The title of this blog post is determinedly incendiary, implying that we parents, teachers, and citizens might not have the power to do something elemental:  protect our children.  Do we have the power?  Do we collectively and individually assert the power to change what is happening with our girls?

I ask because people come up to me at conferences or write in emails some version of:  “I want to curtail her social media use, but I don’t know if I can—she’s already so invested in it.  I do realize her constant social media use is unhealthy for her brain development, and I see her suffering anxiety, depression, loneliness, but I don’t want her to feel left out—that’s her big fear, too–so I give in.  Who needs the battle?  I just hope she’ll be okay.”

As a parent of two daughters, I understand the battle.  Girls operate from an intimacy imperative:  they measure their own self-development in large part by their relationships, and social media is all about relationships.  But still, the American Pediatric Association, the American Medical Association, and many of us in our own research and service organizations argue, “It’s time to take back our power on this important child development issue.”

 

Good and Bad News

 

In most ways today we could say our girls are doing better than ever.  The World Health Organization acknowledged this worldwide in 2015, noting that health and longevity outcomes for females have now surpassed males (even with negative sexual assault and sex trafficking numbers factored in).   There’s a lot of good news, but the bad is bad.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 36% of girls report being extremely anxious every day.  This is a significant increase in baseline numbers in just a few years.  Our children’s brains are growing, evolving; if as the brain grows,  it locks in anxiety responses, it gradually alters its activity toward that anxiety response.

What happens is this: the activity and connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, ventral striatum, caudate nucleus, and other parts of the brain get “rewired,” in part, by heightened cortisol (“stress response”) chemistry.  The rewiring goes “towards” anxiety rather than away from it.  It is as if the brain, knowing it doesn’t want to be anxious, meanwhile increases the ways it can be anxious.  This accommodates elemental feelings of fear the brain is experiencing in a vicious cycle as it grows.

There are various reasons for increased female anxiety—social pressures, school pressures, family pressures—but the one that is nearly universal now is the one about which parents have given up their power.

The Pew Research Center reported in 2018 that 95% of teen girls have access to a smartphone.  The think tank Common Sense Media found in that same year that teens spend 6 – 9 hours per day online.  Most of these teens sense they are being conformed toward social media “addiction.”

Using the word does not necessarily mean the child fits a Diagnostic Manual “addiction” diagnosis but since, according to Pew, 72% of teens feel manipulated by tech companies into being constantly connected, they often do become connected in ways that disallow other occupations and successes developmentally.

To call this an “addiction” may be inaccurate for many of these girls, but to call it an “unhealthy dependency” is quite accurate.  The brain gets rewired during the gradual execution of the dependency on its neural development.

 

Unhealthy Dependency is Bad Enough

 

For this reason, we must reframe our parental ideas about protecting kids.  Something does not have to be an addiction to be “bad enough.”  As a parent and professional, I think it’s time to allow “unhealthy dependency” to rule the conversation.

 

How Do You Know If You Need to Assert Your Power?

 

One way of gauging your daughter’s dependency on devices and social media is to answer this question:  While doing homework or other similar important tasks, is my daughter also multi-tasking between texting, online stimulus, You Tube videos, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.?  If so, your daughter may fit the 6 – 9 hours per day online ratio—your daughter is likely dependent on social media in a potentially dangerous way.

But not all girls (and boys) who spend their time on social media suffer anxiety.  That is true.  If one of your daughters is becoming anxious (especially in the tweens and teens), she likely has genetic markers for anxiety.  Her DNA may be set up for her adolescent hormonology to trigger potential for depression or anxiety, and/or for external factors to push the trigger.

For any child, excessive use of social media can be brain-dangerous, but if her DNA is already set up for early, middle, or late adolescent onset of anxiety, depression, or other similar conditions, social media is even more dangerous.  It acts on dopamine and paralimbic systems in ways that can affect mental health.

 

Going Deeper

 

Brain effects are not just direct ones as the child uses social media, but character and life-style conforming ones, as well.  Each of these affect social-emotional development and can affect mental health.

Since smartphones entered our children’s lives system in 2007, University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project researchers have found that girls have “dramatically decreased” time spent at malls, with friends, at movies with friend, getting exercise, and out in nature.  Each of these decreases in physical, cognitive, and relational activity affects the brain.  A 2018 Cigna study showed higher levels of loneliness in today’s girls than ever before in history—and most of the girls studied were busy on social media.

Anxious girls often come to emphasize solitary activities like movies in their bedrooms while texting with another girl; more time online and on You Tube than out with friends; more time surfing social media than doing each other’s hair, trying on each other’s clothes, playing soccer with friends.

