Social Media, Mental Health, and Adolescent Social Dynamics | Mitch Prinstein, PhD, ABPP

Studies mentioned in this episode, in order mentioned:

Nesi, J., Prinstein, M.J. (2015). Using Social Media for Social Comparison and Feedback-Seeking: Gender and Popularity Moderate Associations with Depressive Symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 43, 1427–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-0020-0

Burnell, K., Trekels, J., Prinstein, M.J. et al. (2024). Adolescents’ Social Comparison on Social Media: Links with Momentary Self-Evaluations. Affective Science, 5, 295–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00240-6

Maza, M.T., Fox, K.A., Kwon, S., et al. (2023). Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media With Longitudinal Functional Brain Development. JAMA Pediatrics,177(2):160–167. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.4924

Maza, M. T., Kwon, S. J., Jorgensen, N. A., Capella, J., Prinstein, M. J., Lindquist, K. A., & Telzer, E. H. (2024). Neurobiological sensitivity to popular peers moderates daily links between social media use and affect. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 65, 101335.

[Kris Perry]: Hello and welcome to the Screen Deep podcast where we go on deep dives with experts in the field to decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens and the host of Screen Deep. Today I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Mitch Prinstein about the intersection of adolescent mental health and social media use, an area of ongoing concern and debate in today’s hyper-connected world. Mitch’s unique expertise spans clinical psychology, developmental psychology, human evolutionary principles, and interpersonal neuroscience. He is the Chief of Psychology at the American Psychological Association, a distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the co-director of the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development. Mitch, I’m so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to Screen Deep.

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Thanks so much, appreciate you asking.

[Kris Perry]: We have quite a bit of ground to cover in terms of social dynamics, peers, and social media. But to start us off, what initially led to your interest in the social dynamics of adolescence and popularity?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: I have been interested in popularity since I was in high school. I was shocked that peer relationships were something that psychologists studied and– then but not surprised at all to learn that given that kids are spending the vast majority of their time with peers, that how those relationships are going can be super important for their psychological development, but also for their lifelong happiness, physical health, and even can affect the experiences of their own kids a generation later. Our peer relationships are extremely important in our lives.

[Kris Perry]: Now this may seem obvious to our listeners, but it’s actually not. What’s the difference between popularity and likeability? And developmentally, which is better for children to try to attain?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]:  Yeah. So if you say something about popularity to anyone from three to 103, they’re probably going to tell you about those experiences in high school when there were the cheerleaders and the, you know, football captains and they can – with as much emotion as they had in high school, tell you exactly where they were on the hierarchy there. But in psychology, we’ve actually learned that there are two different kinds of popularity and one of them is called status. It’s exactly what we just talked about. It comes online and around the pubertal transition beginning of high school and of middle school, where we define one another based on how dominant, influential, powerful one another may be. And we often look and strive towards those who are the most popular, as it were, for reasons that even evolutionarily we can understand as, you know, giving us the kind of feedback and attention that even activates brain circuitry to make us feel really good. But that’s not the kind of popularity that we want. And that’s not the kind of popularity that ends up making a big difference across our entire lifespan. Instead, starting at the age of around three, kids can reliably tell you which kids they like the most and like the least. And our likeability ends up being far more important because those who are the most likable end up living longer, doing well in school. They do better in terms of their occupational performance. They’re happier. They have fewer mental health concerns. And that likeability in some ways is the opposite of popularity because as anyone who went to high school knows, sometimes the kids who are the most popular, we kind of don’t even like. They’re influential and powerful, but we don’t enjoy spending time with them and they don’t make us feel good about ourselves. So what we really want to do is foster the ability for kids to make others feel valued and included and happy, and that makes them likeable.

