Whether it was covering it in the ABPTL Friday News Roundup, or writing about it in a daily post, we’ve noticed how much talk there is out there about smartphones and whether students should be allowed to access them during school time.
Candice L. Odgers, the associate dean for research and a professor of psychological science and informatics at UC Irvine, wrote an interesting piece in The Atlantic recently addressing this concern over smartphones. Odgers writes,
“Smartphones and social media are melting out children’s brains and making them depressed, or so goes the story we are being told. The headlines are constant; it’s enough to make any parent want to shut off every smart device in their home. Fortunately for my kids, who enjoy a good ‘cat attacks dog’ video on TikTok, I go to work each day and see what adolescents are really up to on their devices. And it turns out that the story behind teen social-media use is much different from what most adults think.”
“I am a development psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-oldsusing their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology us, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.”
“Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, ‘Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.’”
“This is why other researchers and I are not buying the stories being told about adolescents and social media. The most recent wave of fear was unleashed by Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, an excerpt of which appeared in this magazine. Haidt claims that a ‘phone-based childhood’ in the 2010s rewired our children’s brains and caused an epidemic of mental illness, especially among young girls; he’s written about this theme for years.”
“Of course, Haidt is not alone in asserting that these apps cause such problems. Social media has been compared to heroin use in terms of its impact and has been blamed for things such as declining test scores and young people having less sex.”
“These stories possess an intuitive appeal – social media is relatively new and makes for an easy scapegoat. But adolescence has always been a time of concern: It is a peak age of the onset of a number of serious mental disorders, and there are many alarming statistics about adolescents’ mental health right now. Caregivers are frightened, and people are just trying to do the right thing for young people. No one wants their children exploited online, or to be fed misinformation or sexually explicit and violent content. Pointing the finger squarely at smartphones and social media offers people common and unlikable enemies. But we simply do not know that these are the right targets.”
“The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction form what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents – including among young-adolescent girls, along with large review of 24 studies that followed people over time – suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.”
…
“We should not send the message to families – and to teens – that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.”
“All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.”
We are foolish if we think we can somehow control adolescent access to smartphones and social media. So, we need to get busy to accomplish two tasks:
- We need to learn how to lead learning for young learners, utilizing smartphone technology and social media as instructional tools, and
- We need to lead learning in media literacy so that young learners can become smarter and stronger in their abilities to better use smartphones and social media in their quest for deeper learning.
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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