Mental Health in the Digital Age: Children’s Mental Health Crisis

This interview with Titiana Jordan from bark and Kimberly Young of Hillside discusses the alarming rise in mental health issues among children and adolescents, particularly in the context of increased digital media consumption. It explores the contributing factors such as social media, screen time, and online interactions, and emphasizes the urgent need for awareness and action to address this growing crisis.

Video Transcript:

Hello everyone! Welcome. I appreciate you stopping by. I’m Titania Jordan, and I’m here with Kimberly Young. Kimberly, tell everybody what you do.

I am the residential clinical operations director for Hillside’s residential program. I’m a psychiatric nurse practitioner by trade, and I oversee all of our programming here at Hillside. I ensure that when a child is in our residential program, they receive quality care in every aspect. Every aspect of care they are receiving, every aspect of supervision by a staff member, is quality. Everything they receive is helping them get to the life that they deserve to live.

That’s awesome, and we were talking off-camera, but you’ve been at this now for over 15 years, right?

Correct.

Wow, that’s incredible, so you’ve seen some things. I have, um, and one of the most impactful things that I can’t wait to get your take on is how things have shifted with the onset of social media and technology. So I’ve got some questions that I want to make sure I ask because they’re important. So forgive my reading, but what are the most significant factors contributing to the current state of children’s mental health? That’s one question. And then, how has technology, especially social media, played a role? So feel free to answer all of that, some of that. I know we could spend an entire hour just on that.

We could probably spend more than an hour, and it is a very complex issue. The pandemic was significantly impactful for our entire world. The trauma experienced was beyond something that anybody could really imagine, and sadly our youth have taken some of the greatest hits from the pandemic. Now, I’m not going to say the pandemic is the only thing contributing to the mental health crisis of our children and adolescents at this point. The rates of depression and anxiety were already increasing before the pandemic. Yet, then we have the pandemic that came and it made a tough situation exponentially worse.

You asked about the role of social media. I think where we see the rising rates of depression and anxiety for children and adolescents currently really follows, in a lot of ways, the trend of the increased use of social media. This generation has tablets in their hands from the beginning. Social media definitely has so many positives about it, but there are many negatives. I attribute a significant portion of the mental health crisis for children and adolescents to social media, which was worsened by the pandemic. Social media use increased during the pandemic. We lost connection, and that was how people maintained connection.

I lived this, as I’m sure many of you watching did. My son was in fifth grade; I think it was March 13th, 2020. He left his fifth-grade class to come home for the weekend and never went back. So we are, I am right there with you. I’m not only the chief parenting officer of a tech company that helps to protect close to 7 million children across the nation, but I’m a mom living this and hanging on your every word. I’m longing for the why. I want to know the why and then I want to know what I can do about it.

And I think it’s so important for people to know that Hillside exists because that would have been really beneficial to know a few years ago. Childhood is so much different now. I just can’t imagine a more stark contrast of childhood generation over generation in the history of humanity. Can you talk to, from your professional viewpoint, the relationship between screen time and sleep patterns and just movement in children? And then how that impacts their overall mental well-being.

Sure. The screen time parameters that have been set up are, over the age of six, pretty vague. You know, they suggest balancing it with healthy life patterns. We know that this is important, yet the families are also on the screen at the same time. We can’t live in this world without being on some type of digital media; that is where our world is going, and there are phenomenal things that are coming from the digital age. However, we have to go back to those generations, like you were, you know, we had, um, parents at home, you know, the stay-at-home mom, the, um, you know, the the dad that was working. Things are very different now. The family structures are very different. So, um, it’s, it’s hard to give specific parameters and elements, but I think if we look at the time, the content, and other activities, that can help to address whatever a family system looks like.

So many parents struggle with just getting, uh, getting their kids to get away from the screen, right? It’s not just as easy as saying, “Do this because I said so,” right? That, that’s like, our parents maybe had a little more luck with that, um, but what can parents do to encourage physical activity and outdoor engagement and counteract the sedentary effects of increased screen time?

