A phone-based childhood

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, May 2nd. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

REICHARD: Coming next on The World and Everything in It: social media and GenZ.

A recent Pew Research study found that about 1 in 3 teenagers believe they spend too much time on their smartphones. Mental health advocates say that number is much higher. And we know that a phone-based childhood harms children.

WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has our story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: It’s been three months since Mark Zuckerberg’s memorable appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley grilled the social media founder …

HAWLEY: Let me ask you this. There's families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now? Well, they're here, you're on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product showing the pictures? Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these good people?

Zuckerberg hesitated, but eventually stood, faced the families, and said that no one should have to go through what they’ve gone through, though he stopped short of taking responsibility.

Zuckerberg was before the committee to talk about the steps his company was taking to protect children from sexual exploitation online. He faced a lot of push back. Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us…I know you don't mean it to be so but you have blood on your hands. You have a product…you have a product that's killing people.

About a year earlier, University of Washington sophomore Emma Lembke appeared before that same committee as someone hurt by social media. She told the Senators that she created her first account at age 12.

EMMA LEMBKE: These platforms seemed almost magical. But as I began to spend more time online, I was met with a harsh reality. Social media was not magic. It was an illusion…

As her screen time increased, her mental and physical health suffered.

LEMBKE: My story is not one in isolation. It is a story representative of my generation, Generation Z. As the first digital natives we have the deepest understanding of the harms of social media through our lived experiences.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about the crisis of youth mental health.

The report showed that up to 95 percent of youth use social media … and more than a third say they use social media “almost constantly.”

According to CDC data released this year, more than half of U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad and hopeless in 2021. That statistic represents the highest level reported over the past decade. And it represents some alarming increases in behaviors like attempted suicide.

BURKE: I think that Gen Z students, or at least the students that I'm interacting with, they do see their community as having a lot of anxiety.

Michelle Burke is a writing professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.

BURKE: They do see higher rates of depression, um, and they want to know why, and they want to know, you know, what they can do to improve the mental well-being within their community.

She teaches a required humanities class for all Freshman students with a unit focused on social media.

BURKE: Yeah. So I always ask my students about their upbringing and like when they got their first smartphone, when they first got access to social media, how they feel about the types of decisions that their parents made.

She then asks her students if they were to become parents someday, would they be as strict as their parents were, less strict, or more strict? About half say they would be more strict.

BURKE: And I've never ever had a student say they would be less strict.

Many social-media studies have found that “phone-based childhood” prevents kids from developing normal relationships and contributes to a rise in anxiety. But Professor Burke isn’t waiting for Big Tech to fix the problem. She says it has to start in the home.

BURKE: And so we really need to guide them slowly and mindfully down this path rather than just, you know, handing a device over and then thinking like, okay, great. My, you know, my 6-year-old is occupied with his iPad, so I can go cook dinner now. And sometimes that's necessary, but we want to be careful about the kinds of habits and behaviors that we're establishing early.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

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