Image: (Tracy J. Lee for NPR)
To read more of Cory Turner's article, please click here.
The statistics are sobering. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. One in 5 teens identifying as LGBTQ+ say they attempted suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, depression rates doubled for all teens. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now?
"Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia... Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve," Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. "We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development."
Prinstein's 22-page testimony, along with dozens of useful footnotes, offers some much-needed clarity about the role social media may play in contributing to this teen mental health crisis. For you busy parents, caregivers and educators out there, we've distilled it down to 10 useful takeaways:
1. Social interaction is key to every child's growth and development.
2. Social media platforms often traffic in the wrong kind of social interaction.
3. It's not all bad.
"Research suggests that young people form and maintain friendships online. These relationships often afford opportunities to interact with a more diverse peer group than offline, and the relationships are close and meaningful and provide important support to youth in times of stress."
4. Adolescence is a "developmentally vulnerable period" when teens crave social rewards â without the ability to restrain themselves.
That's because, as children enter puberty, the areas of the brain "associated with our craving for 'social rewards,' such as visibility, attention, and positive feedback from peers" tend to develop well before the bits of the brain "involved in our ability to inhibit our behavior, and resist temptations," Prinstein said. Social media platforms that reward teens with "likes" and new "followers" can trigger and feed that craving.
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