[Kris Perry]: How should parents talk to their kids about this difference between likeability and popularity?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: You know, we are a social species by definition that is programmed to care what other people think of us. And almost everybody out there in one way or another seems to change their behavior or their beliefs to fit in, at least with some others. Now we have a choice. We can use that kind of innate drive to pursue status, which we know actually leads to a lot of negative outcomes long-term, more use of drugs, more aggression, difficulties in relationships long-term. Or we could use it in a more inclusive and collective sense to help one another feel valued and included. And helping kids to feel that they’re likable is a much better thing for kids to hear and strive towards because it only takes a couple of people that are – that like you and that you can spend good time with to do very, very well in life. Whereas despite many of the movies in the 80s, it takes a lot more than just a quick makeover or, you know, a popular kid liking you in order for you to become one of the coolest kids in your school. So it takes the pressure off kids when they realize that what’s really gonna help them is not being the most popular kid at school, but being someone that a few others like.

[Kris Perry]: Very sage advice and I appreciate the 80s movie reference when it was like somebody waved a magic wand and you went from this to that in no time at all. But we live in an era with social media which does have a fairly rapid impact on adolescents in particular. So how are status and likeability achieved on social media?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Ah. Well, social media has changed quite a few things, hasn’t it? Because it used to be that we would graduate high school, we would go to college in some cases, and we would be around people who were roughly similar in academic achievement, and what mattered would change. And we would revert to focusing on likeability again, because we wanted to form close relationships, and it wasn’t as important to be known and powerful by everyone on your campus. But now social media has actually given us the opportunity to create not just a campus-wide audience, but a world-wide audience. And we don’t simply presume to guess who might be influential or powerful within that audience. Social media has made it possible for us to actually vote and count how many followers or likes or reposts somebody has such that in just a short span of about 20 years, we have recreated that high school popularity metric in our adulthoods and in a 24/7 way where you can press buttons all day long to try to increase those numbers. That’s important because you’re now seeing that we actually evaluate other people based on the number of followers they have. We care about people’s opinions just because a lot of other people follow them. And that’s really changed the dynamic of how we care about others as someone we like versus someone we think has authority just because they have a very big megaphone.

[Kris Perry]: Should or can adolescents use social media to try to achieve popularity and likeability? You’re touching on it, but is it a good strategy for young people to take that powerful tool to achieve this social result?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s one where there’s been a fair amount of debate. Now, my colleagues and I believe that social media is not all good and it’s not all bad. And we really have to look at which are the functions, which pieces of content, which part of the algorithms can make it helpful or make it harmful to kids. Okay, so let’s go back for a sec. Adolescents are supposed to use this period of time to use their expanded brain capacity to develop emotionally intimate relationships with others. The kinds of template relationships that they will use in their long-term partnerships and in their professional relationships: disclosure, support, helping one another through difficult times, nurturance. These are the kinds of things that are skills that have to be developed in adolescence for lifetime relationship success. Can you use social media to foster those qualities? You can. You can use the direct messaging feature. You can use it as an aid to learn about people and then go have in-person conversations with them. You can use it to express who you truly are and find a real connection with others who have similar interests or identities. But unfortunately, some platforms don’t encourage that use of social media. You log in and it might say, got 32 notifications. We’re not even going to tell you their names. We’re not even going to tell you anything you have in common with them. Just go get 32 more. And that unfortunately does not develop the relationship skills that are so important in adolescence. So that would be more consistent with status. Just get lots of numbers and use your interactions to elevate your own status rather than developing a true connection.

[Kris Perry]: You’ve talked about beneficial and harmful types of social media use. There’s been so much discussion in the last few years about social media use and its relationship to mental health issues like anxiety and depression in adolescents. What is the research saying about the unique role of peer relationships, both offline and online, in the development of mental health concerns, specifically depression or self-injury, which you’ve studied quite a bit?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Well, there are some things happening on social media that unfortunately seem to be pretty clearly related to harms. There are a remarkable number of kids who are going on and they’re exposed to cyber hate directed towards an individual or maybe an entire group of individuals based on their identity. There’s no research and no way of imagining that that’s helping anybody. We see a number of kids go online and actually get directed towards websites, posts, or profiles that teach them how to engage in dangerous behavior, like cutting themselves or engaging in anorexia-like behaviors. Again, we know from research that exposure to that is related to increases in adolescents’ own behaviors–negative behaviors. We know that kids are also experiencing loneliness when they are engaging in that social comparison and feedback seeking use of social media, when they’re just going online to get lots of things to go viral, getting lots of hits, comparing themselves to others. That makes kids feel more lonely over time, where it seems like going online to form true connections with people that they have shared interests with might not be bad at all. So it is important to recognize that it’s not just how long kids are on social media or whether they are on at all, but what are they doing on there? What are they seeing? And is anyone talking with them about it afterwards? Or is that information just left to bounce around their own minds with no trusted adult to discuss what they just saw?

