What we often get wrong about teens and screen time

Make Me Smart April 16, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. It is Tuesday, the 16th of April. And we’re going to talk smartphones today. Social media and our lives, especially kids and what it may be doing to them in in many, many, many, many aspects of their lives.

Kimberly Adams 

For sure, and you know, in line with that you have states like Florida and Utah, who are trying to implement laws, much to the chagrin of the tech companies that would ban kids from social media apps until they reach a certain age. And there’s a big fight happening over that. But we wanted to know what the science actually says at this point about the consequences of these technologies. So, here to make us smart about this is Mikey Jensen. She’s a professor of clinical psychology and the director of the Interactions and Relationships Lab at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Welcome to the show.

Mikey Jensen 

Hi, thanks for having me.

Kimberly Adams 

So, I want to kind of separate out smartphones and social media and maybe take them one at a time. What have smartphones done to our interactions and relationships?

Mikey Jensen 

I think you’re right to pull them apart because smartphones and social media are not exactly the same thing. We all get into different things via different devices and on different platforms, and I think it does behoove us to think about them separately. Yeah so, if we’re tackling smartphones first, I mean, we’re at a point in kind of historical time where virtually all of us are connected via smartphone, nearly all teenagers who I study, so I study adolescents and young adults. So, 95% of teens have a smartphone. And the vast majority of young adults do too. Even older adults are highly digitally connected. So, like three quarters of 65 plus year olds have smartphones. So, this is an issue that impacts all of us. It’s not just an issue for youth by any means. Yeah, but

Kimberly Adams 

Are you laughing, Kai, because your mom doesn’t have one?

Kai Ryssdal 

My mother, God bless her. She does not listen to this podcast because she can’t figure out podcasts, but she, I mean, not to make it about my mom. But you know, there are people out there who are not connected, and we should remember that as well. Anyway, Professor, please go.

Kimberly Adams

Okay. So, you were saying.

Mikey Jensen 

No, but yeah, you’re absolutely right. Your mom is in the minority, though. And so, I just think it’s worth remembering that this is not just a youth issue. Although there are reasons that it’s talked about more among young people. So, what are smartphones doing? They’re making us in some ways more connected to one another. So, never before in time have, we had at our fingertips the ability to connect with people we care about, you know, at a moment’s notice. Shoot them a text. Hop on FaceTime, even across, you know, really vast differences, time zones. So, that’s a definite shift in the way that we communicate, the frequency and just kind of ubiquity of being able to connect with people who matter to us.

Kai Ryssdal 

Is it generally accepted that for all the positives that smartphones and that kind of connectivity do bring us. Is it generally accepted that there are negatives, and those negatives are more pronounced for teenagers?

Mikey Jensen 

I mean, I think it’s generally accepted that there are some negatives. I don’t know that it’s generally accepted that the negatives outweigh the positives because it’s a complex mix. It’s an indeed, so your question here about is it worse for teens? I think is really important to this dialogue. We talk about this more in the vast majority of studies lately, and the media attention that has been around kind of youth digital media engagement have been focused on young people. And there are reasons that we would be curious about it. And young people are often the most enthusiastic adopters of new technologies. They don’t have the same kind of reticence to try new things as older adults do, which makes sense. And there are also reasons that we would think about kind of the social connection piece of this being particularly relevant for teens, so adolescents, their brains are tuned to their social environments. Evolutionarily, adolescence is a time when the regions of our brain that are really sensitive to things like social feedback, and reinforcement from our peers, building relationships, building romantic relationships, those are all the key tasks of adolescence and emerging adulthood. And so, those are also the things that are really front and center on things like social media and smartphones. They facilitate those types of connections that are especially key in adolescence. Yeah, but to your question, like, is the evidence stronger for adolescents? I don’t know that I would say that. I think it’s mixed for everybody. It’s a mixed bag because it’s a nuanced picture of kind of potential benefits and then also potential risks.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, when I’m thinking about the risks, I’m thinking about, you know, families struggling to sit down together without everybody staring at their phones.

Mikey Jensen 

Yes, you’re absolutely right. And that is one that comes up as one of the potential pitfalls of the ubiquity of smartphones both on the adolescents’ end, but also on the end of their parents. I think this is definitely something that we all anecdotally experience in our own lives when we’re sitting down with our own loved ones. Or I, myself as a clinical psychologist, when I’m working with clients who say, you know, we’re having a hard time connecting, because there’s so many distractions. It certainly comes up in that way.

