This month, in honor of National Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ve been focusing on mental health in parents and children. We can’t have a conversation about mental health without addressing social media and the demographic most affected by it—our teens.
This month, in honor of National Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ve been focusing on mental health in parents and children. We can’t have a conversation about mental health without addressing social media and the demographic most affected by it—our teens.
Today, 95 percent of teens have access to a smartphone. Fifty-six percent of children and teens have their own social media accounts. And 45 percent of teens say they are online almost constantly.
With the rise of social media among teens, we have seen a deterioration in teens’ mental health.
A recent report in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology says that over the past decade there has been a 52 percent increase in depression among teens, with girls suffering more than boys. One out of every five teenage girls said they experienced a major depressive episode in the last year. From 2008 to 2017, death from suicide increased 56 percent among teens age 18 to 19.
The psychologists behind this research say that they can almost definitively connect the rise of social media among teens with the rise of anxiety and depression. No doubt, this is an epidemic among our teens today.
As adults, we can self-monitor our social media use. We know when enough is enough and when to put the phone down and do something else even though we might not do it every time. We are aware of when we’ve spent a little too much time on our screens. Our children, on the other hand, are not.