Teens & Social Media

September 12, 2024

With the back to school season in full swing we felt it was a great time to talk about teens and social media. Running a media agency and also being a mom, the topic of social media and teens is near and dear to my heart.

I am a big believer that social media provides positives as well as negatives to our lives and we just need to be aware of the risks so we can help teens control social media versus letting it control them. Teens have a greater desire for social conformity; this makes the addictiveness and influence of social media platforms a larger risk that parents should be involved with and monitor.

Here is my perspective regarding the typical topics that come up:

What age is appropriate for social media use?

Most of the platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat) stipulate age 13+, which coincides with when teens get the pressure from their peers. I was resistant at first, but I have grown to accept this. This is of course at the parent’s discretion. I have seen some let their kids as young as age 8 have access to platforms like TikTok, which I personally would avoid but perhaps with the right parental controls it won’t have a negative impact on their life. Some platforms like YouTube and Meta have kid versions that have great controls for parents.

Parents that don’t let their teens use Social Media – Be aware!

By the time teens are in Grade 9 they are pretty digitally savvy. Like anything else, if we take an extreme stance on that topic as parents, the risk is your teen will desire it more and possibly engage without your knowing. When it comes to cell phones and social media this is a tough battle knowing 90%+ of their peers are on it. It is like being an adult without a cell phone (texting) or email account. Imagine how you would work or connect with your friends.

When parents deny access to social media platforms, I have seen first hand how teens will access their social media accounts through other means like a friend’s phone or on their phone when they are not home and remove the app when they get home. Kids have lots of ways around this, especially if the parents are not knowledgeable about social media and/or don’t have accounts themselves.

My advice is rather than fight it, accept it but put some parameters around it and be there for your teen with an interest to learn about it and talk about it! The best way to do that is create an account for yourself. Many parents are on Snapchat now and it tends to be the main channel their teens use to communicate with them.

Things to consider if you don’t allow social media use:

Snapchat – the majority of their peer group is here and they use this app to communicate about everything. By not allowing your teen to participate they miss out on the following:
- Communication with friends – kids will text with friends that don’t have Snapchat, but typically prefer Snapchat as the messages disappear within 24 hours. So most of the communication is happening there that your teen will likely be excluded from.
- Friends – for teens this is how they build their friend network. They have school friends, extracurricular/sports friends and the extended network of those friends i.e. friends introduce them to other friends. I do speak to the stranger danger factor in the risk section below. However, they do meet “safe” friends this way as well.
- Dating – now this is a benefit for many parents to keep your kids off Snapchat and frankly was part of my reluctance (I caved at Grade 8) but seeing what social norms my teen has learned in how her peers use this app as it relates to flirting and dating surprised me and I now feel were beneficial skills to learn at that age.
For the other social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.: They can provide helpful information around topics of interest. However, they can also cause you to spend too much time with unhealthy content. I think the most important benefit a teen can learn from having access early in life is understanding how much it can influence them and how addictive it is. They can learn helpful information about how they can control the privacy settings as well as the type of content these platforms are serving them. Providing teens more knowledge and control over what they are seeing is key i.e. they need to understand how clicking or pausing on videos is informing the AI that they are interested in that content and how it will serve more of this to them. Sometimes we get shocking content in our feed, which might make us pause but this can lead to being served more shocking content. Some people go to extreme lengths to get attention and that isn’t necessarily content a teen should be spending time on.

My reflection learning from how my teen uses it and knowing what I know now: if I had kept her off it until later years, I feel she would have missed out on a lot of communication (school, sports teams etc.), making new friends, learning how to read dating cues and making good decisions there. I also have seen after two/three years of having access, the time spent on the platforms and importance of them has dwindled now that it isn’t a novelty any more. I would rather my teen go through that learning in junior high years versus high school when education pressures become more important.

What are the Risks?

According to a Gallup Study conducted in 2023, teens 13-19 spend a minimum of four hours per day on social media. Males come in closer to 4 hours while females spend an hour more at 5 hours per day. They report almost 2 hours on YouTube, 1.5 hours on TikTok and 1 hour on Instagram. Females spend more on TikTok averaging 2 hours and Males spend more on YouTube.

Keep in mind this is the minimum and I don’t believe it included Snapchat so there are alot of teens spending more time than this.

The risks that concern me the most are addiction, impact on mental health, influence and social conformity pressure, sexual conduct & harassment, and teen predators with intent for abduction and/or extortion.

