As a parent, I am daily exposed to the addictive nature of social media and screens.
My kids howl when I remove their computers. They will go to any length to access my phone. At dawn, I occasionally wake up to my son crawling commando style across my bedroom floor hunting for my phone.
I recently hosted a panel with my colleague, NDP MPP for Waterloo Catherine Fife, to discuss the harmful impacts of social media on our children.
We had Dr. Alison Yeung share her expertise as a family doctor with a special interest in screen time and youth mental health. Her perspective was alarming.
According to Dr. Yeung, children now spend about four to six hours a day on social media. Instead of doing beneficial child development activities like sport, homework, sleeping, playing with friends, interacting with siblings and parents, our children are online.
While online, children are exposed to bullying, harassment, unrealistic portrayals of life that can damage self-esteem, and sexual predators who patrol social media and chat rooms.
Boys can be immersed in a toxic soup of misogynist content, like pornography that is violent or degrading to women.
According to Dr. Yeung, it can take just 20 minutes for an algorithm to start showing violent and harmful social media content to a child.
If a child, say, likes a video about someone having a bad day, a platform’s algorithm could show them content about depression, and then can move to content on self-harm and suicide.
Or let’s say a child is feeling self-conscious about their appearance and looks up dieting tips. It doesn’t take long for the platform to show content about eating disorders and extreme weight loss tips.
Vivek Murthy the U.S. Surgeon General has repeatedly warned that widespread social media use among kids and teens poses a significant mental health risk.
No one is calling for a return to a pre-Internet era. I have yet to meet a parent who frets about their children looking up math quizzes, Harvard lectures, cooking recipes or cute cat videos.
The pressing issue is what we should do to limit the harmful impact of social media on our kids.
Dr. Yeung has sensible recommendations for parents to help them assess whether their kid is ready to have the internet in their pocket. Do they respect your existing rules? Do they do their homework? Are they aware of the risks of the internet, such as predators, and can they communicate with you about these risks? Do they have a good sense of who they already are, so they can handle being inundated with content telling them who to be, act, or look?
At a minimum, Dr Yeung recommends some tech free time during the day and keeping screens out of the bedroom. If safety is a concern, she recommends parents get their child a watch or phone programmed for only calls and texts.
School boards, states, provinces, and countries are experimenting with policies to counter the harmful effects of our brave online world.
Utah has passed a strict law requiring parental consent for a child to open a social media account until they’re 18, and gives parents the right to sue social media companies if they feel their child has been harmed by these platforms.
Utah has also called for the disabling of addictive features that keep children online, such as infinite content (with the next video starting automatically), and unpredictable rewards, like likes, follows and comments, which hook the brain into craving the reward, similar to gambling.
Utah’s law is being challenged in the courts on the grounds that it violates free speech, among other things, and it is currently not in force.
In 2024, Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from creating accounts on major social media platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Platforms that violate the rules face up to a $50M fine. The law is set to come into force in December 2025.
In 2024, the former Liberal federal government introduced but did not pass Bill 63, which aimed to hold social media platforms accountable for addressing harmful material, particularly content that sexually victimizes children, promotes self-harm, incites violence, or foments hate.
Ontario brought in a cell phone ban in schools in 2024, however, implementation varies class by class. The official policy sounds strict: phones must be on silent or powered off, unless told otherwise by the teacher. When I have visited high schools, however, kids tell me they have just got more sneaky about how they use them in the classroom.
Ontario needs to show more leadership. That’s why MPP Catherine Fife is calling for all political parties to hold hearings, listen to the experts, assess what other states and provinces are doing, all with the goal of quickly developing effective laws that will protect our kids from the dark side of the web.
Jessica Bell, MPP for University-Rosedale