Nearly two-thirds of children report getting their first smartphone by the age of ten. Of those, almost all (98%) use YouTube regularly, and 87% are active on other forms of social media. Childhood innocence is being snuffed out, as awkward phases vanish and kids are exposed earlier than ever to sexual content, advertising and constant societal pressures. Kids may be growing up faster than ever, but young adults remain stuck in a strange in-between, caught in extended adolescence. Our parents were right: the phone really is the problem.
We have robbed children of awkward phases and replaced them with algorithms. Take TikTok, for example. What once might have been middle schoolers trading awkward jokes or running around outside after school has been replaced by 12-year-olds posting dance trends, watching political content and scrolling the app for hours. We’ve forgotten what social media is designed as: a highly addictive drug. Companies know and expect underage consumers on their platforms. Algorithms are designed to trick our brains into releasing large amounts of dopamine (similar to meth, heroin and alcohol), leaving consumers “chasing the high.” We don’t give children meth, so why provide them with social media? Kids are targeted as consumers before they know who they are. Advertising takes advantage of undeveloped brains, pushing children to desire certain products and lifestyles and preventing them from forming their own unique interests. Beauty advertisements are particularly damaging — young girls, targeted for makeup ads and exposed to influencers who use their looks to gain viewers, are bound to develop body issues and unrealistic beauty standards.
According to AddictionResource, “research shows that children are first exposed to porn between ages 9 and 13, with 93% of teen boys and 62% of teen girls reporting exposure to internet pornography.” Young children who come across sexual content are victims. Pornography stimulates the brain similarly to drugs and alcohol, and the effect is increased in still-developing brains. Children are given front-row seats to the worst of humanity. Our kids see war, mass shootings and violent crime regularly. Completely sheltering children from the harsh realities of life is certainly not the answer, as the unfortunate truth is that they may encounter these realities in person, but neither is providing an open look at the worst of it. According to the Youth Endowment Fund, “70% of teenage children have encountered real-life violent content online in the past year.” As younger children become more active on the internet, this number will only increase. The internet’s anonymity and the nature of social media platforms usher children into an online society as adults, but kids should not be shown violence and sexual content while companies addict them for profit.
Early exposure doesn’t produce maturity — it stunts it. A recent study has shown that the brains of those who frequently use social media have developed differently from infrequent users. Habitual users show an increase in dopamine release and increased activation in the amygdala, the “emotion center” of the brain. This hyperactivation is thought to increase the value of rewards, lowering individuals’ impulse controls and making them more susceptible to addictive behaviors. In contrast, infrequent users showed lower activation of the amygdala. They were better able to control their impulses and regulate their emotions. Increased social media usage seems to be making users less able to regulate their emotions and more impacted by social cues. Though more anecdotal, this inability to regulate emotions and propensity to be led by social trends rather than independent thought can be seen through societal trends such as the millennial “anti-adulting” trend and increasing polarization in the political sphere.
While kids are being forced to “grow up” in some ways, they aren’t fully emotionally and mentally maturing. Studies are finding that excessive screen use is associated with grey matter atrophy (affecting executive functions), compromised white matter integrity (which weakens communication within the brain), reduced cortical thickness (impairment of cognitive tasks), impaired cognitive functioning (less efficient information processing and reduced impulse inhibition), cravings and impaired dopamine function (increased want for dopamine and decreased ability to feel it). With this comes skyrocketing anxiety, depression and loneliness — all fueled by phones. We’ve built a system that robs kids of their childhood while stopping young adults from growing up.
We need to treat childhood as something worth protecting. Smartphones and social media haven’t just connected us; they’ve stolen childhood innocence and stalled maturity. We wouldn’t hand a cigarette to a child, so why should we give them smartphones? Parents of the past can be forgiven for this oversight, as so little was known about technology’s impact on the brain until recently. However, new and future parents have a responsibility to do something about it. Our generation has a responsibility to try and resist the addiction cycle: buying flip phones rather than smartphones (an increasingly popular trend), using technology with intention and one day protecting our children from this problem. If childhood can vanish in a scroll, we shouldn’t be surprised when adulthood never arrives.