Addiction

This one is easy to manage as a parent you just put in time limits (see links below) on your teens social platforms. My advice would be to only allow 30 minutes max per day for TikTok, Insta and YouTube each. For snapchat think about testing 1 hour to start, however depending on their age the 4 hour might be needed on days they are very chatty with friends. The advantages of these time limits is your teen needs to ask you for more time so you have daily visibility to how much time they are spending versus giving them unlimited time and looking later to learn they are spending 4+ hours a day on social media which is not healthy. I recommend for all adults to put this in place for themselves as well, as we can be just as easily addicted. It is also good to monitor your own behaviour. If you are on all the time, monkey see monkey do! It is much harder to ask them to ease up if you don’t role model that behaviour.

Mental Health

There are lots of great resources that speak to how social media impacts mental health, again for teens this is even amplified as they are more receptive to the content they see versus the skepticism we develop with age.

First there is the content you see regularly and how it can make you feel depressed and/or dissatisfied with yourself i.e. your looks, being left out of things with friends, etc. Seeing beautiful people all the time showing the best of their lives (celebrities and influencers included) or what they want to portray to the world and then comparing it to your own reality can make an individual feel depressed or dissatisfied with their current life.

Another factor is sleep deprivation. Some individuals spend time on social media before going to bed and there are studies that speak to how it makes it hard to sleep. Teens are even more likely to fall into these habits as they are typically online talking to a friend or significant other. Staring at that screen before bed definitely impacts your brain and can cause sleep issues. So helping your teen not form these habits is key.

Impact on relationships. If an individual is too addicted to their phone to the point they are on it when they are with their family, friends or significant other, those relationships get impacted and this can influence mental health issues down the road and create a feeling of isolation where only the phone and social media is the way to connect.
Even governments are starting to prohibit use during class time due to the impacts on mental health, engagement and learning they have seen in years past.

Influence & Social Conformity Pressure

This one sneaks up on parents as we are ready for peer pressure at school but don’t think about how social media can present the same type of conformity pressure. This pressure can come from peers, strangers, advertising, influencers etc.

With peers it is all about trends, a recent trend that disturbed me is young teen girls posting pictures of themselves being drunk. For the teen that only sees 30 min a day of content this exposure is pretty minimal but if your teen has no time limits and is on tiktok or insta for 2+ hours a day they will get this repetition in their feed thanks to the algorithm because it is their friends or they paused in their scroll. If kids see a large volume of other kids doing this it is no different than everyone doing it at school. The more time they are online the more magnified it will be with the repetition of the content served to them.

With strangers, advertisers and influences … My best analogy is imagine dropping your teen off alone to a more dangerous part of town or even on a lighter note a college campus. Giving your teen unlimited time on social media with no privacy settings and content parameters is doing just that. Instead of their social conformity being you and their peers at school (of the same age group), they are now absorbing whatever content they click on and the platform then just serves them more as its AI is designed to keep us on as long as possible. Some examples – diet, fitness, sexuality, mental health trends and even sexual identity – just to name a few. Getting more and more content that looks the same and if you are spending 4+ hours a day consuming that, how can you not feel a need to conform when in some instances it might have just been the attraction or shock/difference factor that made them pause or look initially but the algorithm thinks that is what they want more of.

As a parent this is an easy fix. Ensure your teen understands how social media works with the algorithm focused on serving them content they click on (are interested in) as it’s desire is to keep them on the platform as long as possible. That sells ad dollars. Also educate them about influencers and how these amazing people that show them those cute outfits or tell them they understand their need to be skinnier, need better skin etc. are being paid to do so. Teens tend to not see that content as ads, but they should. What are they seeing and asking you to buy, probe them on where they saw it. If they desire to change their look/clothing, makeup, hairstyle make them wait at least 3 months to see if they still are asking. The influence and trends are so rapid and constantly changing I personally found that in the 3 month timeframe my teen didn’t care about the trend anymore and moved on to something else.

If you see a drastic shift in your teen i.e. isolation, changing their look, desiring more time on social media, wanting to quit other activities to name a few examples, get involved and start looking at social media with them to see what they are looking at. These cues are a good time to pull them off social media for 3 months to get them to personally assess if these desired changes in their lives are real or being influenced by social media. I went through this with my teen a few years ago and she was shocked how much it influenced her and changed her outlook on the platform thereafter. It is really no different than if they had a negative friend group and they move to a new group of friends. Conformity is crucial at this age, I feel it is the parents role to ensure the content their teen is exposed to is balanced and healthy.

