Dr. Gupta is going to have a show about his daughters digital lives in the sixth edition of Chasing Life

How to Make Instagram Safe for Teens? Comment on Hamlet’s ‘How to Make Social Media For Children’s Health More Efficient’

Alexandra Hamlet, a New York City-based clinical psychologist, recalls being invited to a roundtable discussion roughly 18 months ago to discuss ways to improve Instagram, in particular, for younger users. She said that she didn’t see many of her ideas being implemented. She said that social media platforms need to improve parental controls, Protect young people against targeted advertising and remove objectively harmful content.

Michela Menting, a digital security director at market research firm ABI Research, agreed that social media platforms are “offering very little of substance to counter the ills their platforms incur.” She said that their solution put the onus on guardians to activation various parental controls, as they were intended to filter, block and restrict access, and more passive options such as monitoring and surveillement tools that run in the background.

In response, the company recently refreshed its Safety Center, where parents can find guidance on how to turn on safety settings, FAQs about how Discord works, and tips on how to talk about online safety with teens. Parents can prohibit a minor from getting a friend request or a direct message from someone they don’t know by using existing parental control tools.

After the fallout from the leaked documents, Meta-owned Instagram paused its much-criticized plan to release a version of Instagram for kids under age 13 and focused on making its main service safer for young users.

Bringing Safety to the Teens: A Navigator for VR Parental Supervision Tools from ConnectSafely, Instagram, TikTok, and Live

The hub also offers a guide to Meta’s VR parental supervision tools from ConnectSafely, a nonprofit aimed at helping kids stay safe online, to assist parents with discussing virtual reality with their teens. Guardians can see which accounts their teens have blocked and access supervision tools, as well as approve their teen’s download or purchase of an app that is blocked by default based on its rating, or block specific apps that may be inappropriate for their teen.

It is possible to take a break from the app by having it suggest taking a deep breath, writing something down, or listening to a song after a certain amount of time. Instagram also said it’s taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.

Snap previously said it’s working on more features, such as the ability for parents to see which new friends their teens have added and allow them to confidentially report concerning accounts that may be interacting with their child. It’s also working on a tool to give younger users the option to notify their parents when they report an account or piece of content.

The company told CNN Business it will continue to build on its safety features and consider feedback from the community, policymakers, safety and mental health advocates, and other experts to improve the tools over time.

New filters were announced by TikTok in July. The new safeguards gave a score to videos that could contain mature or complex themes. It also rolled out a tool that aims to help people decide how much time they want to spend on TikToks. The tool lets users set screen time breaks and provide a dashboard that shows how much time they spend in the app, daytime and night time.

In addition to parental controls, the app restricts access to some features to younger users, such as Live and direct messaging. A pop-up also surfaces when teens under the age of 16 are ready to publish their first video, asking them to choose who can watch the video. Push notifications are curbed after 9 p.m. for account users ages 13 to 15, and 10 p.m. for users ages 16 to 17.

Discord did not appear before the Senate last year but the popular messaging platform has faced criticism over difficulty reporting problematic content and the ability of strangers to get in touch with young users.

It is possible for teenagers to connect with people on public server or in private chats if they were invited by another person in the room or if they used a public group that the user accessed. All users can receive friend invitations from anyone who is in the same server, which opens the door for them to send private messages.

Chasing Life with My Daughters: How Technology Affects Brains, What We Can and Should Do to Defeat It, and What We Should Do

Rich doesn’t believe that technology is the cause of his patients’ problems, but that it makes them worse. He believes that helping his young patients who are often dealing with other issues is a counterintuitive approach. Listen to how they learn how to wean themselves off their devices and adopt a healthier relationship with their electronics.

In the new season of Chasing Life, I discuss how technology affects brains, what we can or should do to fight it, and my most personal yet. I’m talking to experts and doing something I’ve never really done on my podcast before: I’m speaking to each of my kids – the real experts.

Almost 85% of US adults say they are on the internet at least daily, with about one in five saying they are online almost constantly. And as of last spring, for teens, the numbers were even higher: A stunning 97% report being online every day, with 46% saying they’re online almost constantly, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

It’s not surprising the numbers are worrying. We’re obliged to do so much on our screens for work and school. But we also do things for fun, like killing time on TikTok or doom-scrolling the news. We text throughout the day, and we also chat on the phone and on the computer. You get the digital idea: It’s easy to be on our screens a lot.

I started this journey by talking with each of my daughters, all proud digital natives and Gen Zers: Sage, 17, Sky, 15, and Soleil, 13 – in my tiny basement studio. I highly recommend having a face-to-face conversation on any important topic while sitting down with a loved one, even if you don’t host a podcast. You will be able to learn a lot.

Now, most parents think their kids are smart, and I am no exception. I found our conversations to be very thoughtful, with good insights. They did not stop at that.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/health/screens-technology-brain-chasing-life-gupta/index.html

When did we become digital? Learning from my daughter Sage, Sky, and I about a girl who doesn’t wake up with a smartphone

It would be difficult for a young person to be completely off everything. Sage also said she couldn’t see herself still using social media like Snapchat at age 20, 30 or 40, because that would be “embarrassing” – but she can’t envision using another platform to communicate, either.

Sky said that she manages her time by spending three hours a day on social media, texting and playing games. I was relieved to hear that she doesn’t let it get in the way of her homework, but I was a bit surprised when she said that on occasion, she lets it interfere with her sleep (but only on the weekends, she assured me).