Our girls’ new kind of loneliness can deceive parents:  we think our girls are not lonely because they are “connecting” via their phones or devices—but their “connections,” while seemingly stimulating to brain development, are weak in most ways.

And the cycle continues as social media exacerbates the anxiety of “not being liked,” which feeds anxiety genes—triggering those genes in some cases that would not have been triggered otherwise.  If you have younger girls and someone in your family has struggled with depression or anxiety before, you can protect your daughter, potentially, from triggering the genetics by vigilance regarding social media.

Whether your daughter becomes an anxious teen or not, it’s crucial to remember that lowered levels of human contact (false or weak relational attachment through social media) can decrease resilience and self-esteem.  Connected but disconnected, dependent on a kind of relationship that is incomplete (yet visually and constantly overstimulated by that very kind of relationship), our girls are not building boundaries, problem solving, building resilience, building a self, controlling instant-gratification and relational impulsiveness, and generally maturing.

All of which builds more anxiety.   The American College Health Association in 2011 found that 31% of college women had an overwhelming panic/anxiety attack in their freshman year but by 2016, the number was 62%.  The only thing that consistently shifted in female development in that span of years was social media/digital use.

The brain can get dangerously re-wired between pre-puberty and late adolescence.

Is this what we want for our girls?

 

Taking Back Our Parental Power

 

The first step in taking back our power is to really listen to the science.  The American Association of Pediatrics does not just throw out warnings.  They study, they meta-study, and they deliver warnings based on extensive evidence.

They warn us that too much social media leads to:

*increase in depression;

*increase in anxiety;

*decrease in physical health;

*increase in obesity;

*early sexualization and hyper sexualization;

*negative affect on social maturation (the process of growing up on time).

*negative affect on healthy sleep cycles, especially because girls sleep with phones near them and so they react to notifications, which interrupts sleep cycles.

*and much more.

You can access the AAP and other organizations’ studies online easily.  In The Minds of Girls, you will see the science laid out in depth, in a very readable way.

Show this science to your girls, engage them in conversations about family genetics, anxiety, depression, dependency, brain development.

When they say, “But my friend has……………..,” tell them what every parent must say at some point in a good child’s life:  “Our family is not that family.”  If they want more explanation, give them the family project of studying all the science and bringing it to the family dinner table for debate.  But whatever you do, don’t lose this debate!

The second step in taking back our power is believing in ourselves as parents—believe in our goals, our power to protect, our power to limit.  Every device in the home is ours, not our child’s.  We own the home, we worked to buy or rent the home, we sacrifice to make the home safe, we are charged with our children’s development.  As the authority in our home, a parent has power that our children will not have until they have homes of their own.

Parental Confidence is the bedrock of your power.  If you don’t feel confident on this social media issue, get support from friends, families, and professionals who agree with your take on the science.  Don’t fight your battle alone.  Battles are never won alone.  Look in the mirror and remind yourself that we live in a society that empowers us to help our girls with nearly everything, but somehow, we have trouble being empowered where technology is concerned.  In that mirror, convince yourself to be counter-cultural.

But our daughters need us to help them set limits, especially to emotional expression and feeling-life; this parental action of limit-setting will lead girls to better boundaries-development, resilience-development, problem-solving, authentic relationship, and most of all, more healthy maturation. But we worry that curtailing a girl’s emotional life will lead to “lack of voice,” as if helping a girl to curtail her emotional roller coaster might do her harm.  On social media, she feels emotion after emotion, feeling after feeling, constantly.

A third step in taking back our power is to help our daughter limit her emotions.  Talk about counter-cultural!  We live in a society that teaches us the importance of feeling every emotion not just privately but relationally and publicly, and that is simply not a healthy thing.  It increases narcissism, implodes impulse-control development, destroys relationships, and affects no net gain in personal self-confidence.

While “speaking my truth” and “having a voice” are crucial values, so is stoicism, doing no harm to others with my excessive emotional judgments, avoiding venues for gossip and ostracism, and learning to build emotional intelligence without constant emotive rumination.  The brains of girls who are dependent on social media are spending too much time feeling every possible emotion—sometimes ecstatic but more often laden with judgment, false self-image, and other negative content.  Some feeling and some expression of feeling is good, of course, but too much leads to more anxiety and depression.

A way to study where your daughter fits with all of this is to see how invested she is in selfies.  A 2015 poll showed that the average mid- to late-teen girl spends more than five hours a week taking selfies.  This time does not include the use of software for filtering, slimming, changing bone structure, erasing pimples; and all this does not include the time spent before the shoot, on lighting and make up.

