October 17, 2024
How influential is social media on young people's mental health?
A significant body of evidence tells us that young people's mental health has decreased over time, and a potential link between social media use and this mental health decline has triggered wide interest and concern. Research into social media use and mental health is being conducted at a rapid pace but, so far, findings are far from conclusive. Our new Researcher of the Month, Dr Margarita Panayiotou, adds to this body of work. She led a team of researchers who recently published a study involving thousands of young people in the UK. It set out to explore the interplay between social media use and teens' mental health, wellbeing and social life, and found that when considering the complex combination of multiple factors, things such as a lack of family support are arguably more important for adolescent mental health than social media use.
Summary
The study uses data from the Understanding Society cohort, and explores the responses of 12,041 UK young people aged 10-15 from a nationally representative sample. The Understanding Society study follows thousands of young people and adults longitudinally, asking them to complete questionnaires every year. Adolescence is a complex developmental stage influenced by multiple interacting biological, social, and broader societal factors. These might include friendships, family relationships, teens' general environment, wider societal issues and school, as well as digital habits. Many existing studies focus on social media as an isolated issue. In contrast, Dr Panayiotou wanted to examine the impact of social media within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development more generally. To do so, she and her team used a 'panel network analysis' to explore associations between social media use, mental health symptoms and social systems.
"Generally, our findings indicate that the time spent interacting with social media is among the least influential factors within adolescent mental health, functioning, and social life. In fact, life dissatisfaction and lack of family support were the most influential risk factors for females and males, respectively." (Dr Panayiotou, et al., 2023)
Dr Panayiotou and her team found that social media use was one of the least influential factors on mental health, functioning and wellbeing for this specific group of young people. They found that there were other factors, such as a lack of family support, concentration and restlessness problems, general life and family satisfaction which were all more influential on the participants’ mental health than social media.
This is not to say that there were no links. For females, reports of greater social media use, on average, were related to worse concentration and life satisfaction, whereas for males, these were associated with lower family support and higher levels of worry. Importantly, positive social media associations were also observed, but for females only, where higher use was related to less nervousness and greater friend satisfaction.
For females, greater levels of social media use predicted more concentration problems. This was not the case for males. However, interestingly, dissatisfaction with schoolwork and symptoms of restlessness were found to be more influential on concentration than social media (dissatisfaction with schoolwork having twice the effect of social media).
The network model allowed the researchers to see some interesting sequencing of events, or cascading effects. As an example, for males, being bullied could lead to social withdrawal. In turn, this predicted greater family dissatisfaction, which in turn predicted worse family support, finally predicting greater social media use and potentially influencing happiness levels. For males, unlike females, social media was not found to predict any indicators across time. In fact, for boys, the opposite was found to be true, in that greater social media use was predicted by a lack of family support. It is therefore possible that young males who do not have a good family support system may be more likely to resort to social media. On the other hand, in females, the study showed a sequential, cascading effect where dissatisfaction with appearance may potentially reduce general life satisfaction. In turn, this might impact on happiness levels, which might in turn influence levels of social withdrawal.
Implications
“Our findings suggest that the current depiction of social media use as the culprit of adolescent mental health difficulties is unwarranted and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.” (Dr Margarita Panayiotou et al, 2023)
In the conclusion to their paper, Dr Panayiotou and team note that in terms of targeting risk and protective factors in the complex systems underpinning the development of adolescent mental health, the findings suggest that intervention efforts focusing on key aspects of young people’s social lives and their experience of school might be more beneficial than simply attempting to regulate their time spent on social media. So what can parents and teachers do?
Speak with young people openly to identify their specific needs.
Take an interest in their digital lives and take on board what they say that they need, rather than making assumptions. Consider what key challenges they face to enable a focus on tailored guidance. Aim to identify the positives and manage the negatives.
Make use of existing resources.
Organisations such as Childnet, Internet Matters and our own Tooled Up platform all offer excellent, specific, evidence-based guidance on social media issues, which go beyond safety to consider other issues such as appearance or fear of missing out.
Be curious.
Talk to young people about their use of social media. Ask them what they like about the platforms that they're using. Where do they engage that makes them feel good? What have they learned? Asking curious questions can help to establish what aspects of their use are beneficial and can help to nudge them away from anything that doesn’t make them feel good.
