How social media affects the mental health of teens

Welcome to the ERLC Podcast, where our goal is to help you think biblically about today’s cultural issues. I’m Lindsay Nicolet, and today we’re talking about social media, teens, and mental health. 

In a recent article published by The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, shares that rates of depression and anxiety in the United States rose by more than 50% in many studies from 2010 to 2019, the suicide rate rose 48% for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131%. He also notes how loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. 

It’s no surprise that social media use is tied to these staggering statistics. Romans 12:2 tells us, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” As Christians who are called to a higher standard of living, how can we exercise discernment and wisdom when it comes to using social media?

Today’s episode on how social media affects the mental health of teens

Joining us on today’s episode to discuss technology and mental health is our colleague Jason Thacker, the director of the ERLC’s Research Institute and a senior fellow. You’ll also hear from Eliza Huie, the director of counseling at McLean Bible Church, located in the Washington, D.C. metro area, and Megan Dickerson, a wife and mom who serves in the Center for Faith and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Links mentioned in the episode can be found here:

• Jonathan Haidt | The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
• Eliza Huie | Raising Kids in a Screen-Saturated World

Episode transcript

Narration: There’s no escaping our digital world. Our kids are growing up in a vastly different environment than we experienced. Technology is used in our everyday lives, and we even carry around a powerful mini computer in our pockets, purses or backpacks. Jason Thacker helps us to lay a foundational understanding to build upon as we engage with technology, especially social media.

Jason Thacker: I think for most people, when we think about technology, we think about it as merely a tool that we use. But I think a better category and a better question for us to be asking is not just how are we using these tools, but how might they be also using us? How are they shaping us, forming our perception of the world, forming our worldview, even the entertainment we see, the images we see, the information, the communication, all of these things are doing something to us. They’re forming and shaping us. 

A lot of times people will think technology is kind of a young person’s problem, but reality, it is for all of us, but it affects us in unique ways. There have been studies upon studies showing that technology has some extremely negative effects, especially for adolescents. Especially for teenagers. This is especially prevalent among young teenage girls, not only in terms of body perception and body realities, but also just their understanding of their identity. I mean, we think about the way that social media shapes, informs us in that perspective too. How we present ourselves to the world, the way we want to feel about ourselves, understand ourselves. 

And I think specifically, one of the ways that it shapes us and forms us is how we understand ourselves as human beings. Also how we present ourselves to other people online. You think of an Instagram feed with perfectly curated images that may have taken hours upon hours, or an Instagram reel hours upon hours to get it just right to connect with people online. Not thinking that that actually is a significant burden that is placed on the person, whether it’s the, “influencer,” or even the user themselves. How they start to compare themselves to other people, how they start to want to be perceived in a particular light by a particular group of people. They want to be able to say the right things at exactly the right time in order to gain or garner specific support, or to be identified with a particular tribe or something like that online. 

But we know as Christians, that God has clearly revealed to us not only who He is, but also who we are as His image bearers, that we are created male and female in His image. And that has a direct bearing on how we think about everything in our lives, especially in terms of ethics in the public square. 

So I think we have to start to realize that technology is not a neutral tool, that it’s doing something to us. It’s shaping, informing us our perception of God, our perception of ourselves as human beings, but also the world around us and our neighbors, that people online are actually people. I think one of the most damaging aspects of social media life is that we often treat that as well. That’s just kind of online life, or that’s how they talk about themselves online or engage with other people online. In reality, we’re called to love God and to love our neighbors, ourselves, holistically, whether that’s, “in real life,” or that’s actually in our online personas and digital kind of interactions with one another. To be a holistic, integrated person, to understand how God calls us, to love Him, and to love our neighbors ourselves. So when we start to kind of flip the script on the nature of technology, not just something we use, but actually something using us, shaping us, informing us, I think we’ll have a more holistic perspective on the role of these tools and how we can navigate the challenges, but as well as the opportunities before us.

Narration: In a digital age, unlimited access to people and information through our smart devices has some benefits, but the dangers associated with it are undeniable, especially for our young people and social media. Here are Eliza Huie and Megan Dickerson discussing major ways social media is shaping teens.

