Risks and Benefits of Social Media for Kids Journal

Communities and online social networks can be beneficial for kids, a researcher says. Michael Zwahlen/Getty Images/EyeEm hide explanation

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Michael Zwahlen/Getty Images/EyeEm

Communities and online social networks can be benign for kids, a researcher says.

Michael Zwahlen/Getty Images/EyeEm

Screen time is often considered the enemy when information technology comes to instruction kids to be agile and well-behaved. But should all forms of media be considered equal?

Research being presented Tuesday finds that for nine- and x-yr-onetime children taking part in a study of encephalon development, greater social media use, such every bit scrolling through Instagram and texting, was associated with some positive effects, including increased physical action, less family conflict and fewer sleep bug.

The children who had a higher utilize of general media, like Internet, Idiot box and video games, were more prone to have worse sleep and more than family disharmonize.

Kids who used social media still participated in more than traditional forms of screen time. Only the time they spend interacting with others through social media, texting or video chatting outweighed TV, video games and Net time.

The findings come from an analysis of data from well-nigh iv,500 young people and their parents collected by the Adolescent Encephalon Cognitive Development study, a project of the National Institutes of Wellness. The written report, launched in 2015, is gathering information about how immature people'due south brains develop and how they navigate boyhood and become adults. The analysis of screen time is one of the first to emerge from the data nerveless so far, and information technology'due south being discussed in a symposium about the ABCD study.

"The nigh important matter is that not all screen media is bad, if you want to put it in a nutshell," says writer Dr. Martin Paulus, the scientific managing director and president at Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla. "There'due south a lot of pre-existing biases that if we expose kids to media, something terrible is going to happen. What we show is that's not the case."

Paulus says he went into this research looking for potential indicators of time to come depression, feet, drug use and other trouble. Kids spend half of their free time in front of a screen, he says, and then it'due south something worth investigating.

In the report, children self-reported activities like watching Television receiver, texting or visiting social media sites — and the fourth dimension spent on each. They were also asked about whether they play mature video games and lookout man R-rated movies. They rated their time spent on these controversial activities as never, once in a while, regularly and all the fourth dimension.

Parents reported the screen fourth dimension of their children on a typical weekend day and weekday.

Kids also reported on their involvement in sports and other physical activities and had a neurocognitive cess. Kids and parents study on family conflict. Parents also kept track of how well the kids slept and filled out a checklist that assessed their children's behavior, such as noting attention bug and aggressive behavior.

Paulus and his colleagues found that kids with greater general media activity, such equally watching TV or playing video games, reported more sleep problems and college family conflict.

The results haven't been published yet, merely are being presented Tuesday at the Research Club on Alcoholism in San Diego. Paulus said he has submitted the findings for scientific publication.

Previous social media and screen media research has been washed largely in older kids or teenagers, Paulus says, with less focus on these younger kids.

Paulus says that around ten to 20 percent of kids this age are on social media. The users tend to be from slightly more affluent places, have more educated parents and exist girls.

The social media users also engage in other online consumption. They just written report more than screen time existence social than their peers who spend more than fourth dimension online playing games or watching videos.

"What we've simply seen is these kids at this age, they're already using social media every bit a advice tool," he says. "They are networked with their friends, they engage in more diverse activities, and in the prepuberty stage when yous don't have all the teenager stuff going on, it truly is building a network community."

Communities and social networks tin can accept beneficial effects, Paulus says, so kids who are using social media to build connections then may encounter positive outcomes.

Do these findings mean that parents should ban TVs and sign their kids upwards for Twitter? Probably not. For i affair, the researchers couldn't prove causation; they identified associations.

Psychologist Chris Ferguson of Stetson University says that both the negative and positive differences identified in the research are small. "My takeaway from this is for the virtually office, information technology looks like screen use, in general, and social media apply have relatively little touch on most of the outcomes the authors are looking at, with maybe the exception of sleep," he says.

Still, Ferguson says, the finding could assistance allay some parental concerns. He notes that social media had some apparent positive furnishings.

The findings besides propose that the way parents and kids view the coaction betwixt online media and family unit conflict vary. Ferguson says kids seem to exist maxim they often plow to media equally a stress reliever when there are issues in the family unit. Parents don't necessarily run across information technology that way, considering there was no clan between media and family conflict when they reported information technology.

"Information technology's difficult to say if screen use is making those issues worse, or [children] are they simply using information technology every bit a coping mechanism considering they have some of these issues," he says.

In his enquiry, Ferguson has bumped into a similar situation with kids who read tons of books and have mental wellness issues. It doesn't hateful that books caused the problem, he says, it just could mean that kids turned to books equally a coping skill.

He says that the work by Paulus "challenges the narrative that we accept about screens having direct detrimental impacts, particularly social media, on kids," Ferguson says. "Obviously things are a lot more complicated than that."

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