[Kris Perry]: What uses of social media are specifically associated with depression? And you have a study from 2015, I believe, that investigated this.

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, we found that a lot of young folks tend to go online to compare themselves to others. And sometimes even to put something out there and hope that people will compliment them. So, for instance, many young people might put up a selfie and hope that everyone will talk about how wonderful their face or their body shape might look. Unfortunately, a lot of kids, and sometimes even adults, forget that what you’re seeing online is not a representative take of someone’s life. It is the very specifically curated, cherry-picked versions of what you want people to see about you. And as a result, a lot of kids report that they feel they’re making upward comparisons. They’re looking at people who are prettier, more popular, you know, having more successful lives than they feel about themselves. And they also report that they forget that that social comparison is a false one. Because it’s many hours, if not days later that they realize, wait a minute, that might have been a filtered picture, a Photoshopped picture, maybe not even a real picture at all. But that immediate emotional reaction that they have is that sense of, “I’m not as good as everyone else.” Now, as adults, we’ve all experienced this at one point or another in our lives. But you have to remember that for kids in particular, this is the time when they are forming a stable sense of self-image. And we’ve known for decades of research that kids are more likely to base that on what other people think of them than they have an internally derived stable sense of self-image. So this is a perfect storm. They are looking to others’ feedback to know who they are. And when they looked for others’ feedback or comparisons, they’re looking at picture perfect lives with others that might show cyber-hateful responses towards them, even encouraging them to hurt themselves or attempt suicide. And maybe for that reason, we’re seeing that a lot of kids report that they find it something that makes them feel a lot worse about themselves when they go online.

[Kris Perry]: I’m going to keep going with the social comparison, but one follow-on question about the anonymity of the viewer. So I post a selfie, and people have access to it and can like or not like it. Has it been studied that that audience reaction is maybe more negative, less supportive if you know your identity is not public?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, it seems like the kinds of hateful content that people share with one another is worse online than it is offline. It’s harsher. And some have said that it might be because you can post whatever hateful comment you want and it’s anonymous. Also, if someone posts a hateful comment, you might be able to disregard that as one really cruel person. But when other people like or repost that hateful comment, now it starts to give you what we call overgeneralization. So you say, wow, three people like that comment, that must mean that like 20 % of the world thinks I’m that ugly. You know, so we tend to make those mistakes as humans where we overestimate how many people agree with what we might see a few people post or like. So that unfortunately is a really hard piece of this that most kids have never received any training on how to react, respond and cope with.

[Kris Perry]: You brought up social comparison and you have a 2024 study on this topic. Can you quickly explain exactly what social comparison is and tell us, are there certain types of social comparison that seem to be more difficult for adolescents to deal with than others?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, I think a lot of adolescents are looking for ways to feel that they’re as good as others, or certainly they don’t stand out in a negative way. So when kids are putting things online that exposes their beliefs, especially their appearance, or some of their interests and hobbies, it’s really difficult for them when they’re seeing that others don’t agree, don’t align, or they see other people that they perceive to be more attractive or have more popular opinions and so on.

