Australia’s social media ban should be a call to action for parents

Kid culture is getting ready to change … in Australia. A nationwide social media ban for everyone under 16 is going into effect this month. So, what exactly will it look like? How are they going to implement and enforce it? What will the results be? All unknowns at this point, but one thing we do know is it’s been a long time coming.

Since the early 2000s when the smartphone industry took over the world’s attention span (and our households), there has been ample opinion and a growing body of evidence about its impact on our young people. Some of the evidence has been causational and some correlational, but all contribute to a cohesive storyline on smartphones and social media in relation to our children and youth.

Psychological research results include, but are not limited to, shortened attention spans; lowered rates of in-person social interaction; decrease in age appropriate interpersonal skills; higher rates of body image dysmorphia and self-injurious behavior; rates of anxiety disorder and depressive disorder; sleep disturbance; delayed fine motor coordination among small children; and lowered rates of outdoor playtime. I’m just getting started and I haven’t even talked about cyberbullying, youth suicide rates, adult content addiction or the erosion of self-regulation skills at age level.

Beth Collums is an Atlanta-based writer. Her professional background as a child and family therapist and passion for offering support to families gives her a uniquely insightful perspective on the intersection of mental health, relationships and education. (Courtesy)

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Was it the government that should’ve regulated it sooner? Was it the parents who should’ve been more reticent to accept the technology into their family culture? Was it tech companies that have gone rogue in free market capitalism?

Australia is the first country to attempt to wrangle the problem at the federal level through national restrictions on social media for kids under 16. It’s like when the first one of your friends gets a boyfriend and you’re jealous and curious all at the same time, meanwhile wanting to know all the juicy details. The world is waiting with bated breath on how it’s going to go.

Lawsuits have begun as tech companies are set to lose billions of Australian dollars. News has already been reported that children on Reddit streams and in chatrooms have conversations trying to attempt a coup, figure out a way around the restrictions, conversing on how to fake ID information and where to buy masks that would trick facial recognition technology.

This, my friends, is the behavior of addicts. They need their “fix,” and they will go through hell and high water to get it. Dopamine knows no bounds.

And who could blame them? Kids under 16 have never known a world to exist without a supercomputer of “friends” and entertainment in their pockets. They are rightfully anxious, as many behavioral addictions are being revealed. Unhealthy pleasure-seeking pathways are being threatened and they are experiencing fear.

Fear is also the reason why many parents — after terabytes of scientific papers have proven detrimental impact — still aren’t changing their behavior in regulating their own children’s device and social media usage. We’re afraid of life for our children without social media and smartphones. Will they be left out, have no friends, miss important information or miss out on opportunities?

And smartphones and social media make kids happy, right? (Refer to paragraph three for a gentle reminder.)

I have fallen into this trap, too. You want your kid to be liked, to be “normal,” to have friends and most of all to be happy. We know how important social development and peer assimilation is in adolescence. Maybe we just don’t want to give our kids any reason to be sad in an era plagued by sad kids.

We want the government to fix the problem so we don’t have to. We want schools to ban the phones so we don’t have to take them during school hours. We want Big Tech to suddenly get a conscience and start using a moral compass when making algorithms that entrap kids.

I can’t become a lawmaker and propose legislation against profit mongering our kids’ attention spans nor can I become a school administrator and change policy to ban phones in the K-12 classroom. I can’t become a tech company C-suite executive and launch virtue-based algorithm policy. But what I can do is parent my children using the best information available.

Parents, what we can do is what we should do.

Set fear aside and do the next right thing. Simply put, this means not giving your child a smartphone before age 14, putting time restrictions on apps and total downtime block before bedtime, not allowing smartphones or computers in bedrooms, not allowing social media before age 16, monitoring site visits, searches and histories because devices are not our children’s private property until they pay the bills for them.

Let’s take back our authority, parents. Let’s use the voice we have, even if it’s only in our own homes. Let’s not blame others for our parenting mistakes we have made out of fear or ignorance. The body of evidence is large enough at this point to not give any of us an excuse of not knowing any better.