What is really important is to realize where that excessive screen time is coming from. So, if we’re looking at a biology perspective, brain development, that excessive screen time is hitting the pleasure centers of the brain. What comes from pleasure centers of the brain is dopamine. Mhm. What does dopamine do? It makes us feel really good. Yeah. So where I have seen the most success is when parents find activities that a child finds as pleasurable so that they are having that much dopamine come in their brain as well. So, some, it may be rock climbing, for another child, it may be digging for worms in the ground. It’s going to depend on your child, what they find pleasure in, um, and so it’s not the same for every child in any way, but you’ve got to find something that is as pleasurable to replace it with. You can’t just pull it away. That’s, that’s not going to be successful in any way.

Oh my gosh, that is a golden nugget that needs to be shared far and wide. How can parents effectively communicate with schools and other caregivers to create a cohesive system for children’s mental health during the digital age? Because it, it can’t just rely on parents. That, that burden’s too great.

No, it absolutely cannot. We’re looking, we need to talk to our policymakers. We need to talk to our researchers and our universities that are researching. We need to talk to the digital companies and the tech companies that are going to create the safeguards, um, and the things to protect the content that our children are seeing, um, I think as a cohesive team addressing these issues and getting some really, really strong guidelines. We need more research to create those really strong guidelines, um, that then that’s going to support the parents.

But on a very smaller scale, kind of at home or in your own community, um, a lot of communication with your, your child’s community, um, to make sure that everyone is doing the same thing and having the expectation. So, this is a very small example, but let’s say that, um, a parent, um, of a child struggling with mental health issues and social media, um, they have a plan that’s working really well at home. And then they go to Grandma’s house, and Grandma is as loving as can be and wants to allow their, their grandchild to have anything they want, right? And this is really with any type of behavior management. But then the grandparents, or any other, I don’t want to single out grandparents, but any other family member or caretaker, um, allows the, the child to do things that are not what’s aligned in the behavior plan or the plan that the family has created. And then we don’t actually shape those behaviors and help to support the mental health. So you want to make sure that everybody in your child’s village is on the same page, um, and, and knows what the plan is, knows how to support your child, whether it is specifically with social media and digital use or it’s their mental health struggles, the school counselors, um, those at your community center, everybody being on the same page.

And so parents having a plan and printing it out and providing it for them, put it on the fridge, yep, and share it with everybody. I love it. Um, this is a good one. This is critical. Um, teens get a bad rap sometimes, right, for just being moody and whatever, but like, I get it. Your body’s going through incredible changes physically, mentally, emotionally. So let’s give them some grace. That said, how can parents differentiate between typical teenage behavior and then signs of a more serious mental health issue exacerbated by technology use?

Well, it’s hard. It’s very, very hard. It goes back to knowing your child, having open communication, and understanding um when there’s a change in baseline. Um, if your child has typical times where they get a little irritable, don’t want to follow the rules, that is that’s pretty normal. We would expect that in teenage development. When we start to see significant withdrawal, change in mood before and after using um social media or a digital platform, um, withdrawal from other life activities, less sleep, more sleep, change in appetite, um, starting to see different behaviors, sneaky type of behaviors, or a significant change of friend group, these are the times that I say to pay close attention and start communicating even more with your child and checking the facts to see what’s going on.

That’s critical. What role do peer interactions on social media play in children’s mental health, and how can parents guide their children to navigate these interactions positively?

Great question because this is the time of learning who you are and developing those friendships and figuring out how am I going to see my life moving forward, separate from the family in a bit. So you’re the children and the adolescents, they’re looking for connection, they’re looking for identity. And then we’ve got social media with people posting sometimes only the best parts of their life, um, which are going to really impact then how your child is feeling about themselves, um, a time of developing self-worth and self-identity. And then this is exacerbated by seeing only other people having good times or only other people like the girls are impacted so much um by the body image issues and seeing others. And that’s why, you know, our, our females are seeing the significant increase of depression and anxiety. And this is the reason: the body image exposure to other peers.