Kai Ryssdal 

There’s a picture floating around our family thread. My children are, four of my children. I have four children. They are one of a group of 10 cousins. And I have a picture of them at some Christmas a year or two ago. All 10 of them in the living room, sitting together, each and every one of them staring at their phones. It’s the most remarkable thing.

Mikey Jensen 

It’s also funny. It’s funny that that example you gave you said it’s floating around our family thread.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, totally. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Mikey Jensen

So, that highlights bott that the in-person piece might be creating some barriers to connection face to face. But there’s also these ways that you know, when you’re not physically together, it does facilitate connection. So, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say is that it’s actually quite a mixed bag of the push pull of social connection.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, so let’s do a little news you can use here. And I don’t know whether you have children, if you do, how old they are. But were you to be chit chatting with a with a parent of a 12-year-old. What would you be saying about things they should be considering about whether or not to get their kid a phone?

Mikey Jensen 

Yeah, and this is a question I quite often do answer for folks because it comes up a lot. I think parents are motivated to help their kids navigate the digital environment successfully, right? This is another place where parents want to help scaffold their children in a way that works. And one of the main questions is, when do we get a phone? And then the next one is okay, and then what do we do after that? Like, how do we do it in a way that’s working for us? I tend to give the advice to parents of teenagers when they asked me this, and I admittedly, I’m the parent of a toddler. So, this is not yet a question that I have to answer for our family. But I tend to encourage parents of teenagers to think about their kid. And remember that there’s never been thus far in their parenting experience, a one size fits all solution for pretty much anything, that each teen is the individual, and they have unique needs and maturity. And so, I encourage them to kind of do a little self-assessment of their family and their teens readiness for a phone. So, thinking about things like their level of maturity and development, so that’s both their age. So, how old are they? How mature are they? Have they evidenced in the past the ability to, you know, get new privileges and navigate new environments in a way that was responsible? Are they aware of the potential risks for what could happen via a smartphone or on social media? And then the big thing that I often encourage them to do is to have a plan proactively before they get the smartphone in their hands for how it’s going to be managed within the family context. So, will there be rules? Will there be times of day when they are not allowed to have their phones? So, for instance, during mealtime, you know, at certain time at night, will the phone be out of their room for sleeping, which is often something I encourage. And I do think that honestly, putting those systems in place proactively does a whole lot to make the experience go well, and to avoid kind of potential pitfalls and having it cause problems.

Kimberly Adams 

So, I asked at the beginning about smartphones. Switching over specifically to social media. What does the research tell us? I mean, I know it’s a relatively new field of study. But what do we know so far about what social media is doing to sort of our emotional connections, especially when it comes to kids.

Mikey Jensen 

So, you note that this is a newer area of research, which makes sense given that the technologies are new, but it’s actually a very active area of research. It’s something that people have really gotten interested in. And for good reason, there are concerns that it could cause problems. And I will say this is a place where the literature has evolved from the early days where we actually saw quite a bit of evidence of potential risks of online engagement. But that was a unique point in time, right? When there were very few people who were very engaged online, and it was a minority of users. And there might have been potential kind of compounds that drove people online, versus now where social media engagement is quite common. Something like 46% of teens recently in a Pew survey said that they were online almost constantly, and a lot of that time is spent on social media. And, thinking about okay, well, what are the potential impacts of that engagement? I would say in terms of like, what’s the consensus, there is an emerging consensus that we should stop thinking about screen time as a kind of a unitary construct. It’s not the amount of time you’re on there that probably matters, right? It’s what you’re doing.

Kimberly Adams

I didn’t know that.

Mikey Jensen

Well, I mean, I guess consensus is perhaps a strong word. I think we’re seeing a lot more evidence that these umbrella constructs things like self-reported screen time, are less informative than thinking about the qualitative nature of the experiences that young people are having online. So, if you think about two hours as the amount of screen time. If one teen is spending that two hours, you know, scrolling TikTok and watching videos that are making them feel bad about themselves. So, perhaps engaging in social comparison to other people and their bodies, which is one of the areas where we have decently strong evidence that social comparison and body image is detrimental to young people online or offline, versus two hours spent, you know, FaceTiming, with your best friend who moved across the country, and you know, laughing and sharing your successes and showing them, you know, the new art project you just got done at school. Those two hours are so qualitatively different, that those are really apples and oranges. And it behooves us to think about those as qualitatively different online experiences, even though they could both happen on the same platform. Those both could be, you know, via say, Instagram where they’re messaging, but it could be very different.

