Children’s mental health and social media: It’s complicated – Alexandria Echo Press

ALEXANDRIA

— Social media engagement increased by nearly 17% during the pandemic, and those numbers have not dropped.

For primary school-aged children, this means approximately 5.5 hours per day.

For high school students, this number is 8.5 hours.

These statistics were shared as part of an event hosted by the Douglas County Children’s Mental Health Collaborative on Oct. 28.

The event took place at the Broadway Ballroom and the featured speaker was Erin Walsh, co-founder of The Guardian.

Spark & ​​Stitch Institute

. Walsh is a parent, speaker and author.

“That (8.5 hours) is more time than most kids spend asleep,” Walsh said. “It’s more than just the time they spend in school with coaches, mentors, teachers or guides. …

“It takes up an extraordinary amount of our waking hours, and increasingly some of our sleeping hours, and is arguably the biggest lifestyle change in the last generation,” he said.

“This development has both good and bad points,” he said.

On the bright side, social media helps kids make friends and encourages self-expression, Walsh said.

The downside is that boredom disappears, the difference between wanting something and getting it almost disappears, he said.

Other problems include isolation, negative social comparison, and increased anxiety and depression.

“We see little consistent correlation between these two lines across large collections of research, whereas news headlines often make it sound much more like ‘case closed’ than it is,” said Walsh. “It’s really hard to study this because we don’t have a ton of good hard data. But what we see is a relationship between these two lines, a small average; the more time we spend in these areas, the worse our lives become.” become results.

“I say ‘small’ and I say ‘average’ on purpose because as parents we have to pay attention to broad trend lines because they lead us to pay attention to the things that are important in our society, in our schools,” she said.

Data on screen time and mental health outcomes are “very complex” when it comes to individual children, and are actually quite complex, Walsh said.

He said both the content children access and the interactions they have are important.

“What they do matters,” he said. “We can have a great time in front of a screen, but if it’s disrupting sleep we’re likely to see poor or worse mental health.”

On average, children receive 237 notifications per day, with 5 to 10 percent of those occurring overnight, Walsh said.

“Depending on where their phone is and whether their notifications are on, it may be disrupting sleep,” he said. “Sleep is one of the primary ways to reactivate the emotional regulation center of the brain.”

Additionally, Walsh said the content children access is determined in part by an algorithm that is not central to their mental health and well-being.

Solution? “Talk to your kids about it,” she said.

“We can ask some questions, observe them, and then use monitoring as long as we use it with developmental tasks in mind,” he said.

Walsh also suggested starting with agreements before parents monitor their children’s social media use.

He said it to make it clear that monitoring does not mean parents will spy on their children; This was just to make sure the children were safe and that they were adhering to the agreements made.

It’s also important to empathize with children’s experiences, Walsh said.

“The number one reason kids don’t tell us when bad things happen online is because they’re afraid we’ll overreact and take their phone,” she said. “We get a pushback and we reserve the right to take their phone calls, but if that’s the only tool they’re less likely to come to us when something disturbing happens.”

First of all, “It’s more complicated than just ‘on’ or ‘off,'” Walsh said.

For more tips on parental controls and social media, Walsh suggested using:

Common Sense Media

for guidance.

For more information about the Spark & ​​Stitch Institute, visit:

sparkandstitchinstitute.com

.

Travis Gulbrandson covers several beats, including the Osakis School Board and Osakis City Council, as well as the Brandon-Evansville School Board. It will also focus on crime and court news.