[Kris Perry]: Which adolescents, or should I say individual factors, make specific adolescents more vulnerable to these social harms from social media use?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: You know, there’s some research that said that there used to be these vast gender differences because stereotypically, those identifying as female have been taught to find their worth within social relationships more than males, it used to be said. So social media might be providing a context that was particularly harmful and concerning for females. There was also research saying that females are more likely to post full body selfies where males are more likely to post only facial selfies. And the world already puts a remarkably unfair amount of pressure on females regarding their body shapes and sizes. Interestingly, research shows that it would be wrong to think that only females are potentially at harm on social media because there’s a growing culture of men and those identifying as boys also feeling that they’re not big enough, strong enough, having the athletic build they want. A number of folks going to the gym and finding that people are videotaping and posting their workouts just to kind of post online how much weight they can lift and feeling very concerned and insecure about their masculinity if others comment in a negative way about their physical strength. So it’s important to remember that while there may have been some dialogue about some kids being more harmed than others, it would be wrong to assume that anyone is safe unless we have had a very thorough conversation with kids about what are you seeing online? How do you make sense of what you see online? What would you do if you saw something hateful, harmful, dangerous online? And what have your friends done when that has happened to them? Those are some really good prompts to help kids start having a dialogue with adults, even adults who know nothing about social media that makes them feel like they can process out loud with someone that they trust and care about how hard it is to consume all of this information, much of which they didn’t even ask to see.

[Kris Perry]: I mean, adolescence, just being human is such a subjective experience. Then you add in that particular sensitive time and development and then you add in social media. It does seem like a perfect storm. We’ve talked about harmful content and specific uses or patterns that may be problematic and individual differences. You also touched briefly on some specific features or attributes of social media platforms that are important. What matters most in regard to youth mental health outcomes when you think about all of those intersections?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: I think that the percentage of kids who are being directed towards content or followers they didn’t ask to have contact with is extremely concerning for a variety of reasons. One is not everybody is who they say they are online. So sometimes kids are being exposed to someone who is pretending to be a safe peer when they might be a predator. And that’s happening, unfortunately, way more than most parents realize is happening. The second is they’re being exposed to content and information they may not be ready for, or they may not have had any  prior exposure to, and it can be very confusing and difficult and particularly frustrating because it’s something that doesn’t have to be happening, especially to youth. We also see that now kids can easily take any content they see online, plug it into an AI content generator and create brand new images and brand new information that looks remarkably realistic. Most grown adults cannot tell the difference between a bot account versus a real human account. Most adults are unable to tell the difference between mis or disinformation and actual factual information. And most adults make the assumption that what they see online reflects a majority of others when it might only reflect the opinions of a few. Children do worse at all of these things. So if we’re not training them how to live in a world with social media, we’re just sending them out into something that even adults find confusing. We have to be training them how to live in a world that none of us really grew up with. And maybe we all need to be learning this information together.

[Kris Perry]: In terms of attributes of how social media is designed, what attributes of social media design are most associated with problematic neural responses, which is what you’re basically describing even adults struggle with. But in adolescence, what is most associated with those problematic responses?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Well, when you see that a post that you have put up has gotten liked or there’s a nice comment, we have a dopamine response to that in the same way we would if someone nod, smiled, patted us on the back. It’s a moment of social approval. It’s just that this is now kind of really supercharged because it can happen from bot accounts, it  can happen from real people. It can happen 24/7. Well, the area of the brain that has that response is one of the first areas of the brain to develop at age 10, 11 or 12. So there’s a craving for that kind of positive feedback from peers. Now, the reason why this is particularly important is that that area of the brain informs an adjacent region of the brain that encourages us to do more of whatever just gave us that dopamine response. And that link in the brain circuitry is the same link that we see with addiction to harmful substances. Now, I’m not going to talk about whether social media is addictive or not, because psychology researchers get very picky about that phrase, given that there’s no diagnosis for addiction right now to social media. But we do know that it’s led to about 50 % of kids reporting that they don’t feel in control of their social media use. They feel that they can’t stop even when they try and that they’re having symptoms of withdrawal. Now that’s concerning because we know that adolescent brains are built to be vulnerable to this exact phenomenon. And we’ve done nothing to make platforms protective to those vulnerable brains. Look, if adults who have a different brain capacity choose to engage in that behavior, we can say that that’s the adult’s choice. But it doesn’t feel like it’s okay to say that adolescents chose to do so when they have not yet developed the area of the brain that allows them to inhibit their desire to meet every impulse and instinct that they have, which is the area called the prefrontal cortex.