Eliza Huie: There are positive things about social media. It definitely can promote social connection. It can promote learning and creative exploration as far as, like, what are your gifts? And that can kind of come into self expression in positive ways. But there are so many concerns about it as well. And so certainly one of the biggest dangers is they’re exposed to so much content. And I don’t know if I would say that is the biggest danger, but it’s certainly high on my priority. As I’m talking to people, whether you’re a teenager or an adult, how much information are you getting, and do you understand how shaping that is? I think the danger is that we don’t realize that being on the Internet as prolifically as we are, we are exposed to so much information, and it is shaping our worldview. And so we need to understand that every bit of content that we are receiving is worldview shaping. And ultimately, God’s Word is what should shape our worldview. Eternal truths should shape our worldview.

Megan Dickerson: When I was thinking about this, I thought about it in two different ways. First is that our kids see what they’re missing out on. So teenagers that are on social media see that their friends are getting together without them. And so it’s already such a hard time of life when you don’t fit in with your friends at school or at church or in real life. That is so hard. But then when you add that component of, you get to see everybody in the world, and you get to see all these things that you’re missing out on. Maybe when I was in high school, a couple of my friends would get together and I just wouldn’t know about it, and so it wouldn’t impact me as much. But now our kids know what their friends are doing and what they’re left out of, and our kids don’t have the skills to not always be comparing themselves. I know that’s hard for me as an adult, even to see what I’m not invited to or what I feel left out of. And our kids don’t have those skills yet. And so I think that that really contributes to their mental health. And especially when we can be anonymous online and say things that we would never say straight to a person’s face, but something about through the computer screen or through the phone, it feels different. And so people are mean, and we need to protect our kids from that for a little bit longer. 

I think the second thing that I thought about was the way that, so I’m almost 40, and the way that younger generations talk about mental health is really helpful in a lot of ways, but it often feels like everything is a mental disorder and there’s just not room to have a bad day. So sometimes we can self diagnose ourselves from TikTok, and that might be helpful. So there’s some things that I’m like, oh, maybe my husband has had ADHD his whole life, but he’s really smart and he was able to cope with it. But it can be really problematic for our kids who aren’t actually depressed. They’re just kind of sad for a day. And so figuring out for them where the line is between I’m just having a bad day to this is a mental health issue, the lines get really blurry. I thought about my nine year old. She has a hard time getting to sleep, and every night she’ll come down and say, well, I bumped my knee and I need a Band-Aid. And we’re like, so the expectation is that you’re just going to be uncomfortable sometimes. And I think for our teenagers and a lot of younger generations, we have to help them see that we’re not going to be at peak mental health every day, and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that our mental health is disordered in some way.

Narration: Brain development in adolescents and teenagers has a significant impact on their ability to process the information they take in Athens, such a rapid pace on social media. Here’s Eliza to explain the science behind it.

Eliza Huie: In order to answer this question of how social media is different for teens rather than adults is to understand the stages of brain development. There are two times in our postnatal afterbirth life that our brain develops very quickly, and one is the early stages of development that happen between the ages of two and five. So in those toddlers and early childhood years, we see rapid brain development. And there is one other stage of life where that same amount of significant growth happens, and that’s between the ages of 12 and 18. In those teen years, you see another burst of really significant growth in those years. In between, it kind of slows down and you kind of see some steadying. But that’s why sometimes, and I don’t mean this disparagingly in any way, but a teenager can sometimes look like a toddler, and a toddler can sometimes look like a teenager because there’s significant brain development. They’re seeing things for the first time in their brains in new ways. 

And so to answer that question, we need to understand that teens are under significant development in their brains at this stage of life. And so in light of that, there is the potential for some of the negative impacts to be greater. Things like the impact of the possibility of addiction is greater during that time of development, because those neural pathways are much more formative during that stage of development. It’s also more impacting because that is the stage of life where we are developing in understanding how to maintain focus and to process information for executive functioning, for logical responses and so forth. And so information is being wired differently during that team stage of life. It’s also good to understand that that has a direct impact on mood. So you have the prefrontal cortex, which actually brings inhibition, kind of slows things down, lets you think logically about things. So you have that part of the brain that’s not fully developed, but you have them kind of putting thoughts together and having this rush of adrenaline while they learn and so forth, but they don’t always have the inhibition and so they move into things a lot quicker. If I could just say, adults aren’t immune. And so we need to be aware that we are also impacted by the addictive nature of screens in general, and how just a like or a comment just can hit us in such a way that we just continue to go after those things as well.