Selfies are not themselves dangerous, of course, just like social media, in moderation, can be useful.  But Alexandra Hamlet, PsyD, a psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, notes the danger of girls becoming more anxious, not less, from all of the narcissism:  “With makeup, with retouch, with filters, with multiple, multiple attempts, it’s almost like you’re never going to stack up,” says Dr. Hamlet, “And that is where I think it gets dangerous.”

A fourth step in taking back our power is examining ourselves.  Keep a journal for a week to study how often and for how long you use social media.  Note along the way what your own emotional responses are to what is tweeted, to a selfie you take, to someone’s Facebook or Instagram post, to Snapchat, to whatever “connection” you make via social media, even to political discourse that angers you.

Feel what your kids feel and record it.  Show it to your kids as you study yourself to see if you yourself need to put more limits on your own triggers, your own issues, and your own projections via social media.  Whatever you feel, remember that your children are more vulnerable than you, feeling what you feel in triplicate.

If after your discernment process you see that you are using social media moderately and well, share this moderation with your kids so you model it.  If you realize that you are engaging in some self-destruction—and an increase in anxiety perhaps—from the somewhat false relationality of social media, share that with your kids, too, and work as a family to all reach more moderation.  The battle usually gets easier when your kids see how invested you are in not only their health, but your own.  Now they can’t say, “But you do _________, why can’t I?”

And a fifth step in taking back your power is to set rules and stick with them, including providing alternatives to social media dependency.  Some of these rules and alternatives are:

*Don’t give your kids smartphones until they are thirteen or fourteen.  Use “Here is your Smartphone” as a rite of passage and a privilege your kids need to earn.

*No smartphones, computers, etc. for an hour before bed.  If you begin using this rule early in a child’s life, by the time she is relatively autonomous, she’ll likely see the wisdom of the rule and enforce it herself.  If she doesn’t, you are the safety patrol and can enforce the rule.

*Work with schools to make sure kids do not have access to social media during the day, even if they do need the internet for research.

*On weeknights/school nights, remove social media apps from kids’ phones.

*Have family meals at least four times a week—and at the dinner table, at least some of the time, debate the science not just of social media, but of all technology, AI, cloning, etc.  This science can lead to endless family time together.

*Make sure to have family outings out in nature over the weekends, and other times when possible.  For instance, try to spend some time every day or every other day walking outside with your child to discuss important things or just to be together, and encourage your daughter to do the same with others—nature is a great brain developer.

*For as long as your daughter will do them, help her to enjoy martial arts, sports, athletics, and similar forms of exercise.  If she is getting too little athletics time, let her know that one to two hours a day of physical activity is healthy, so she does need to organize for that before she uses screens and social media.

*Teach your daughter mindfulness, meditation, and if you are a religious family, the art of prayer.   Help her to engage in this kind of activity at least once a day.

*When she enters adolescence, give her important work to do, require her to volunteer somewhere (animal shelter, friend who is veterinarian, mom’s or dad’s workplace, assisted living facility, preschool classroom).  Babysitting can fit this bill, but some unpaid volunteering is also a good rule.

*Teach her that when babysitting, she should only pay attention to the children, not social media (caregiving is sacred time, not to be distracted from).

*Overall, help her focus on Leadership not Likes.

Taking back your power is not about being an authoritarian parenting but an authentic one.  We parents need to protect our daughters not just by providing food, shelter, and clothing, but by protecting them from harm.  Our job has not changed in the technological era, nor have girls changed.  They still need us to be a wall for them against excessive anxiety and depression.  They still need us to give them self-development through healthy maturation.  They still need us to prepare them with readiness to take on the world independently.

Most of all, they still need us to do our sacred job:  giving them natural child-growth that is healthiest for their cells, body, and brains.

 

References

 

Most of what is written here is detailed in The Minds of Girls, by Michael Gurian, 2018.

Other recent, powerful articles, including the 2019 references to the polls in this blog post, are:

Lindsey M. Roberts, “Expert Recommendations for a Child’s First Phone, from Basic to Smart,” The Washington Post, August 24, 2019.

Mary Pipher and Sara Pipher Gilliam, “The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls,” The Wall Street Journal, August 17-18, 2019.

Rachel Ehmke, “What Selfies are Doing to Girls’ Self-Esteem,” The Child Mind Institute, June 25, 2019, online. https://childmind.org/article/what-selfies-are-doing-to-girls-self-esteem/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=READ%20MORE&utm_campaign=Weekly-06-25-19.