Verified by 
Key points
- A recent poll found that parents are worried about screen time, social media, and internet safety.
- Mental health issues are also a primary concern for parents.
- Delaying technology use and teaching digital literacy are possible solutions.
The annual University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health finds that screen time, social media use, and internet safety top the list of parental concerns about their children’s health.
In this nationally representative poll, a whopping two-thirds of parents of children between 0-18 say they are worried about increased time on devices and use of social media, followed closely by internet safety.
Here’s how their top 10 concerns stack up: overuse of devices/screen time (67%), social media (66%), internet safety (62%), depression/suicide (57%), bullying (53%), stress/anxiety, unhealthy diet (52%), healthcare and insurance cost (50%), school violence (49%), and smoking/vaping (48%).
A closer look at this list reveals that the top six concerns are actually closely linked, as increased time on devices and social media use are often pointed to as potential sources of depression/suicide, bullying, and stress/anxiety. Additionally, it is striking that given the rise in school shootings over the last few years that gun violence is missing from the top 10. It comes in at number 12 (47%), behind childhood obesity (48%). Just a decade ago, parents rated childhood obesity as their number one concern. How times have changed.
Two Solutions
1. Waiting on Tech Use
A May Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,520 adults found that 76% of American adults think social media is inappropriate for children under 13. 53% said they think kids should be between 14 and 17 before the begin using social media, and 32% think kids should wait until they are 18.
Waiting to give children access to cellphones, the gateway to social media and internet use, is a logical and relatively easy solution to the problems parents worry about most. Yet, data shows we are actually moving in the opposite direction.
According to Common Sense data from its 2015 and 2021 surveys, the proportion of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds with smartphones nearly doubled in those years. The majority of parents give their children a cellphone around the ages of 12 and 13, and the percentage of 12-year-olds owning a cellphone grew from 41 percent in 2015 to 71 percent in 2021.
As far as social media goes, The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021, finds that approximately 38% of children between the ages of 8 and 12 and 84% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 are using social media.
Nearly every social media site requires users to be 13 in order to open an account, but as everyone knows this is more a suggestion than a requirement. Anyone who can fib about their age can easily open an account.
Yet children under 13 just aren’t developmentally ready to use social media. It takes about 12 years of life to fully develop the cognitive structures that enable abstract thinking, which is a necessary prerequisite to ethical thinking. So, before 12, it's difficult, if not impossible, for a child to fully grasp the ethical impact of their actions, online or otherwise. Nevertheless, young children are increasingly joining social networking sites, sometimes putting themselves in harm's way by engaging or being targeted by cyberbullying, dangerous “challenges,” online harassment, misinformation, and more before they understand the dangers and/or know how to respond appropriately.
There are so many good arguments for waiting on tech use, yet for many families, swimming against the tide in this way is just too hard, so there is a second solution.
2. Educating on Tech Use
Some schools, but not all (and not nearly enough), already teach students how to use technology safely and wisely. You might have heard about your own child’s school teaching digital citizenship (the safe and responsible use of digital tools), information literacy (how to find, retrieve, analyze, and use online information), media literacy (using critical thinking skills to analyze media messages), or digital literacy (the big umbrella that encompasses all of the aforementioned skills).
Learning digital literacy in school, ideally before or in tandem with getting a first device, equips children to protect themselves from the things their parents fear most. For example, a student who learns about the “persuasive technology” techniques companies use to sneakily capture and hold their attention—the endless scrolls, instantly cued up videos, intrusive notifications—will be less likely to fall for these tactics. The student who understands how their social media use impacts their digital reputation, and how important that reputation will be to their future pursuits, will be more careful about what they say and do online. And the student who knows how their personal information is collected and used to target them with ads, information, and sometimes misinformation, will be a more savvy internet user. Even a few key lessons in digital literacy can help a child use technology safely and wisely.
If you are wondering why every school doesn't already teach digital literacy, or any of the tech literacies listed above, so am I. Nearly every student today uses devices for schoolwork and homework—at increasingly younger ages no less—so teaching them how to use these literacy tools should be a no-brainer. After all, a student's curiosity is sure to take them from Google Classroom to TikTok for both entertainment and research.
Simply put, literacy is different today. As the National Association for Media Literacy Education, puts it:
"Being literate in a media age requires critical thinking skills that empower us as we make decisions, whether in the classroom, the living room, the workplace, the boardroom, or the voting booth.”
Not only would in-school education give students the literacy skills they need to use their devices safely and wisely, it would likely ease parental concerns #1, #2, and #3 (and possibly #4 and #5) above.
Wouldn’t this ease all of our concerns?
