Parents: There’s good news and bad news about those hours your kids spend online.
A new study suggests the time teens invest on their phones does not necessarily have an adverse affect on their mental health.
“It may be time for adults to stop arguing over whether smartphones and social media are good or bad for teens’ mental health and start figuring out ways to best support them in both their offline and online lives,” co-author Candice Odgers, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and Duke University, said in a statement.
Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 adolescents, then tracked a subsample of nearly 400 North Carolina public school students aged 10 to 15.
For two weeks, the team collected reports of mental health symptoms three times a day, as well as a daily log of technology use.
They analyzed whether participants who engaged more with digital technologies were more likely to experience later mental health symptoms, and whether days that adolescents spent more time using digital technology for a range of purposes were also days when mental health problems were more common.
The answer in both cases was no.
There is no denying the detrimental effects of social media on people—young and old.
As a 30-something, I’ve had to cull my Instagram feed (on more than one occasion) to remove accounts that make me feel anything but good about myself and my life.
And I know that scrolling through my feeds before bed can disturb my sleep, leave me feeling groggy in the morning, and make me anxious the next day.
But, as a whole, teenagers seem to be coping quite well with technology. After all, they’ve had smartphones for about as long as they could talk.
In fact, when associations between tech and mental health were observed, they were “small and in the opposite direction that would be expected,” according to a UC Irvine news release.
“For instance, teens who reported sending more text messages over the study period actually reported feeling better (less depressed) than teens who were less frequent texters,” it said.
That’s probably because social interactions—even digital ones—can make us feel part of something, rather than separate and alone.
Watch a video walk-through of the study above.
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