[Kris Perry]: So I heard that in all of the work you’ve done, you’ve come up with eight unique attributes of social media use, things like asynchronicity, permanence, availability, et cetera. Can you talk a bit more about those and what your work has shown regarding neural response?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Sure. The human brain is remarkable in its ability to pick up on even the most subtle of social signals, a small change in the tone of our voice, a little alteration in our eye contact. Our brain picks up on all that because we’re a social species. Now, we’ve changed the way that we socially communicate so many times already in human history with the printing press, to the telephone, to email. Why are we making such a big fuss about social media? Isn’t it just the latest of these technological advances? Maybe, but the research suggests maybe not because what’s happened is that it’s changed so many aspects of our social interactions all at once. Not only is this a new medium where we can communicate at different points in time–I can write something today. You could respond to it three years later– but also there’s this focus on visual content. There’s this artificial intelligence that’s driving who we talk to when we are notified to talk to them, even recommending to us who we should be friends with and what we should say in our responses to them. And this quantification of people voting on how much they like you, they like your posts, they like what you said. All of these changes and several others that have all happened at once have created a very scaled down way of social communication such that all the nuance and the subtlety of how we communicate with one another has kind of been lost. So I have to express my entire opinion to you in a hundred characters or so, and you have to agree or disagree with a thumbs up or a thumbs down in a hundred posts. So we’ve become a society that’s kind of begun to shout at each other with very broad polarized statements rather than with nuance and debate and you know, subtlety or half agreement and questions and, you know, that’s changed things a lot. Um, what we find of course, is that the adolescent brain adapts to the environment that it’s brought up in. And in our research, we have looked at kids who have started using their phones for social media in habitual ways. They’re picking up their device a hundred, 200, 300 times a day. We look at that, and look at whether the number of times they’re picking up their phone might be related to changes in how their brain responds from one year to the next, to the next, in response to the same kinds of information that they’re shown while in a brain scanner or an fMRI. And what we find is, you know, perhaps no surprise for anyone who’s seen kids engage in social media use, the more the kids are really stuck looking at those phones and on social media, the more their brain seems to become hypersensitive to any signal that might be about them, to anything that might be about how they’re being socially evaluated by others. They seem to react in this very dramatic way and their prefrontal cortex, the brain’s breaks, as it were, that kind of help us to be more careful and cautious. That seems to respond less and less over time. So we’re kind of bringing up kids in a world where they have to care deeply about what others think of them and be very rapid in their responses. And their brains are actually growing to make them very good at that. Now, if that’s what they need to do for the rest of their lives, and that’s all we want them to be able to do, maybe this is a great adaptation. Maybe their brains will change and they’ll develop other skills later. We don’t know that yet. But what we know now is that probably makes them want to use social media even more because they’re so craving those social signals and they’re not able to stop themselves. And as a result, it probably means that they have been stuck in a cycle and maybe that cycle could continue where they’re likely going to just keep on using their devices for more and more time over the years. And it’s concerning to see this, not just in our own living rooms, but to think that that’s actually happening at the neural level when we see that on a brain scan.

[Kris Perry]: You brought up adaptation, and I can’t help but think about Charles Darwin and how over centuries – millennia – we have made adaptations as a species to survive. And you’re bringing up a really rapid adaptation, and in the case of an adolescent, it may feel like it’s so they can survive. It is such a dramatic increase in exposure, their own personal exposure and to the world, and it’s so rapid and the brain is developing at the very same time. Have you thought about where adolescence as a stage of development will be 20, 30, 40 years from now if we continue on this trajectory that you just described?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: What concerns me is the ways in which kids’ attention to their devices and social media platforms is actually taking them away from things that they otherwise would need for successful adaptation. And that’s particularly concerning because we don’t know what happens if you spend so much time online. But we do know what happens if you lose the opportunity to develop relationships, if you lose the opportunity to have physical exercise, and perhaps most importantly, if you lose your sleep. We know that sleep disruptions are related to, in the next day, less attention, less academic performance, more irritability and emotion volatility, right? So mood swings. We know that kids get in more driving accidents the day after disrupted sleep. But we also know that if kids are getting disrupted sleep night after night or delayed sleep start, it actually is changing the size of their brain growth during adolescence. So we’re stunting the growth of their brains if they’re staying online until midnight, one, or two o’clock, which kids tell us is primarily because of social media. That concerns me more because there might be an opportunity to make up for something that they missed otherwise, but you disrupt that prime growth period, the second most important period for brain growth in our entire lifetimes. You can’t get that back necessarily. And we know that kids are absolutely missing out on sleep because of social media. That scares me for adaptation and for this cohort as much, if not more than, what they’re actually seeing and doing on the device themselves.