Narration: Teenagers can’t navigate this digital landscape on their own. It’s up to parents, churches, and caregivers to help them discern the good and bad of social media and to develop healthy habits when it comes to devices. Eliza, Megan, and Jason discuss how we can disciple younger generations to choose wisdom, and how our example lays the foundation for that discipleship.

Eliza Huie: We’re always hungry for the practical steps, and that’s part of the reason why I wrote raising kids in a screen saturated world. And it is really just a small book focused on tips. And I will just tell you, the first tip that I share is still the tip that really is motivating me in my own social media use. And that tip is to model digital discipline. So, parents, if you are worried about your teens’ use, pay attention to your own use. We really need to be able to show them that there is a space where screens don’t need to be. And so, as you think about modeling digital discipline, think about that. Like, what does it look like for you as an adult to have places in your own life where screens don’t exist? So no computer, no phone, nothing that is a screen? Teens actually are looking for ways to streamline their screen use. They recognize the negative impact it’s having on their attention, their focus, just their self image and so forth. And so that would be my biggest takeaway is to have spaces in your life that screens do not exist. And then from time to time, make some adjustments so that you are modeling for them that digital discipline that is so needed in their lives.

Megan Dickerson: This is so hard because we’ve talked to several youth pastors now who’ve tried to make changes, and the biggest people that push back on those changes are parents. Parents are the ones that don’t want their kids to, like, put their phone away for the service because they want access to them. I think that there are two ways that churches, and especially youth ministers can approach this. The first would be to create a phone free space for teenagers. That’s going to work better for smaller churches than larger churches. I think if you talk with your student leaders and help them to see the value of just putting their phone away, using a physical Bible, not the Bible on their phone, and just not looking at their phone during the time that they’re meeting with their small group and changing the culture from the ground up, that’s going to go a long way. 

I think the other thing that they could do is to engage in social media in a positive way, that the church’s presence on social media can give places to hang out in real life. Hey, this grade is going to connect at this time so you can go and make friends in real life so that they can see that our teenagers can see that they are whole beings. They’re not just their online presence, but they are holistic people that need to see people in real life. 

I think it’s encouraging parents to model healthy relationships with their phones and with social media. I know, like, when I have a hard time putting my phone away when I’m on social media more, my kid is like, hanging over my shoulder, wanting to see all the pictures, wanting to see what’s going on. When I’m on my phone more, that’s when I get requests for smartphones more. 

And so we know that in so many areas of parenting, more is caught than taught. It doesn’t really matter what we say if we’re not displaying it. I think that’s probably the biggest aspect of my parenting philosophy, is that if I want my kids to love Jesus, I have to love Jesus and I have to show that to them. If I want my kids to love the Bible, they have to see that I love the Bible. They’re not going to just hear my words and take them at face value. They’re smarter than that. And it’s helping our kids and helping us to be comfortable with being different that we are christians. We are different from the world that looks as parents like making choices that maybe our kids aren’t going to like all the time. That looks like for our kids being left out of some of those conversations because there’s a greater good and a greater danger than they can see. 

We encourage our kids to wear helmets because they don’t see that there’s a danger in riding their bikes without it. And we have to help them see the dangers of social media because they just can’t see them. That’s why God gives them parents, to guide them through these things. It really is on the parents and on our churches to teach them and shepherd them through that and to walk with them through these very personal decisions. But it’s helping parents and helping our churches see that there really are dangers. There’s danger to our souls when we are sucked into this comparison with other people, when we are focused on these online relationships more than just loving our neighbor and seeing the people that are right in front of us.

