A new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open tracked 14,000 students in Australia aged 11 to 14 from the year 2019 to 2022. It found that the students underwent a drastic shift in how they spent their time.
Over the period, the percentage who used social media daily increased from 26 percent to 85 percent. All that time has to come from somewhere, though, and the answer is awful.
The percentage of children who never participated in artistic activities increased from 26 percent to 70 percent.
The percentage who never read for fun increased from 11 percent to 53 percent.
The percentage who never joined extracurricular music increased from 70 percent to 85 percent.
The percentage who never used social media declined from 31 percent to just three percent.
When you give a child a phone, you must know that we’re forcing a time shift on your child:
Time spent using their phone will be taken from time spent elsewhere.
Time cannot be created to accommodate phone use, although it’s highly distorted when using a phone. Science tells us that when a person engages with social media, their sense of time changes dramatically, much the same way time warps around a black hole.
An hour on social media feels like 27 minutes to the average person, meaning not only are you forcing your child to change the way they spend time, but you are also altering their perception of how they spend time.
They think they spent 15 minutes scrolling through TikTok. It was actually 34 minutes.
That loss of time adds up quickly.
I don’t think children should have phones before the age of 13. I think the longer you can wait, the better,
But when you give your child a phone, as Elysha and I did when our kids were 13 and 16, the one stipulation that we made and maintain was things:
No social media of any kind. No Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or anything else.
Both kids have adhered to this restriction. Their phones are communication devices that can access information via the internet, stream videos on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix, capture photos and videos of the world around them, and use apps such as Duolingo to improve themselves.
Both phones are also monitored by a service called Bark, which uses AI to scan their phone use and alert us when something undesirable takes place.
So far, the only warning we have received was from Charlie, who clicked on a video entitled, “Huge horn show.”
It was a video of a train.
Parents tell me it’s impossible to keep kids off social media, but it’s not.
You can be kind to your child today by allowing them to do whatever they want or whatever their friends are doing, or you can be kind to the future version of your child — the one who needs as many academic and social tools as possible to succeed in the future — by holding firm and allowing them to have a social media-free adolescence where they are not forced to shift their time to meaningless, oftentimes determinental online pursuits.
When you give your child social media, please remember:
They will trade time on their phone for something else. They will engage in time-wasting and time-warping activities that often harm children’s self-esteem and expose them to things that are less-than-positive to their mental health
What will your child leave behind so they can scroll through social media instead?