Acknowledge the challenges that they face.
Some challenges associated with social media appear again and again in research. One of the main pressures that we know about is appearance, comparison and body ideals. Other important issues to consider include the pressure of staying online and following digital etiquette, fear of missing out, the exposure to risky content, and the potentially overwhelming exposure to information. In conversations with young people, acknowledge that if they do struggle online, this is very normal and is something that young people commonly report.
Put things into context.
Remember that whilst some experiences are unique to social media (such as the constant exposure to so much information), others have recurred in different contexts over time. Challenges with appearance comparison and body ideals were, in the past, explored on TV or in magazines or newspapers. Now they are online. We can learn from the past here.
Model and develop healthy habits, including phone-free time.
Navigate a balanced approach to life together. This should involve time away from phones and real life socialising, spending time with family where possible and doing other things that you and they find enjoyable, alongside digital experiences. It is important to bear in mind that this will vary depending on a young person's circumstances. Notice and reflect on your own habits too.
Bring young people into conversations around rule setting.
If, as a school or parent, you are considering implementing digital use guidance, or perhaps you are thinking about joint rules across a year or friendship group, make sure that you involve children in their design and try to reach some common agreement around rules that will work. If young people are consulted, and feel involved and invested in guidelines, they are much more likely to follow them.
Be sceptical of simplistic answers to complex questions.
In Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, he argued that smartphones caused a mental health crisis in adolescents through social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. He calls it the “great rewiring of childhood” and “the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s”. Dr Panayiotou believes this to be an overstatement and oversimplification of a very complex issue, especially given what we know about the complexity of adolescent development and mental health. How can one thing be the sole reason behind mental health decline given all these interacting factors? When we do acknowledge complexity, as in Dr Panayiotou’s recent paper, a different picture can emerge, one which stresses the importance of considering our children's lives in the round, not only focusing on one single issue.
Listen to our podcast interview with Dr Panayiotou here.
Dr Margarita Panayiotou
Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Manchester
Dr Margarita Panayiotou is a senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Manchester. She is interested in understanding and improving adolescent mental health. Dr Panayiotou is currently leading a project that focuses on better understanding and assessing adolescent social media experience.
Dr Margarita Panayiotou
Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Manchester
Scroll our research gallery
Dec 17, 2024
Intrinsic reward and word learning
From infancy onwards, humans display an innate motivation to acquire language and to communicate. We start acquiring words as babies and continue to do so throughout our lives. In fact, children are thought to learn over 3000 new words each year. However, relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words, particularly when it comes to adolescents. Adolescence is a period of great neurological change and sensitivity to learning. It's also marked by changes in reading behaviours. Whilst children become skilled readers between the ages of 10 and 18, this period is also associated with motivational changes in reading, with teens frequently showing a disinclination to read for pleasure. This change often coincides with the transition from primary to secondary school. Policy makers are keen to motivate adolescents to read for pleasure, arguing that it would improve not just literacy outcomes, but also result in substantial economic and societal benefit. Recent research has shown that adults find learning words to be intrinsically rewarding, and that this intrinsic reward facilitates the entrance of new words into long-term memory. Our researchers of the month, Professor Saloni Krishnan and Professor Pablo Ripollés, set out to establish whether the same is true for children and teens.
Nov 14, 2024
Delivering effective menstrual education
Research has shown that menstruation and menstrual cycle symptoms can be disruptive and detrimental to physical, mental and social wellbeing. As many as 93% of teen girls experience dysmenorrhea (severe cramps) and girls with a typical cycle experience 11 menstrual cycle-related symptoms on average, potentially including mood changes, stomach cramps and increased levels of anxiety and fatigue. Adolescents with problematic symptoms have reported a negative impact on school attendance, behaviour, confidence around peers and participation in physical activity. In the United Kingdom, evidence suggests that menstrual health education delivered by teachers generally focuses on menstrual cycle biology, as opposed to management of menstruation and menstrual cycle related symptoms. Our latest researcher of the month, Dr Natalie Brown, set out to understand young people’s perceptions of menstrual education in schools and their experiences of menstruating whilst at school, including within physical education. Her study involved nine focus groups with 10-15 year old female pupils attending primary and secondary schools across England and Wales. Pupils highlighted that, in their experience, menstrual education is limited and noted that the menstrual cycle impacts negatively on their school experience, affecting participation in sport and school attendance generally. Participants highlighted a need for more support and information regarding understanding and managing periods in school.