[Kris Perry]: No, it is very concerning and sort of this epigenetic question and how we’ve even thought about the connection between trauma and epigenetic changes across generations. Now we’re talking about within one generation, the change to the brain that may be the result of sleep deprivation or other kinds of displacement is very concerning. And you also spoke a little bit about neural vulnerability to social media, and you’ve come out with work recently in collaboration with Eva Telzer, who’s also been on this podcast, about a possible neurobiological basis of vulnerability to the negative mental health effects of social media, social comparison, and interactions with perceived popular people. Can you tell us more about that?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: We are finding that not all kids approach social media in the same way. And this is where I think it’s so important for adults, teachers, to really be talking with kids about how they use it. I often say, if kids are getting online to follow a reputable news feed and talk with their friends about current events or about their feelings, that would be perfectly okay. But if kids are going online and being exposed immediately to harmful content, that would be concerning. And we know that some kids go online specifically to seek out that kind of content. So before we just hand kids a phone or before we just let go of all the parental restrictions, I think we need to ask kids, what are you doing on there? Why are you doing it? How does it make you feel? And I think that if kids tell us that they’re using it for really helpful purposes and it’s enhancing their relationships, let’s not take it away completely. And a lot of kids, particularly those from minoritized backgrounds, say, “This is the only opportunity I have to share the stress of being the only person who looks like me or feels like me in my home, in my school, in my neighborhood.” Let’s not take it totally away. But if kids say, “You know, I go on there and next thing I know it’s three hours and I feel badly about myself and I’m seeing things that I’m shocked I am being exposed to.” That’s a very different conversation. So we need to be thinking about how the individual child is using this and then make adaptations and restrictions and permissions for them that make sense given that child’s development.

[Kris Perry]: Are there certain things parents should look out for that would suggest that their child is processing social media information in a way that puts them at higher risk for depression or other mental health issues?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, we should ask kids to talk with us a little bit about their peer relationships and where they’re getting their information and their assumptions of what their peers really think, feel, and believe. Many kids tell us that they scroll through their feed and they hit like, like, like, like, like on everything because they feel a social burden to like everything that their friends post, because their friends will get mad at them if they don’t. And unfortunately that accidentally communicates to others that, “Gee, I didn’t know this person thought it was okay to do that dangerous behavior or that illegal behavior or that immoral behavior.” And kids are misinterpreting what a like means or what a follower means. So we really have to ask kids, “Where are you getting that information? And why do you believe that kids feel that way?” And if kids seem to have only information about online activities that doesn’t seem to fit with what you understand other kids to believe, that’s a good sign that maybe they’re spending not as much time getting some in-person interactions or some FaceTime or texting interactions that might help them really get that one-on-one contact back.

[Kris Perry]: With all your work in adolescent mental health, media use, and social dynamics, what’s been the one finding that has most surprised you across all these areas?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: It was probably work that we did with a group of 19- to 20-year-olds who were at UNC Chapel Hill doing extremely well academically, and yet told us after we did an experiment with them and took away their devices for a day, they said, “I’m so happy that I was able to put it away. I was shocked at how different I was, and I wish my parents never gave into me when I was 12 and I stamped and I yelled and I cried for a phone. I wish they had held out for longer.” It took us, their professors, to take away their devices for a class assignment – of course, they could choose not to do it, but most did – for them to finally experience the world without social media and without a phone, just for 24 hours. And the number of kids that reported that they were going to make lifelong changes based on the finally first experience of being able to look people in the eyes, sleep when they want to sleep, concentrate, exercise, made me realize just how much kids who have grown up with this just don’t know any other way. And they need help. They need someone to blame for why they’re not on their phones for a day in order to see what the world is like not tied to that device.

