Help Your Child Increase Socialization Post-COVID

High use of screen time and social media, along with the COVID pandemic, have created a loss of socialization skills and social disconnection, especially among children and adolescents, find Pandya and Lodha. Young people need to develop skills that allow them to interact socially with one another and with adults both in childhood and into adulthood. If they miss the window of opportunity, they will not know how to successfully converse, negotiate with, or respect other people. Evidence of such deficits is already showing up.

COVID lockdowns isolated children from peers. Both family and outside-of-family conversations were minimal. As a result, children did not socialize much during the lockdowns. Lockdowns created lonely children.

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Children relied on devices for both schooling and entertainment. Often, they were babysat by devices. Medical masks hid facial expressions of adults and other children. Socially, increased use of devices––even prior to COVID–– had children exhibiting immature decision-making and little self-restraint in behaviors, found Twenge and Campbell. Students lack the know-how to make friends after two years of COVID isolation. Twenge and Campbell find that this lack creates frustration and can lead to sadness and depression.

Digital use affects many areas of life––speech and brain development, cognition, sleep, hearing, eyesight, and physical and mental well-being, studies show. Device/tech use affects not only children’s development but parent-child interactions. Kelly et al found that, paradoxically, there is disconnection from people and the world around them from digital use, especially from social media use.

In three books she has written—Generations (2023), iGen (2018), and Generation Me (2014—psychologist Jean Twenge documents a doubling of depression in teens between 2011 and 2019, before the pandemic, when screen time was exploding but before lockdowns and increased device use due to COVID. Emergency room visits for self-harm increased four times between 2010 and 2021 in 10 to 14-year-old girls, Twenge found. The last two years of her data cover the COVID lockdown period.

Social media use is implicated. Social media use has been found to worsen mental health and to diminish time spent in person with friends and family more than other screen time use. Teenagers, especially girls, cite increased depression from heavy use of social media, finds Twenge.

Suggestions for Increasing Socialization

If heavy social media use and increased screen time are the culprits, how do we rectify the loss of socialization and conversation skills in our children? The goal is to replace social media and device use with face-to-face interactions and conversations. Here are some suggested steps to take.

Reduce Device Usage

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry make recommendations for screen time type and usage for different age children and adolescents.

• Have a day or evening without using any devices.
• Be phone/device-free during meals.
• No phones/devices in the bedroom.

Discuss Device Use with Your Children

• Have parent-child talks about what your children like and dislike about devices—both their usage and their parents’ usage.
• Discuss good and bad social media experiences your children have experienced.

Teach How to Have Face-to-Face Conversations

• Spend time with your children having conversations––listening and responding; sharing thoughts, opinions, and emotions.
• Create specific topics for conversation or discuss topics your children gnerate.
• Model how to listen and how to respond with consideration and good manners.
• Plan family meals in which everyone is involved in discussing what to cook, food preparation, and who will do what to get the meal ready.
• Have meal dates with your children––one child at a time––and another child friend. Also, both parents can go out with their child and a peer. This will teach how to have multiple people engage in conversation. A topic can be chosen ahead of time or not. Expect every person to listen to others as well as contribute to the topic being discussed.
• Spend more time talking with your children, whether on a drive, a walk, going to a museum or library, or camping out. See what your child observes. To increase learning of nonverbal communication, make sure you speak with one another while you are both looking at each other.

Increase Non-Device Activities

• Reading

Ask children to read books, newspapers, magazines on paper, not on their devices.

Take turns alternately reading to your children and asking them to read aloud to you.

Visit story hour at the library. Make sure your child interacts in the session.

• Play

Involve children in outdoor play as well as board games, hobbies, and crafts.

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Have children put on imaginative play scenarios and enact stories they and peers have created.

Listen to music together. Talk about your children’s understanding and opinions of the music and the story. “Peter and the Wolf” and “The Firebird” are excellent for this.

Draw or paint with your children. Use different media. Talk with them as you both create.

• Physical Activity

Increase solo and interactive physical activities with your children––bike riding, roller skating, dancing, bird watching, fishing, bowling, kite flying, canoeing, water skiing. Be sure and talk with one another during the activities.

• Increase Dumb Phone Use

Request that children reach out to friends and extended family by audio phone only to practice having conversations about how people are and what they are up to, suggest Pandya and Lodha.

It is hoped that parents will see improved socialization and conversational abilities in their children to restore some of the deficits children have suffered from both increased device use and COVID lockdowns.