Kai Ryssdal 

Just picking up on something you mentioned about these being new technologies, right? So, social media is newer than smartphone. Smartphones themselves are still relatively new. Not to make this about my kids, but when my oldest, the parameter for us getting our first couple of kids phones, and back then they were flip phones, was that they were going for them from the elementary school where we knew exactly where they were all the time, to the combined junior, senior, high school campus, and who the hell knows what’s going on when they’re out in the world, right? And we wanted a way to get in touch with them and for them to be able to check in. So, my eldest son gets a flip phone. His youngest sister who’s 10 years younger, bam, out the gate gets an iPhone. Right? And believe me, we’ve thought about that. But my point is, we almost don’t know yet what we don’t know because this is so new. Professor, do you buy that? Or am I full of it?

Mikey Jensen 

No, I do think you’re right, that it’s such a rapidly evolving context, that it’s hard to pin down like the exact questions, right? Because by the time we’ve designed a study to study it, they’ve moved on. There’s a new platform. There’s a new product. It is a very tricky thing to keep a handle on. You’re not wrong in that sense.

Kimberly Adams 

So then, what about these efforts by states like Florida, Utah, and even sort of at the federal level with suggestions to restrict TikTok? What about the idea of laws that would ban or limit kids from social media apps? Is that a good solution?

Mikey Jensen 

I am not against legislating around young people’s social media engagement. I do think that we want to maximize potential benefits and minimize potential risks online. But I do think that any interventions that we put into place, whether that be on the individual level, so things that I as an interventionist or psychologists do, or interventions that policymakers put into place in the forms of legislation, they should be evidence based, and they should be attending to this balance of potential benefits and risks. I do think that some of the proposed legislative changes. So, for instance, you mentioned social media bans, say until a certain age, or banning entire platforms outright. I worry that those are perhaps overly blunt instruments. They take something of a sledgehammer approach. And I do worry that those really widespread, kind of, politics and policies run the risk of throwing out some of the very real benefits of social media with the risks. So, for instance, we know that young people can get social support online and knowledge. And indeed, a lot of those benefits are particularly important for young people who don’t have those types of support in their face-to-face environments. So, there’s a pretty compelling literature on online social support for LGBTQ+ youth, in particular, who maybe in their face-to-face environments don’t have good networks, don’t have good supports, or have been, say, you know, ostracized from their local communities. And I do think that those social media bans would also restrict access to those very important benefits. So, we would need a more a less sledgehammer approach, and maybe a more scalpel one. So, we’re thinking about exercising the pieces of platforms that are not working for young people, which do exist and are things that I think we should legislate around. But we have the tools to be nuanced about it. Legislation doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, you were saying that you support evidence based legislation. But is there enough evidence for lawmakers to really make firm decisions about this at this point?

Mikey Jensen 

That’s a really good question. We do have evidence. It’s not all, you know, it’s not all for sure. I guess is how I would say that there. So, I do think we probably don’t have evidence that taking kids off of social media entirely until after they’re, say 16, is going to help more than it hurts. I don’t think we have evidence for that. But we could put into place more nuanced restrictions that we do not suspect would have widespread harm. And that that could then be something that we see if it works, and is it helping? I think it’s just very hard to make those kinds of calls if you ban everyone. I also worry that those really widespread things like bans, they’re probably pretty hard to enact and enforce. And those limit their effectiveness anyway. And so, then it might just feel like we’re doing something without actually doing something that’s effective.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, we’ll leave it there for now. Mikey Jensen, professor of Clinical Psychology and director of the Interaction and Relationships Lab at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Thank you very much for making us smart.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thanks for your time, professor.

Mikey Jensen 

Thanks so much.

Kimberly Adams 

This reminds me of a conversation I will bring up at every opportunity that I had with LeVar Burton, because it was LeVar Burton. But I was talking to him for an interview about, you know, using technology to teach kids to read. And I was saying how I struggled to get my niece to read physical books, like I would buy her physical books and try to get her to read them. And what did he suggest I do to encourage her to fall in love with books the way that I did? And he said, well, parents asked me this all the time. And what I always say to them, and I loved how he tried to shift it to not be judgmental on me. But anyway, he said, what I tell them all the time is, do they ever see you reading a book? And, if they don’t see you reading a physical book, they’re not going to feel the need to read a physical book. And it’s going to look hypocritical when you tell them that they need to, and it’s sort of the same thing. I think with smartphones and social media. It must be so hard to kind of try to put restrictions on kids and manage their time when the rest of us are on our phones all the time.