[Kris Perry]: So powerful, and I really love that example. And I think about some of the regulations and the shifts that are being experimented with in schools right now where they’re looking at how to separate the child from their device for a few hours a day so that they might experience something similar to what you just described. Has your work affected how you and your family use media?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, my kids are 14 and 12 right now. They do not have phones. They do have iPads, but not social media. And we have talked with them extensively about their own thoughts and feelings, what they know about social media, and what they observe in their friends when their friends get on social media. We fully expect that they will have phones, maybe soon, that they will get on social media probably soon after. But we want to be part of the dialogue and we want to scaffold them slowly, gradually into this process. So that way, by the time that they’re doing it with little to no supervision, we feel that they are carrying with them the knowledge and the values of what we as a family believe in. And they’ll be able to navigate it hopefully with some feeling of competence and confidence in being able to resist some of those temptations. I recommend that every family take a phone-free day as a family and parents talk about how hard it is for even us as the adults. If people with, you know, very sophisticated educational backgrounds who have invested billions of dollars, have invested energy in getting us hooked, no matter how much we think we can resist it, we are probably not going to be successful. So, I think that we need to help kids recognize this is hard for all of us, and let’s have open dialogues about it, which is far better than kind of just letting them figure it out all by themselves.

[Kris Perry]: Those are some great examples that any parents listening right now can implement themselves. I really appreciate how empathetic you are with them. And I know we’ve talked a lot about harms from social media, but as you noted at the beginning, it’s not all bad. Briefly, can you tell us which uses of social media can promote healthy or positive outcomes in adolescents based on your experience?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Yeah, it seems the direct messaging feature is pretty similar to texting. And that can really help to develop one-on-one relationships, which could be nice. It’s also how we use the information we find online. So if it helps us to foster good communication skills offline. Say, “I saw on Facebook, you said something about this event in your life or this stressor you were having. Now let’s go talk about it in more detail.” That can actually be very helpful because we share things online we might not share with somebody otherwise. So that provides a nice entry point, especially for kids that might have a hard time knowing, “How do I strike up a conversation with someone that I don’t really know very well?” And last, we’ve also found that kids have more diversity within their online peer contacts than they do offline. Cause most of us still live in neighborhoods that are relatively segregated. So the opportunity to be able to talk with folks from all different parts of the world with all different interests and backgrounds can be absolutely wonderful if it helps kids to understand the breadth of who we are as humans rather than just one particular viewpoint.

[Kris Perry]: Finally, if you could make one additional suggestion of something that we haven’t covered already to help children lead healthy digital lives today, what would it be?

[Dr. Mitch Prinstein]: Take the phones away at nine o’clock at night. Let them get their sleep. Take the phones away during instructional time at schools if that phone is not being used to assist instruction through an educational app. Scrolling social media while trying to learn AP Chemistry is probably not gonna make you better at AP Chemistry. So, I think it’s important that we give kids time to learn how to focus and on their schoolwork seems pretty important. Some communities might choose to take it away at all times or not. We don’t have the research yet to know what works, but we do know that not only do kids get distracted and have lower grades when they surf the internet in class, but the kids sitting behind them get lower grades, too. So, we wanna do it not only for the kid with the device, but for the secondhand exposure that might be affecting other kids in the classroom as well.

[Kris Perry]: Mitch, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today to discuss these vital topics, adolescent mental health, social development, and media use. Your contributions to this field are remarkable, and I deeply admire and am inspired by your work. Thank you, too, to our listeners for tuning in. And for a transcript of this episode, visit childrenandscreens.org, where you can also find a wealth of resources on parenting, child development, and healthy digital media use. Until next time, keep exploring and learning with us.