Sep 16, 2024
How do young children’s relationships with parents and teachers impact their adjustment to school?
We already know that children's relationships with their parents and teachers contribute to their school adjustment and achievement, and that positive, close relationships with adults are really important for a wide variety of children’s outcomes. However, few studies have examined interactions between these relationships or sought to address the nuances of children’s experiences in terms of how different relationships have different impact or influence. To address this, along with colleagues, our new Researcher of the Month, Dr Caoimhe Dempsey, has recently published an article which aims to examine the links between children's relationships with their mothers, fathers and teachers, and three domains of school adjustment: academic achievement, academic self-concept and behavioural adjustment in the classroom. By examining a range of data, the researchers sought to find out whether some children are more susceptible to the effects of the quality of their relationship with their teacher.
Aug 19, 2024
Supporting children's transition to secondary school
Supporting children to successfully transition from primary to secondary or senior school is vitally important. It's a big life change, which can leave both parents and children feeling excited and nervous in equal measure. At Tooled Up, we often use the analogy of a journey for the transitional experience. In fact, anyone who has attended or watched a talk with our founder, Dr Kathy Weston, is likely to have heard her say that we'd all want our children to be well prepared for any journey they go on, and that, as loving parents and carers, we wouldn't dream of sending them off on any journey without the right equipment, mindset and strategies to reach their destination safely and securely. Transition to a new school is no different. Research shows that there are numerous holistic protective factors that can help to ease transition. Conversely, it's also the case that problems with successfully transitioning to secondary school and subsequent lower levels of school connectedness are associated with lower education outcomes, school drop-out, higher levels of depression and anxiety, and increased involvement in criminal, violent and antisocial behaviour. Research also shows that these difficulties may not be equal across different socio-demographic variables, with children from underserved communities (including those from minority ethnic backgrounds and lower socio-economic status) and children with behavioural difficulties facing greater challenges during the transition to secondary school. It's therefore important for all parents and educators to consider how to make this transition as seamless as possible. Along with her co-authors, our Researcher of the Month, Dr Aurelie Lange, has published a new paper which evaluates the efficacy of a new UK-based online intervention called Level Up. In it, Dr Lange seeks to explore families' experiences of facilitators and barriers to engagement and change.
Jul 15, 2024
The impact of digital experiences on teens with mental health vulnerabilities
Over the last decade, digital developments have led to major changes in the ways that teens learn, work, play and interact with others. Digital access is a daily reality for most children and young people. Nine in 10 children in the UK now own a smartphone by the time they reach the age of 11, and the large majority of children aged 11 now use social media (78%) and have a social media profile (72%), despite being younger than the minimum age requirement for many platforms. By the time teens are 17 years old, 97% will use social media. Coincident with this change, adolescent mental health problems have also increased in prevalence. It is therefore no surprise that much research has focused on the relationship between digital experiences and adolescent mental health. However, comparatively few studies have directly compared the experiences of teens with mental health conditions meaning that some key questions remain unanswered. Do adolescents with pre‐existing mental health conditions differ in terms of why and how they engage with the digital world compared to peers without such difficulties? Are specific mental health conditions linked to different patterns of digital usage? What role do such differences play in the development and escalation of these conditions? In a recent paper, our Researcher of the Month, Dr Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne, and her colleagues, explore what the evidence shows about the digital experiences of teens with mental health vulnerabilities.
