they specifically understood that they to
create a dopamine hit every once in a while. It was a social validation feedback loop.
That's what a hacker would come up with to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors and creators
understood this consciously, and we did it anyway. So
the findings about dependency are completely consistent with what these documents suggest might be known by the
platforms themselves.
There's a lot of debate right now about the use of smartphones in schools.
We don't have data yet to know whether a bell-to-bell policy,
meaning that kids can't use their phone from the very first moment school starts until the very end.
Versus just, no phones during instructional time policy might be better instead.
Those data are being collected right now. We're doing that. In Australia, there's some,
well, actually, they're doing an overall ban, but in many states right now,
there are different policies in play. Hopefully, over time, we'll know more about what might be best.
But the research does give us some information that might be helpful, for developing those policies.
The first, of course, is it would not surprise anyone to know that kids who are looking at their screens during class get lower grades.
It may surprise you to know, however, that, the same thing happens to the kids sitting behind them.
Secondhand screen effects, or bystander screen effects, are
Making entire classrooms, have a harder time concentrating
because just a few kids might be using their devices in that classroom.
This makes perfect sense. If you've ever been in a situation where someone in front of you is using their screen, it is pretty tempting,
and it is hard to keep paying attention if you see someone that's watching videos or scrolling something that's not related to the task at hand.
Now, a lot of kids say it's fine, they're multitasking. According to the brain, at least, there's no
such thing as multitasking. It's actually rapid task shifting, that we focus on different things back and forth
one another. And kids are worse at that than adults. So, you know, if if we
thinking that multitasking or the ability to do that while paying attention to something else
is okay. It's probably not okay for a school kid. I can't imagine
trying to take AP Chemistry while watching a TikTok video at the exact same time. That's not about AP Chemistry.
But interestingly, research that we've recently been doing in collaboration with folks
in Canada, where they got started on this a year or two before we did here in the States,
has demonstrated that, once you start putting in policies, you see effects
you see effects that are beneficial to the teachers, not just to the kids.
The, use of phones in the classroom is actually leading to higher levels of teacher distress.
and lower job satisfaction and greater attrition from school. And once the policies
are put into place, you see a drop in teacher stress, and you see teachers more likely to stay on the job.
These are recent data that came from our lab showing you that
20 minutes of every hour, kids were on their screens
during the school day. So it's not, on average, I mean literally, in each
hour of the day, they spent 20 minutes of that hour on their screen.
And when you look at what they were doing on their screen, it is predominantly social media.
And then entertainment, including things like YouTube.
There's some other stuff they're doing on their screen,
maybe that's academic time, but you can see here in green that that is
a minority of what they're using their screens for.
Here's also data from a study called the ABCD study.
It's a very large study of over 10,000 kids across the entire country that are
these kids are coming in and getting their brains scanned very regularly, and they're getting we're getting lots and lots of information in the field.
About, about these kids, because the investigators are collecting all kinds of data from their parents and their teachers and their school,
and so on. What you can see here is that those kids with high
social media use, here depicting in red, are scoring the lowest on every measure
here of cognitive performance, and this is within middle childhood, 9 to 13 years old.
That's lower on a task designed to look at impulsive behavior,
that's lower on reading, comprehension and memory,
their processing speed, their ability to process things very quickly, their vocabulary score,
and an overall composite of their cognitive and intellectual development.
Okay, let's talk briefly about AI chatbots. Chatbots are happening.
The vast majority of teens, over 70%, are reporting
that they are using AI chatbots more than once, so they are repeat customers looking at these platforms now.
It's important to note, though, that this is problematic for two reasons. One.
Chatbots, again, are taking away from things they should be doing instead. And two, chatbots are not
simulating human interaction in the ways that we need for adolescents to develop the competencies that
are supposed to be the hallmark of the adolescent period. So, remember that when you're
an adolescent, you are starting to learn more sophisticated social competencies. Things like
how to handle loyalty and trust and intimate disclosures, how to handle conflict.
These are things you might not do well as a child, but we really learn in adolescence.
And research finds that when you look at people in their 50s and 60s.
You can predict so much about their work performance, their marriage, their parenting,
based on their adolescent-learned social competencies.
So if you take away the learning opportunity during that period, this potentially could have a multi-decade effect on the lifespan.
One of the reasons why chatbots are not doing what they need to do is that
chatbots tend to be sycophantic, providing a more frictionless experience.
But we need a little bit of conflict. We need a little bit of pushback
in our interpersonal interactions. That helps us understand social norms.
It helps us correct our behavior, it gives us the information we need.
It also helps us to develop empathy, because we can understand others' perspectives.
Unfortunately, research continues to come out saying that chatbots continually
agree with everything that kids are putting in there, even when kids are putting things in that is very
clearly indicating that they're doing something wrong or bad or socially inappropriate.
Chatbots are also representing themselves as if they're humans
in a way that can be very misleading. They use human pronouns, human names,
they even use verbs like they're crying, or they're caring, or they're feeling to try and convey an anthropomorphic quality.