Kai Ryssdal 

Here’s the twist on that. My wife is a voracious reader on her iPad and on her phone. Literally books, right? I mean, she reads books and novels. It’d make me crazy doing it on my phone. iPad, I get. But she spends a lot of time sitting on the couch on a Saturday afternoon curled up, but with her phone in her reading, you know, whatever the next great American novel is and so it’s a little bit tricky, right? It’s a little bit tricky. Yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. Okay, well, we’d love to hear what you all think about smartphones and social media and how they’ve impacted your life. Those who are old enough to remember a time before smartphones. If you’re a parent of a kid or a teenager right now, how are you navigating parenting around screen time? Although I guess that’s not the measure anymore, that was new info, and social media access. You can tell us about it. 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART. We will be right back.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, time for some news. Kimberly Adams, you get to go.

Kimberly Adams 

Quick update on that Change Healthcare story that we’ve discussed on the show before. It was a huge hack. It really delayed a lot of pharmacy benefit processing, and it was a major deal. It was a hack. And who knows whether or not United actually paid the ransom. They haven’t been super forthcoming about it, as big corporations usually are not when there’s a ransomware attack. Any who, they reported their quarterly earnings yesterday. And everybody was watching or everybody who watches this kind of stuff was watching to see how much this Change hack and the financial hit to it was going to show up. $1.6 billion seems to be the total cost of what this hack is going to mean for UnitedHealth Group. But the company still maintained its earnings forecast and still, you know, did all right. And the markets were very happy about that. It’s wild to me that you can have a disruption that severe, and yet the conglomerate kind of like beats expectations for earnings, which tells you about the wild level of profits in that industry. But because I was looking at that, you know. And just as a reminder, and I’m looking at Reuters here that the Change healthcare, which provides billing and data systems serves more than 30 million, you know, people. So, in particular. I’m just going to read here. “The hack at Change, a provider of healthcare billing and data systems and a key node in the US healthcare system, disrupted payments to doctors and healthcare facilities nationwide for a month while taking a harsh toll on community health centers that serve more than 30 million poor and uninsured patients.” And I think when we were talking about it was something like two thirds of like, the medical processing in the country was like running through this thing. It was such a huge deal. And at the time, because some of the folks I was talking to were saying, you know, it’s bad in terms of its impact on the processing and people being delayed getting their prescriptions and, you know, these community health centers not being able to make payroll, but also let’s not forget that this patient data is now at risk. And so, I saw this story in TechCrunch today. It says and I’m going to read here. “An extortion group has published a portion of what it says are the private and sensitive patient records on millions of Americans stolen during the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare in February. On Monday, a new ransomware and extortion game that calls itself RansomHub published several files on its dark web leak site containing personal information about patients across different documents, including billing files, insurance records, and medical information.” And that is really bad to have that many people like yeah, our finances are already shot, you know, that’s been sold a million times over on the dark web. But now our health information too. It just sucks, man.

Kai Ryssdal 

I have nothing to add. It definitely sucks.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, what’s your news?

Kai Ryssdal 

So, continuing with the theme of that. The International Monetary Fund was out with its global growth forecasts this morning. The United States is, to nobody’s surprise if you’ve been paying attention, doing better than every other developed economy on the planet, but says the International Monetary Fund, it is coming at a cost. And that cost is fiscal unsustainability. Washington’s overspending the reports that I’m reading Bloomberg here, “risks reigniting inflation and undermining long-term fiscal and financial stability around the world by ratcheting up global funding costs.” So, here’s the deal. We have said for a very long time in this country policymakers have they have said, listen debts not that big a deal, because money is fundamentally cheap. And that’s been the way it’s been for 15-ish years. Now, however, money is not cheap anymore. The United States when it wants to borrow has to pay four and a half percent interest over 10 years on a 10-year treasury. That is four and a half percent more percentage points more than it cost like three years ago. So, not only are we all paying more for mortgages and car loans, the government is paying more to borrow money. And as the International Monetary Fund points out today, in a somewhat unusual poke in the eye for the United States, elevated interest rates are making our unsustainable fiscal path even more unsustainable. And I’m going to leave it there because it’s a whole conversation actually to be had about fiscal sustainability and what we should do and you can’t cut your way to stability, there has to be something on the revenue side, which I think I’ve said before on this podcast. We don’t talk about it in this country.

Kimberly Adams

Except for we do, though.

Kai Ryssdal

Well, you and I talked about it. When was the last time we had a serious conversation about raising taxes?