Jason Thacker: The Christian ethic actually reminds us that it’s actually an other oriented life. Carl F. H. Henry once said that love for another is the whole sum of Christian ethics. This idea of loving God and loving our neighbors, ourselves as other oriented. We live in a day where it’s very self oriented. It’s about what I want, what I desire, my body, my choice. Me, me, me, me. The Christian ethic calls us outside of ourselves to love God and to love our neighbors, ourselves, as we align our lives with Christian truth, with what God has revealed to us, not only in creation, but specifically in His Word and a Christian understanding of reality that we are to engage as we navigate in a relationship with our Lord, in relationship with other people. While online tools can be helpful for connecting, you’re never truly connecting. You’re not building a lot of the rich, deep relationships, especially when things get messy. It’s very easy to, “disconnect when things get hard or difficult or messy.” But in real life, it’s actually real life and real friendships. Real relationships are messy. They’re hard, they are difficult. They are not always fun. They’re not always Instagram worthy. And I think we need to slow down to ask some of these bigger questions of social media and technology in our day as that relates to not only child and adolescent development, but also for the rest of us as well, who may not be, quote, digital natives. But nevertheless, we can see something changing about ourselves, our disposition, our outlook on life, just because we spend more time online.

Narration: The truth is we can institute best practices and healthy boundaries, and we should. But real change regarding social media happens at the heart level for kids and adults alike. We need the Holy Spirit to give us the wisdom and motivation to entangle the complicated digital web we so often find ourselves trapped in. Here’s Jason with how an embrace of the Great Commandment will reorient our relationship with social media and our devices.

Jason Thacker: I wish I could sit here and give a five or 10 tips and tricks to write your relationship with social media and technology, or five or 10 tips to fix your relationship, or to fix your child’s relationship with technology. It’s a lot more complicated than that. We don’t have simplistic solutions. What we need to do is have a holistic perspective to realize, yeah, I might be able to do that. I might be able to have all of the different social media platforms. I could have a burgeoning, you know, online platform. But is that actually good for me? So what I’m encouraging parents to do is to not only connect with their children, not only connect with their teenagers, to show where they have fallen themselves. It’s not, again, it’s not just a young person’s problem, it’s an everybody problem. If we recognize that to have some of those raw and honest and open conversations and say, is this actually good for me? Is this helping me to raise my child in the fear and the admonition of the Lord? Is it helping me to develop virtue? You need to realize there’s not a magic age for a smartphone? I think a lot of people say, well, it’s 13 because you’re officially a teenager. Well, reality is at 13, 14, 15, our brains are still very much developing. We may not have the social and the public understanding and virtuous skills to be able to navigate those types of things. So it may be holding that off until later in life. The recent book out by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation has very good kind of advice, helping us to think that he’s not coming to it from a christian perspective, but he’s showing the reality is that we have often kind of thrown our children into what he calls kind of a Mars like environment, hoping they survive, because we don’t really understand what’s going on here. We don’t understand a lot of the motivations behind these tools and their designers, the money that can be made to keep our attention and to keep it as long as possible. So I think when we start to slow down, to recognize more holistically what technology is, we’ll also start to recognize. And, you know, just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should. Not only for our teenagers and young people, but also for ourselves, to say, let’s cultivate wisdom. Let’s cultivate some virtues, and a lot of that might be the virtues of limits, to slow down, to pull back, to rethink how we engage online. Because again, at the end of the day, our goal, as Christ very clearly told us in Matthew 22 is to love the Lord our God, with our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbors ourselves. How is social media, how is our use of technology helping us to love God and to love our neighbors ourselves? If that’s not aiding that pursuit, maybe we need to step back from it and reevaluate so that we can reorient our life toward that love of God and love of neighbor.

Narration: We live in a complicated culture situated within a world complicated by sin. As a result, the choices we face aren’t always cut and dry, and we can’t always anticipate the consequences. This is certainly the case with technology and social media. Our society and our children have already suffered so much in our smart age. We need spiritual wisdom to discern how we can redeem our use of these devices for the good of our children, our own mental health, and the priority of loving the Lord with all of our heart, soul, and mind. May we help the next generation live set apart lives when it comes to social media for the glory of God and their witness to the world. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of The ERLC Podcast. Join us next time as we talk about counseling and mental health.