It often feels like the whole world is conspiring to keep our kids tethered to tech—and that’s because it is. Social media companies have poured billions of dollars into making their products as addictive as possible, especially for kids and teens. (Location 38)
Children 12 and under are not supposed to have social media accounts, but they can simply lie about their birth year to sign up. When states have passed laws requiring age verification, tech companies have immediately sued to keep the laws from going into effect. Kids and teens can just click on a button labeled “I am 18 or older—Enter” to access pornography websites. For the foreseeable future, keeping kids safe online is up to parents. (Location 42)
When my kids were young, someone said to me, “Remember: You’re not raising children. You’re raising adults.” I have thought about that nearly every day since. (Location 63)
Figure 0.1: Symptoms of depression, U.S. teens, 1991−2023 Source: Monitoring the Future survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders Note: The 2020 data were collected in February and early March before pandemic lockdowns. (Location 79)
In 2009, less than half of teens used social media every day, mostly on a computer. By 2017, 85% did, usually on their own phones, anytime, anywhere. (Location 87)
Figure 0.2: Percent of U.S. teens who get together with their friends almost every day, 1976−2017 Source: Monitoring the Future survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders Note: The wording of this item changed after 2018, so only data up to 2017 is shown here. (Location 91)
The number of 10- to 14-year-old girls admitted to the emergency room for self-harm in the U.S. quintupled between 2009 and 2022. Most tragic of all, twice as many 10- to 14-year-olds took their own lives via suicide. (Location 122)
Figure 0.5: Social media use and depression, UK teens Source: Kelly et al. (2019), Millennium Cohort Study (Location 129)
Reel sobre el paper.
Across dozens of studies, teens who are heavy users of screen media (electronic games, the internet, online videos, and social media) are between 30% and 200% more likely to be depressed or unhappy than their peers who are on screens less often. Sometimes the link is larger for social media and internet time than for gaming and videos, but the association is nearly always there. (Location 133)
A study of Danish families found that after two weeks with minimal access to screens, kids and teens were less angry and less depressed compared to a control group who did not change their screen use. These studies are experiments (also known as randomized controlled trials), the gold standard in science for showing causation because people are randomly assigned to either cut back on social media time or not, which equalizes extraneous factors. These studies mean social media causes depression, not just that the two are linked. (Location 137)
sobre el paper.
According to Snapchat’s own research, one in four 13- to 15-year-olds have been asked to share explicit pictures of themselves, and about the same number have received such images. (Location 155)
The impacts of tech go far beyond mental health. With kids and teens spending less time with their friends in person, their social skills are suffering. Kids are inside on their devices instead of outside in the real world, robbing them of experiences with independence and decision-making. Parents and children spend less time together, interfering with family bonding. Teens are distracted at school by their phones, can’t concentrate on their homework, and arrive at college unable to focus long enough to read a few pages in a textbook. (Location 162)
sobre el impacto en la capacidad para concentrarse.
It’s not enough to simply talk to kids about keeping their phones outside their bedrooms at night. It’s not enough to tell kids they might see inappropriate or harmful content online. It’s not enough to advise that they shouldn’t be spending three hours a day on TikTok. They need rules. They need rules because they are kids. As a society, we have many rules in place to protect kids and teens as they grow up. The prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of self-control and decision-making, develops more slowly than the rest of the brain and isn’t fully formed until the mid-20s. This is why teens do dumb things sometimes. That’s why we age-gate activities that are dangerous, addictive, or require solid judgment. It’s why in most of the world 13-year-olds are not allowed to drive, 15-year-olds are not allowed to vote, and 16-year-olds are not allowed to buy alcohol. (Location 194)
Author Scott Galloway, who has two teen sons, puts it this way: “My job as their dad is to be their prefrontal cortex until it shows up.” (Location 208)
sobre el rol de la PFC en la toma de decisiones y su maduración tardía.
Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s founders, said, “It’s a social validation feedback loop… you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. We understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway.” When Facebook was being developed, he says, the objective was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that was before social media companies started using algorithms to feed people the content that would keep them tethered to the app. (Location 211)
Sobre el diseño adictivo de RRSS
In adolescence, friendship and status are all-important, making it even harder to stay away from the apps. Social media companies have invested in algorithms for a very simple reason: The more time users spend on the app, the more money they make. And if they can get them young, the company will make more money over the user’s lifetime. That might be why nearly half of teens say they are online “almost constantly.” The companies know this: TikTok’s internal research, for example, concluded that minors have “minimal ability to self-regulate effectively” and “do not have executive function to control their screen time.” (Location 215)
Imagine that when you were a kid you went to your parents and said, “Now that I’m 10, I want you to buy me a gadget that costs 40 for every month I have it. I’ll be able to communicate with my friends and with adults I’ve never met every second of every day. And by the way, I’ll never look up from my hand again.” They would have said no. (Location 228)
On average, kids now get their first smartphone around age 11, and 38% of 10- to 12-year-olds use social media. (Location 235)
With use so pervasive and the dangers so dire, parents are in a tough spot. But there is a way out: You have to be in charge. For a previous generation of parents, that was obvious (and if you didn’t like it, well, sonny, you can get out of the car and walk). For us, it’s not. Being an authority figure seems a little strange. We left behind the harmful practices of our parents and grandparents, like spanking and shaming. We vowed we would never say “because I said so.” We want to show our kids we love them, and we don’t want them to be upset. Is it working? Only sort of. (Location 237)
relación con el problema de la autoridad. Kathy Araujo.
Clinical psychologist and parenting expert Becky Kennedy calls this type of parenting “Sturdy Leadership”—it’s a combination of validating feelings but also holding boundaries. She suggests parents should respond to kids pushing back on rules with something like this: “One of my main jobs is to make decisions that I think are good for you, even when you’re upset with me. This is one of those times. I get that you’re upset, I really do.” (Location 282)
In a recent poll, half of 18- to 27-year-olds said they wished TikTok and Snapchat had never been invented. It is difficult to imagine that this many young adults in the 1990s wished TV was never invented. (Location 296)
Overall, kids are surprisingly self-aware that the time they spend online is often not beneficial or healthy. They’ve even come up with a name for the reality-bending effects of being chronically online: brain rot. The phrase is so descriptive of life today that the Oxford English Dictionary named it the word of the year for 2024. (Location 310)
investigar origen y explicar expresión.
Becky Kennedy advises parents to think of themselves as a pilot “who always has the right to return to base should the skies be more turbulent than expected—in fact, this is something the passengers would want a pilot to do, even if they seem annoyed in the moment. You are the pilot of your family plane.” (Location 409)
Not getting enough sleep is a risk factor for just about everything we’d like our kids to avoid, from getting sick to feeling depressed. Yet most kids—90% according to one study—are not getting enough sleep. (Location 432)