Teen anxiety in the age of social media, and how to help

Being immersed in social media can add to a teenager's angst. Listen to how you can help your teen limit the stress.

Transcript:
Cliff Mehrtens 0:07

Welcome to Novant Health Healthy Headlines. I'm Cliff Mehrtens. Smartphones are prevalent especially among teenagers. But are they doing more harm than good? A study recently published in the Journal of American Medical Association psychiatry suggested that teenagers who spend more than three hours a day on social media are more likely to develop mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and aggression. For some insight into teens and social media, we talked to Novant health psychologist Dr. Courtney McMickens show discuss the dangers of social media, what parents can do to monitor their kid's activity there, and some tips about setting ground rules. You can find stories like this and hundreds of others by searching Novant Health and Healthy Headlines. Thank you for listening.

Dr. McMickens, there's been a direct link and a recent study between the amount of screen time social media the teens spend on their social media devices and loneliness, depression and anxiety. Is that a real thing? Do you see that?

Dr. Courtney McMickens 1:13

it is something we see often in the clinic. It's hard to say which came first, the social media exposure and interest versus the anxiety and depression. But what we do know is that spending lots of time on social media has been shown to be linked to depression and anxiety, as you mentioned, and it also facilities facilitates this isolation of kids to their rooms and away from other relationships in their lives, such as their parents or their friends. And they become absorbed in some of the comments and the likes and the comparisons. That's what I see a lot in clinic is a lot of concern about what other friends are doing, what they're seeing on social media, some of the replication of what is happening on social media that causes these consequences that are not always positive.

Cliff Mehrtens 2:15

And that manifests itself how what do you see these young teens dealing with?

Dr. Courtney McMickens 2:21

So a lot of worry about how they'll be perceived, if they're doing what their other friends are doing. Some kids do have limitations around this social media. So they worry about the fact that they have to tell their friends, they don't have Snapchat, or they don't have a certain platform, or they're not allowed to. And so then they start to feel as if they're not connected to people. So that can lead to some sadness and loneliness as well.

Cliff Mehrtens 2:53

Seems like almost irony, because social media was developed for us to all connect to each other. But in a way it sort of can push people, teens and adults alike, push us into our isolation. How does a parent as a parent, what sort of advice would you give for them to deal with some signs they might see their child struggling with?

Dr. Courtney McMickens 3:15

Well, first, I want to talk to your team about engaging in social media from the beginning, and set some ground rules as far as you having access to their page, being able to log on and check what they're doing, especially for younger teens, who are just getting out. Or just getting into that adolescent stage, and may not have the same awareness socially as older teens may. And also setting some limits around time that you use social media. And you know, making a rule about dinnertime knows no phone at the dinner table, that type of thing, so that you stay connected to the real relationships. And I think the challenge is that, and you know, this might be a generational thing. But some of the challenges that kids, adolescents view some of these relationships as real relationships, where we know that relationships include some physical contact, we it includes some ability to exchange in a bi-directional way, as opposed to one sends a message and wait for a response type of thing. And so and you want this long term, kind of history, so parents with their kids or kids with school people they attended school with, you want to have that type of relationship, as well as these relationships you have with people over the internet. So I think having that conversation initially, and talking about things to look out for when people are maybe showing signs that they're not engaging healthily in an online relationship, asking you to do things that you don't feel comfortable with, threatening to kill, tell people things about you that you've shared with them, and secrecy via the internet or social media, kind of knowing those land mines per se, from the beginning, and then setting some some some limitations around how we engage with social media.

Cliff Mehrtens 5:19

This is a relatively recent development, obviously, with more people carrying smartphones and social media becoming a big thing. It's hard enough being a teeen anytime in history. This just adds to it. What are some of the other general things not related to social media that you see teens have to deal with? Just because that's the, you know, demographic they're in right now?

Dr. Courtney McMickens 5:43

Well, I think it's always important to take a step back. And when we talk about anxiety, we're talking about our normal feeling, right? So all anxiety is not bad. Anxiety is like this feeling you get when you there's a perceived danger or perceived threat. And throughout developing mental stages, kids have anxiety that's normal, like an eight month old, who has anxiety about separation, or a four year old, five year old that has anxiety when they first start kindergarten, or preschool, that's all normal. The tricky part is when you get into developmental anxiety that goes beyond what we would typically expect and starts to interfere with functioning. So in adolescence, you know, the key to being an adolescent, that is all very egocentric, it's about them. And everybody's kind of looking at them and evaluating them. And so when you think about how that plays out, with friends, and, you know, making, forming a friend group, or deciding which sport to play, or deciding what you're going to do when you graduate from high school, and there's always this anxious about, well, are people going to judge me for my decisions? Or are people going to judge me for what I'm wearing. And so that's just kind of amplified in the social media context. But it's also amplified on a day to day basis, because everyone you go to school with now has access to other parts of your life that they wouldn't ordinarily have access to, which I think is what makes it different now than before, because either knowingly or unknowingly, you're giving people more of a intimate look into your life by sharing some of these details.

Cliff Mehrtens 7:31

How do kids deal with that? And what would you recommend for parents who might enter into the world of cyber bullying?

Dr. Courtney McMickens 7:38

Yeah, I would say from a most conservative standpoint, and I actually think this is probably the safest thing until we kind of know how things will pan out in the future is, is limiting access to smartphones at that age of 12 and 13, where they're not really necessary, and they may cause more harm than good...