Sexual Conduct & Harassment

This evolves as the teens get older but basically teens have big feelings and when you are trying to attract that other teen, or have started dating that other teen there can be a desire in sending each other pictures and those pictures can escalate in how sexual they get.

This comes down to talking to your teen about this and reinforcing it as they get older and start dating (yes they do forget or just don’t listen to us). Regrettably, there is usually an example of someone at school that made this mistake and the private picture was snapped to most of the school etc. This can happen when someone is being teased or a relationship that ended and the other teen is getting back at them. Sometimes it can be immature teen culture of showing each other who they are “talking” with and counting or rating all the pictures they get. I have heard stories from friends who are educators where guys on sports teams were trading the girl pictures for money like they were trading cards and the police had to get involved.

I encourage you to start having these conversations and discuss these types of examples once they get Snapchat. Not to scare you off but1 month of my teen being on snapchat guys were sending shirtless shots, which is the grade 8 advancements. However, her friend was getting pictures of the full works in Grade 9 with parts scratched out saying they would send the unscratched photo if she sent her body photos. She was shocked and hence talked to me about it, which made it easy to have this conversation. To be more prepared for these discussions, I asked older Gen Z team members at work how common sexual pictures were for them in high school as this clearly didn’t exist in my day. Long story short it is rampant. All we can do is educate our teens of the risks and consequences of their actions if they choose to go there and trust them to make informed decisions.

Predators – Abduction & Extortion

This is the scariest of them all for us parents and the examples we hear in the news are far too frequent unfortunately. This happens across all the social platforms. The best thing you can do as a parent is set up the privacy settings on all the apps.

If you let your kid go onto these platforms and they don’t have privacy settings set up, trust me the predators come knocking and it can be fast. My husband and I had a disconnect regarding TikTok and I could not believe how many people were following my daughter and how many were trying to private chat her on the account. Not to say they were forsure predators but we weren’t going to give it time to find out. Being engaged we figured this out in about 4 weeks and reset her account immediately. But I know so many parents that are not engaged and they have no clue of who their teens are talking to online.

Make sure you show interest (play dumb) and ask your teen about TikTok private messages and have them show you theirs. Same with snapchat and seeing their list. That is where you might ask: How do you know that person? All to learn, it’s a “social media friend” and they don’t really know them. This is how those “friendships” happen. They can talk for months to build that trust with your teen and eventually get the teen to meet with them or send them sexual pictures that they use for extortion. When you think about how we teach kids & teens regarding stranger danger it is more the old fashioned young child getting approached at a park by someone that might misrepresent who they are or the parent sent them to pick them up. Not the person who has talked to them online for 3 months sending daily images and telling background stories with a profile that matches those stores. I really feel for kids these days on all the knowledge they need to have on what to look out for.

Suggestions to Leave You With

Step 1: Have an open conversation about these risks.

Kids are smart, ask them what they feel is appropriate and inappropriate conduct and what they need to “never do” or “watch out for” is a great start to the discussion and then you can fill in the blanks prior to downloading the apps

Step 2: Help them set up the accounts and privacy settings.

This ensures you have control over their accounts (know username and passwords) as well as you manage the privacy settings for those accounts. I think this is crucial for Grade 9 and younger. Here are instructions on how to set up privacy controls

Step 3: Set up the time limits on your (parent) phone

Step 4: Occasional Check-In’s

Set the expectation with your teen that you will do occasional check-ins and that it is a part of the privilege to have the phone and platform. Easy to do when they are younger hence age 13 wasn’t too bad to set this expectation. I appreciate high school that would get more pushback, but you would hope they have learned great habits at that point and know what to be weary of.

Step 5: It’s time for a Break

If your teen behaviour is changing too much or in a negative way, take control of the account and ensure they get a social media “time out” for 3 months for them to do their discovery offline. Same for any addiction, sleep or mental health issues. At that point they need to reconnect to physical life versus the virtual one.

For parents, we can all agree It is hard to know what the best approach is and it will vary based on the teen. Teens will need to learn how to control social media versus letting it control them as it will be a part of their lives eventually. I have personally seen the benefits of letting teens learn in a safe place with parents there for support. However, if you do let your teen have access to this at a young age, I strongly recommend the importance of parental controls, content/message check ins and chats with your teen about how they use these platforms, to help protect them from the risks noted above as well as develop healthy versus unhealthy social media habits.

Susan Murphy