Chatbots can't cry, or care, or feel. They are they are bots. But as a result of this,
Very dopamine, kind of enriching interaction that's sycophantic.
And the ways in which it's trying to simulate a human relationship, it's probably no surprise that youth
now report that they are trusting their chatbots more than their parents or teachers. In fact, we just
recently finished looking at some data with middle school students, 50% of whom were using chatbots already.
And those who were said that they would prefer to interact with a chatbot
than a human peer, and they thought of the chatbot as their as their friend.
This is a concern. Remember that chatbots, like social media, are completely unregulated.
There's absolutely nothing at the federal level that is, determining what chatbots are allowed to say or not.
As a result, there are still chatbots that are calling themselves therapists, or even calling themselves psychologists and
offering professional advice. Tragically, sometimes that professional advice has been to encourage
kids to end their own lives, going so far as to teach kids how to tie a noose,
and to offer and actually write a suicide note for the child to leave behind,
which horribly, some kids have followed through on, as you've likely seen in the news.
Keep in mind that chatbots are using not just the best data to provide information, but all data.
There's a lot of misinformation online. Kids are sharing their data to help others make a profit,
but there's not appropriate consent or reminders, or helpful information.
In child-friendly language to help kids.
Be more cautious or careful with what data they give away, and there's a lot of ways in which AI is now using
child imagery to imitate the voice or images, sometimes even for child pornography.
So, there's just it's very exciting technology in the world,
but it's not yet ready for kids, especially kids, to engage in with no
guardrails whatsoever, or no teaching or training
of what's out there, and we've seen some of the horrible outcomes
Sadly, as I mentioned earlier, there are now chatbots for those aged 0 to 6,
and the concern about taking away human interaction
human interaction during a pivotal time for language development, emotional development,
things that even in those ages affect our immune system development through human interaction
is a grave concern, for these new toys.
Moving on, there's also emerging evidence
about social media and brain development I wanted to talk about really briefly.
The ABCD study that I mentioned before, has yielded a couple of recent findings.
One is that, those who are watching short-form videos, specifically on TikTok and
Instagram, are now having more difficulties with that prefrontal cortex
kind of executive function type of,
competency, worse, attention, worse control of impulses, and so on.
We also have seen that ourselves, that the more that kids are picking up
their phones over time, the worse they are in cognitive control.
And there's also been recent data from that ABCD study showing that the more that kids
are using screens, the smaller their cortical volume, so it's actually
changing the size of brain growth in this other way as well,
particularly in areas that relate to addiction and also relate to ADHD.
So here you're seeing a way in which the brain is, in fact, not growing
to the size that it should, and here are the behavioral consequences.
And again, this is a very, very big, authoritative study.
We've also been collecting data on this, but not on the size of the brain.
Instead, on whether the brain is functioning in the right way. Are the right areas activating when they should be?
We've been able to do this by looking at objective measures of how much kids are using their phones.
Your phone is collecting this data, whether you realize it or not. There's a screen
that you can go to. It will tell you how many times you picked up
your device, what apps you used, how long you used them, and so on, and so on.
Here are 14 days, represented by 14 columns across all the kids in our study, each one represented by a little tiny dot.
These kids in 6th grade were picking up their phones 100 times a day on average,
with a range going above 300 here, even a couple over 400 a day.
And then, for the amount of time on the smartphone, the average was around 500 minutes
a day, which is 8 hours. I know that's a lot, that's an entire workday,
but remember how many hours they're getting at night, remember they're doing it during class.
If you're a parent, you know that they're wanting to do it at the dinner table.
Believe it or not, some kids are reporting well higher than 8 hours. As you can see here, the range goes up to double that.
So, what we found was that in the immediate moment when they put down their phone,
they actually report that they want more of it. I mean, there's that dependency
again. They want more of that, they want more of those interactions.
But interestingly, at the end of the day, and this might sound counterintuitive,
but the more they picked up their phone during the day, the more lonely they felt.
By the end of the day. You might think the opposite, but when we talk with teens about it, it's because they say that
they're on there, but they're on there with something that's fake and curated and superficial,
and it's not providing them with the emotional intimacy that they need, and that adolescence
is supposed to be the time period for developing
for developing those kinds of relationships. So, they actually feel worse because they're missing out on the in-person
or voice-to-voice interactions that, kids need and adults need so much.
Then, after looking at that information in 6th grade, we scanned their brains in 7th, 8th,
and 9th grade. And what we did is we gave them a task where they were going to get some social feedback.
And what we would expect to see is, and you remember from that initial graph,
that we should see that the areas of their brain showing that
craving for social feedback should be going lower, lower, lower over time.
And that is what you see here in orange, if you're not someone who uses your screens very much.
But among those here in blue that were using their picking up their phones habitually,
you actually see the exact opposite. So the parts of their brain that should be getting less
They should be activating less as kids get older. Actually, we're activating more
as kids got older. So, really demonstrating that this habitual use of screens,
screens, again, the screens were, for social media predominantly, is changing
how the brain is growing. Some areas are getting super hyper-responsive.
