Nothing to ‘like’ about social media’s damage to our kids

Ten-year-olds are self-harming as unregulated social media creates an anxious and unstable generation of digital natives. Surely our kids’ well-being comes before tech giants, writes Kylie Lang.

Who is going to take responsibility for the generation of screwed up women we are blithely creating?

Can we expect the captains of social media to fess up and admit they’ve plundered the self-esteem of millions of girls the world over and offer to pay for their psychological recovery?

Hardly.

But unless steps are taken now, a mass insecurity complex is what we will be forced to deal with and the fallout will affect families, businesses and even our national psyche.

How can it be that girls as young as eight have already identified that they have a “good” side when being photographed? Whatever happened to the whimsy of childhood?

Former Australian netball captain Laura Geitz shared this sorry observation at a breakfast I attended last Friday in the Maserati showroom for International Women’s Day.

Geitz gets to talk with lots of girls through her coaching clinics across Queensland and while she’s technically there to offer performance tips about sport, it’s the emotional fragility of kids that is grabbing her attention.

Rightly so.

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The 31-year-old champion netballer, whose second child is due in July, reckons many girls are unduly preoccupied with their looks and already sucked into the social media vortex where images must be carefully curated.

This is not just anecdotal evidence, sadly.

Being natural, unfiltered and real are things of the past as young people — including boys, to a lesser extent — preen and prime for the online world.

Doctors and psychologists are already dealing with the fallout from this unhealthy behaviour, with 10-year-olds self-harming and one in four teenagers heading for a “serious mental illness”, according to Mission Australia and the Black Dog Institute.

Something needs to happen to prevent this cycle of esteem damaging exposure. Picture: supplied

Certainly, there are other factors at play, but the links between social media use and mental wellbeing are tangible.

New research shows the longer children spend on social media, the greater their depressive symptoms, such as low self-esteem and poor body image.

Using social media for three to five hours a day leads to a 26 per cent increase in depression scores in girls and 21 per cent in boys.

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Kids who are online for more than five hours — seriously, where are the parents? — have worse outcomes, with a 50 per cent spike in depression scores for girls and 35 per cent for boys. Even light social media use has kids agreeing with statements like, “I felt miserable or unhappy” and “I didn’t enjoy anything at all”.

The study, of almost 11,000 children aged 14, was conducted by the University of Essex and University College in the UK, but there’s no comfort to be found in thinking the situation is any better here.

Melanie Zimmer-Gembeck, a professor in applied psychology at Griffith University, has observed a “steep growth” in appearance-related anxiety symptoms in the early teenage years.

There has been a clear shift from typical, or unremarkable, body image concerns that occur in most girls and many boys to heightened fears that interfere with normal day-to-day living.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Professor Zimmer-Gembeck says appearance was always a focus among her friends — you had to wear the right clothes to be in the popular crowd, for example — but what’s changed is that today it has become an obsession.

Body image problems are now the norm for girls and commonly found in boys from age eight, according to one of her research papers, published last year on Cambridge University Press’s Development and Psychopathology website.

How to tell if your child is afflicted?

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There will be frequent checking of appearance, anxiety about not looking right, and attempts to cover up or hide.

It doesn’t stop there because Zimmer-Gembeck says appearance-related anxieties can develop into body dysmorphic disorder, a mental illness characterised by excessive preoccupation with a perceived physical flaw.

What is the solution? Picture: supplied

How to protect young people from such hugely self-defeating behaviour she is not sure, but I think it’s obvious that one of the solutions is to encourage — and model — better and more moderate use of social media. Set limits around screen time and enforce them.

The emotional wellbeing of our young people is everyone’s concern.

Unstable or anxious kids grow into adults who are likely to pass their own insecurities on to their children.

There’s also the social cost of individuals living compromised or tortured lives because they’ve come to base their self-worth on their outer shell.

Add to this the financial cost of mental ill-health — currently 4 per cent of GDP or $4000 for every taxpayer, totalling more than $60 billion every year, according to the National Mental Health Commission — and it’s clear things have to change.

The commission says prevention and a focus on early interventions will reduce the need for complex and costly catch-ups.

No argument from me, and a fine place to start is with social media.

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