But the thing about it is that peer interactions are wonderful, and social media has a great benefit for this. I mean, some children in more rural areas, let’s look at like an LGBTQ plus child um that needs to be able to connect with others that they can identify with safely; they are um able to find that on social media. Um, some children of color, some girls of color have even said 70% have said that they find actually body-affirming, skin-color-affirming, hair-affirming um content on social media and with people, peers, that it improves their mental health.

So where parents can play the role is that open communication and letting their child know specifically when do they need to come to you and and let you know, as the parent, something’s going on that’s could have further impact down the road. So cyberbullying, a friend saying something to them, um, or someone calling them out about something or content that just pops up somehow that this, we know we don’t want to be looking at this type of content, um, so that then you can help decipher with your child. The developing brain of a child and adolescent is not going to be able to decipher those things, but if you, as a parent, have very clear guidelines, “These are the things I need you to reach out to me about and let me know,” then I think we can prevent the mental health um deterioration.

What I have observed through our work at Bark is just an increase in children placing their self-worth and finding their confidence, unfortunately, in those peer interactions on social media, which can be very volatile. It can give you the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. So, if we as parents and caregivers and allies can help our children understand their self-worth outside of their followers, the comments, and where they may or may not be included on Snap Maps, that critical data is so important.

Let’s talk stats. Absolutely, you know, 95% of 13 to 17-year-olds right now say that they are on social media, and about 40% say almost constantly.

I saw that study. I saw that study, and what was so interesting to me was the phrase “almost constantly.” That used to not be a level, right? And now it’s just, there’s so much we don’t even use hours anymore; it’s just almost constantly.

Exactly, and what’s even scarier is that a lot of recent studies are showing that more than three hours a day on social media negatively impacts a child’s mental health. Most children are on social media four or five more hours a day, and so then we ask ourselves why we have a mental health crisis. Even more, you know, there are studies out there that show that when people do pull back from social media, their mental health and well-being improve. There we go.

Now, again, these are all correlation studies, and we need a lot more research. Our children and adolescents have been part of a human experiment in the last decade or so. But there’s enough data out there to show that we need to find balance. I was just about to say, you know, Kimberly and I aren’t saying that social media is bad and that tech is bad. Absolutely, they’re tools that can be used positively or negatively and absolutely need to be used in moderation. Absolutely, under adult supervision with appropriate filters and monitors and conversations in place. Yep, absolutely.

So, Kimberly, we could talk for hours. Our professional endeavors have a lot of overlap. You know, at Bark, we are focused on empowering parents and children to live their healthiest lives in appropriate balance with tech. We don’t think the answer is all or nothing, but it’s moderation. It’s appropriate conversations and filters and time limits. I mean, goodness gracious, children have got to sleep at night, right, instead of doom-scrolling TikTok.

So, I have been hanging on your every word, not only professionally but also as a mother. As we wrap, is there anything that you’d like to leave, you know, parents with or even children who might be seeing this? Wow, no pressure.

Yeah, that’s a powerful question. I think the most important thing is that it’s okay to not feel okay. And when you’re not feeling okay, reach out to your parents, or if your parent recognizes that your child’s not feeling okay, reach out to them rather than reaching out to social media. Social media has many benefits, and I am not going to downplay those. Our world has to continue to use it and will continue to use it and will grow from it in many ways. However, it’s human connection that is going to really help us get through the sadness, the anxiety, and the many struggles that our children and adolescents are going through right now.

And by human connection, you mean in real life?

In real life, that is right.

Kimberly, thank you so much for being here, for all that you do for children, for our community. Hillside is so blessed to have you as part of their team. Thank you, guys, for doing what you’re doing. Thank you, Bark, for putting in the help to families because we see what social media is doing. We see what the digital age is doing, and parents need support, and you’re making an impact. Thank you for being here.