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, about raising taxes, no. I do think though, it’s increasing in its discussion. I’m hearing more of it than I used to, but maybe that’s just because I’m attuned to it. And, it’s sort of what do they call that? Selection bias.

Kai Ryssdal 

Selection bias. Well, look, there’s a conversation to be had about the tax structure in this economy. Because look, if Donald Trump wins again, more tax cuts will be on the table. And in point of fact, even if he doesn’t win, the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts are coming up at the end of 2025. So, you know, anyway.

Kimberly Adams 

No, the end of 2024, beginning of 2025. Yeah, they expire in 2024. No, Nancy Marshall-Genzer, who’s our other Washington correspondent, and I were talking about this the other day. And I can tell you from sort of private conversations I’ve been having with folks around Washington in positions that would know, people are working on this now. This is going to be a huge issue. The expiration of those 2017 tax cuts because it has a potential to have a major impact on individual finances, corporate finances for sure. And the deficit and the debt and I mean, we were talking about this yesterday with like 401(k)s and mortgage interest finance, the tax code, and how we generate revenues in this country is the part that is one of the one of the several things that nobody wants to mess with. But yeah, all right. Cool. We should go on with the show. We’ll done news. Let’s do the mailbag.

Mailbag

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kimberly Adams 

Last week we talked about the electric vehicle market. EV market. And we wanted to hear from you, EV owners out there about your experience. And we got this.

Donna

This is Donna from Cathedral City, California. As a longtime Tesla owner going on three years now, I love my EV because I never want to go back to a gas station ever again. And at the same time, my husband and I have been discussing whether or not I would get another Tesla because as much as I love having an electric vehicle, Tesla’s got some issues. Hoping that the EV market continues to grow, and there’s more available when it’s time to purchase my next one.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, what’s funny is there’s so much more now, Suzanna, than there was just three years ago when you bought your Tesla, so there will only be more on the market for sure. Okay.

Kimberly Adams 

I wonder how much Elon Musk is messing with the brand just like, his existence because I have to say like, there was a time in my life and I was like, oh, my next car would probably be an electric vehicle. I’d consider a Tesla. I would not consider a Tesla now, and I 100% blame it on Elon Musk.

Kai Ryssdal 

100%. You got some company out there, believe me. Believe me. All right. One more. Let’s go.

Jesse

Hi, this is Jesse in Virginia. I got a kick out of Kai’s make me smile on the market for pencils. I played that segment for my sixth grader and learned that he’s part of the tiny pencil economy. I had no idea we’ve been sitting on a goldmine with all the little worn-down nubs that keep finding. He told me that he traded a tiny pencil and a pencil sharpener for the giant dry erase marker I found in his backpack last week. Thanks for making me smart and helping me better understand my kid’s world.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, my goodness. How much do I love that? How much do I love that? That’s fabulous. Holy cow. All right. On the way out as we always do. This week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question. What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about? This week’s answer comes to us from David Hollander. He’s a history professor at Iowa State University.

David Hollander 

When I started learning about ancient Rome, I assumed it was a pretty healthy place to live. After all, they had lots of aqueducts, public baths, and sewers. However, it turns out that few houses got water directly from aqueducts. And when they did, they used the water mostly for decorative purposes. As for the baths, the water in them wasn’t treated, and we know that sick people like to visit them. So, the baths were a great place to catch a disease. Research in recent decades suggests that ancient Rome wasn’t particularly healthy. Malaria was certainly a major problem. Rome may in fact, have been a bit of a population sink.

Kimberly Adams 

A population sink.

Kai Ryssdal

You learn something new every day.

Kimberly Adams

And weren’t their pipes lined with lead also? Wasn’t that like, messing with people’s brains. Oh boy. There’s the meme about how much men think about the Roman Empire. Although that meme disturbed me because I feel like I think about the ancient Roman Empire a lot and it made me wonder about myself. But anyway, that is it for us today. We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question, and what other ancient empires maybe you think about a lot. Our number is 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART. Maybe the Mayans or Egyptians. Pick your empire.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Jesson Duller. Juan Carlos Torrado is going to mix it down later. Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kimberly Adams 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. And Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager is Neal Scarbrough.

Kimberly Adams

What’s your favorite ancient empire, Kai?

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know. I’m not an ancient history guy.

Kimberly Adams 

Really?

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. No, I’m like a more recent history like 1500-ish to the present.

Kimberly Adams 

Huh. Learn something new every day.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah.