Parents are waking up to the dangers of phones and social media for preteens and teenagers. A whopping 84% of U.S. adults “worry about the effect of social media on the mental health of today’s young people,” according to a Harris Poll that came out in June.
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has sparked conversations among parents like few other books. An instant New York Times bestseller, the book features Haidt presenting the case for how the cellphone, and everything on it, has negatively affected almost every measurable mental health marker, increasing sleep deprivation, addiction, loneliness, depression, and more.
Haidt proposes four new norms for all families to follow: No smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and encouragements for more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
An important adage to remember about social media is, “If it’s free, you’re the product.” And it’s not just you, the adult, who is the product, but your children as well. The more children use a phone and its apps, the more money these corporations are making off of them.
This week, Instagram, perhaps sensing that the winds were changing, introduced “teen accounts” to try to appease parents into allowing their children access to the photo-based app. Its press release touts the benefits.
“We developed Teen Accounts with parents and teens in mind,” it reads. “The new Teen Account protections are designed to address parents’ biggest concerns, including who their teens are talking to online, the content they’re seeing and whether their time is being well spent. These protections are turned on automatically, and parents decide if teens under 16 can change any of these settings to be less strict.”
The restrictions include automatically making teen accounts private, limiting whom teenagers can message, restricting sensitive content, and implementing time-limit reminders and sleep mode.
Imagine you’re attending a dinner party, and you’re allergic to dairy. Your host reassures you that she won’t cook the broccoli soup with cream — she’ll just use skim milk instead.
That’s pretty much what Instagram is doing with these teen accounts. Are they better than they were before? Yeah, sure. No parent wants some creep messaging her child, and it’s nice knowing there’s something resembling a content filter.
But these new kinds of accounts were created to fool parents into believing that social media can be made child-friendly — anyone under 16 is, in fact, still a child. That is a lie meant to lull parents into a false sense of security.
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Instagram cannot be made child-safe because the evils of social media aren’t just about the aspects that the social media giant may be able to control. Comparison is the thief of joy, and that is what Instagram traffics in, and why it is irredeemable for brains, especially young, developing ones.
The whole premise of Instagram, leading you to ogle photos of other people’s perfect lives — their food, their vacations, their bodies — instead of going out and living life and seeing everyone’s imperfections in person, is the reason children these days are less happy with their own lives. Instagram teen accounts and their settings are a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, and parents shouldn’t fall for its attempts to pretend the app is in any way appropriate for children.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.