And then we also saw the less activation of the prefrontal cortex.
That area was developing, like, a weak muscle. It had not developed to be strong.
So I want to just end briefly, with just a couple of quick takeaway points
of how to translate this into, suggestions for home or for patients.
Of course, there's no data to suggest
that, being off of one, not having a device, or being off these platforms
harms kids in any way at all, it seems. So, you can wait. It seems really
helpful if you can wait with others. So, if parents band together and say, we won't buy for our kid
if you don't buy for your kid, so at least our kid won't be the only one. That seems to work really well.
If kids are online, we want to make sure that they are
Using a direct messaging feature or some other feature that will ensure they're getting social support and emotional intimacy,
we want kids to have relationships with their peers, human peers, not relationships with numbers or with bots.
We should not have platforms with open chat. There are so many predators with adult content
or with AI directed towards kids, especially the younger kids, are. If that's not something you can shut down on the platform,
then it might be something and the platforms are not going to shut that off for a known kid,
and it might be something that, as parents, we have to make sure our kids can't get on in the first place.
We can't monitor every single thing they do, of course, but we can use
the parental controls to try and, keep the amount of time
they're on as brief as possible. There's no reason why it has to be more than 30 minutes a day,
although I know kids, wish they were on for a lot longer.
We also absolutely need to talk with kids about this. It's it's hard. A lot of us have the
tendency to say, oh, I wasn't on that stuff, and I don't understand what this streak means, and why you're
on that thing, and when we do that, we accidentally tell kids, if you ever have a problem with this,
don't come asking me, because I'm already telling you it's not important, and I don't get it.
We should probably do the opposite. We should probably say to kids
explain it to me. Why is that on there? What does that icon mean? What does
that acronym mean? You know, so that way, when they have a problem, they
come to us as parents and say, remember how I taught you about a streak? Well, something
bad just happened, and I want to explain to you, because it's making me feel upset.
The platform should absolutely, 100% be taking down
content that encourages kids to engage in illegal
or maladaptive behavior. They're not doing it, though, so
We have to be expect we should expect that the minute you hand your child a phone,
within the hour, they may very well be exposed to this information,
and that's not hyperbole, there's research that's showing that.
So if you're going to give your 9-year-old a phone, talk to them about these things first.
talk to them about these things first.
Similarly, talk with them about discrimination and cyber hate first. They will see it,
because the platforms are not taking it down.
We are now working with pediatricians to put signs up
in offices around, in exam rooms
and in waiting rooms to talk about addiction to social media, so kids can self-screen and then,
Can start a conversation with their physician, and we're working
on materials to offer physicians about best practices
for getting kids to have moderate phone use, especially at nighttime.
All phones, including ours as adults,
should be charged in a room that's not in our bedroom.
We should show our kids that we're doing it too, put them all in the kitchen together,
all plugged in, and let your phones go to sleep when you are going to sleep.
It's really hard to tell kids not to compare themselves to others, but
it is important today to tell them that our brains are developed to make us
believe what we see. But we now live in a world, for the first time,
where that's not true very often anymore, at least online. Bots.
Photoshop. All kinds of things are
are well built in to make
what we see not true, not representative, not even necessarily from a human.
So we have to perpetually, continually
tell kids to think twice
after before they have a reaction to something that makes them feel bad online.
We should absolutely be teaching kids how to drive
before we just hand them the keys to the car.
APA suggests these 10 areas as a
digital media literacy curriculum.
One of the things that I've been doing myself, directly, and I found that to be a really helpful way to go about this. I've simply started by asking them, why do you think people invented social media? And they have lots and lots of ideas and thoughts, and they generally know that someone's making money.
is I've recently been invited more and more to talk to middle school and high school students
directly, and I found that to be a really helpful way
to go about this. I've simply started by asking
them, why do you think people invented social media?
And they have lots and lots of ideas and thoughts,
and they generally know that someone's making money.
But I have yet to find anyone who understands how they make money.
So I show them.
opening up the App Store and plugging in a popular,
social media platform.
If you go in the App Store, and you type this in there, and you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see a
section called Privacy Data. This is simply what you'll see, clipped right into this slide.
It literally indicates all the different parts of all of your other activity on your phone.
And every specific piece that is being scraped from your device,
and being given to the company, and sold for their profit.
Kids don't know this. I, like I said, I've yet to meet any child
who knew this information, who had found this information, but let me tell you something. Once they know,
they're not so happy about this, and they are wiser consumers. I'm not saying that they throw
their phones away on the way out of the talk, but they do seem to have a very
critical and healthy approach to understanding
how it is that their engagement with these platforms
is compromising their own their own data. And I think that's important for them to understand,
as well as for adults to understand, quite frankly.
Let me stop there, so that way there's time to ask if there's any questions at all. I want to thank you
so much for your attention, especially as I went through
a lot of different areas really, really quickly there.