When I asked my youngest, Soleil, about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to grow up with all this technology, she answered like a Zen master: “I just think it’s a thing. I don’t think it is a good thing. People can’t do much about it. It’s just a thing.” She reminded me that she wasn’t going to choose the one she would have chosen.

All three of my daughters told me they would’ve preferred the Millennial childhood, where cell phones existed, but not smartphones or social media. They told me that these platforms create an obligation to engage more than just a desire. “I don’t want to let my friends down,” Soleil told me.

My daughters think that today’s teens and the generations to come are going to have to figure out how to control themselves because people do around temptations like chocolate and potato chips.

I learned what the people thought about my and my wife’s parenting decisions around screens. As part of the Gupta House Rules, we decided to make the kids wait until middle school before giving them smartphones. We have time limits on their social media accounts. We also try to have family dinners every night, when we all cook together and everyone’s phone – including mine – is put away.

But now, after having talked to my daughters and quite a few experts, I question whether we provided the proper guardrails. I would never toss my car keys to a 16-year-old with only a learner’s permit and say, “You’re on your own!” Maybe I did the digital equivalent.

Talking about screens makes me feel vulnerable. I constantly ask myself, am I doing the right thing? Is my father a good dad? Am I too strict or too much of a pushover?

I am used to having the answers, and the data to back up my beliefs, as a doctor, but this is one area where I don’t. I am in a new place for myself and for the parents and people everywhere. There is no handbook or agreed-upon best practices. Because this is all so new, the studies haven’t been done, and in fact many of the questions haven’t been formulated yet. Five new questions crop up when we get a handle on one. The mythical water serpent grows two new heads for every one it is cut off.

On the other hand, I worry about forcing my values into my kids and their current situation just like my parents did to me and my brother in the 1940s. It felt like their beliefs were out of step.

On the one hand, my experience is something that I can’t rely on as a parent. It is a given that we should follow in the footsteps of our parents if we choose to do the opposite. I can’t say, “This is the way we used to do it when I was a kid,” because nothing like that existed back then.

How much is too much? The case of Jerome Yankey: When social media became problematic to him, and when he finally quit, it was hard to tell

How much is too much? Sometimes it’s hard to know. Sometimes the answer is more obvious. It was for Jerome Yankey. He was a college freshman when he noticed that his use of social media, specifically TikTok, had become problematic.

“It just kind of started to really wear on me physically first, I think, because that was when I was just scrolling for hours, not going to sleep – it was taking hours out of my day. I wasn’t really doing much else in my free time,” he explained.

When the toll shifted from physical to mental, quashing his creativity and warping his sense of worth, he decided he needed to quit. And he did it cold turkey – no easy feat.

Yankey is not the only one. The 2022 Pew Research Survey of US teens found that 67% of them use TikTok, and among those, 16% use it “almost constantly.” It’s even higher among those who use the video sharing platform, with over one in ten using it almost constantly.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/24/health/screen-time-gupta-podcast-wellness/index.html

Internet addiction as a mental health disorder: A diagnosis and a treatment plan for children with problematic media use at Boston Children’s Hospital, New York

For now, internet addiction is not an official clinical diagnosis. There are still many questions about whether it is a mental health disorder or if it should be categorized as a mental health condition. There are many questions about how to define it, measure it, test and treat it.

Most experts do agree, though, that regardless of whether it is a true “addiction” or something else, too much screen time can have bad effects, especially for kids.

That’s where Dr. Michael Rich comes in. Rich and his co-director are responsible for the Clinic for Interactive Media Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, where they treat patients with problematic media use.

“Where the problem comes in is when their day-to-day functions are impaired in some way,” he said. “They’re not getting enough sleep. They are consuming too much. They are missing school or falling asleep in school. They are withdrawing from their friends.”

The term addiction has been used in a way that is derogatory. We think of addiction as a weakness and approach it as punishment rather than a cure.

What are you doing when you aren’t home? What do you do when you don’t know? What happens if you are out of sight of your parents?

My first cell phone was a brick-shaped Nokia with a couple hundred minutes loaded onto it. My parents gave it to me when I got my first car, on the understanding that, whenever I drove somewhere that wasn’t school, I’d call them as soon as I arrived so they’d know I was safe. It was understandable given how many times I had to pass the driver’s test, but I had no problem agreeing with it. I almost never remembered to do it. I realized I had forgotten to call when I was in the middle of a movie. I’d sprint out to the car—where I kept the phone itself—and have a brief, harried conversation with my worried and deeply irritated parents. They knew, of course, that I was likely fine. But it’s hard to not know what your kids are doing without you.

When kids are old enough to go to school, they begin living out of view of their parents. These out-of- sight times are a source of mystery for parents. You attempt to trust their teachers, their caregivers and institutions but that trust is largely blind. My picture of what goes on between dropped-off and pick-up is fuzzy at best, and I have two girls who are very eager to let us know about their school days. A girl walks out of class with a packet of Fritos and a pile of graphic novels, while I have to figure out the rest.

Social media is the largest and most threatening threat to this invisible time. Parents see their children staring at screens, and they know that worlds exist inside those rectangles that are unreachable to them, even if they are just curled up in an armchair 10 feet away. These worlds are full of specialized languages, secret social codes, and networks of references and in-jokes that would take weeks of immersive study to grasp. Time itself is the recourse if parents don’t understand what their kids are being exposed to, how they are helping to build online, and so on.