Jun 13, 2024
NELI Preschool: a new oral language enrichment programme for preschools and nurseries
Oral language skills provide the foundation for formal education, yet many children enter school with language weaknesses. Oral language is fundamental to children’s overall development and educational success. It is linked to all higher level cognitive skills and is pivotal for literacy development, and education more generally. It’s also vitally important for children’s social and emotional development. The term oral language refers to a complex set of skills that should ideally work seamlessly together to enable children to communicate with others by producing and understanding language. It’s an umbrella term, encompassing numerous component skills which include having a good vocabulary and the grammatical ability to combine words effectively to convey meaning, along with an understanding of cause and effect, memory skills and the ability to plan what to say and what not to say. Language skills develop rapidly between the ages of 3–6 years making preschool an excellent time to intervene to support language development. Because of this, Dr Gill West and her colleagues – as part of a team headed by Professor Charles Hulme – have developed and evaluated the efficacy of a new language enrichment programme, the Nuffield Early Language Intervention—Preschool (NELI Preschool), which is delivered to children the year before they enter formal education. The programme combines language enrichment for all children, with additional targeted support for those with language needs, potentially narrowing the gap in language skills associated with social disadvantage.
May 16, 2024
"More is more”: the impact of careers education on later outcomes
Does school-based careers education, advice, information and guidance (CEAIG) have any influence on later life outcomes? A body of research has shown that careers education and activities can play an important role in helping young people to prepare for and navigate transitions into the world of work. It has also shown that the quality and quantity of provision can vary considerably, with those who are most socially disadvantaged experiencing the least and lowest quality provision. However, until now, the impact of careers education on later life outcomes has remained unclear. A new paper written by Dr Julie Moote and colleagues seeks to find out what relationship there is between young people’s perceptions of the quality and quantity of school-based careers activities and education experienced at the age of 14–16 and their outcomes several years later, when they are 21–22. Findings are discussed in the light of recent legislation relating to careers support in England, which highlights how important it is to ensure that the needs of all young people transitioning into the workforce and adulthood are met.
Apr 11, 2024
STEM in preschool settings: do teachers’ scientific questions differ by child gender?
In the US, as in numerous countries including the UK, female and non-White students are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields. A significant body of research demonstrates significant gender disparities in STEM achievement, participation and attitudes from early childhood, and that these continue to widen as children get older. Children are strongly influenced by their early environments and conversations with adults. Whilst gendered messages around STEM are now rarely explicit – children are unlikely to be told that girls can’t be scientists – they may receive more subtle messages about representation and belonging. These differences may contribute to children’s beliefs about their own STEM ability, their performance in STEM activities, and their decision to pursue a career in STEM. US researcher, Dr Sona Kumar, and her colleagues sought to explore whether there are subtle differences in the messages that preschool educators send girls and boys about STEM. Previous, older research with caregivers found that parents tended to provide more scientific explanations to boys than to girls. Studies have also found that, within classroom settings, boys often receive more attention from teachers on science-related subjects than girls. Dr Kumar predicted that teachers would direct more scientific questions to boys than girls and tested this by observing a preschool setting.
Mar 14, 2024
Do parental controls work and what are the pros and cons?
Policymakers and technology companies promote the use of parental control tools to ensure children’s safety in our digital age. In recent years, there has been considerable industry investment in this new generation of technical child protection measures, designed to help parents and carers to control what their children see and do online. Some of these tools operate at the level of the device (such as a phone or tablet). Other tools are embedded into specific services, such as Snapchat, or streaming services such as Netflix. Others work at the level of the operating system, such as IOS, Android or Windows, or are provided by your broadband company. Control tools vary in functionality. Some allow parents to limit the amount of time that children spend on a device or particular app. Others can track their child’s location. Internet filters block certain categories of content (violence, adult content or gambling, for example), or specific websites. There are other tools that track children’s online activity (search history, online purchases or activity logs, for example) and provide reports or real-time alerts to parents. Some tools track activity and interactions on social media platforms and can limit children’s contact with unknown users. But how many families actually make use of them, and do they work? Our Researcher of the Month, Dr Mariya Stoilova, and her colleagues, reviewed all available evidence in a recently published study.
Feb 09, 2024
BMI, body dissatisfaction and depression: positive steps forward
We know that more adolescents are experiencing depressive symptoms than in the past, but we don’t yet know precisely why. Noting a need to understand modifiable risk factors for depression, which could inform future preventative work, our researcher of the month, Dr Francesca Solmi, and her team, have recently published new and novel findings about the impact of high BMI and body dissatisfaction on children’s later mental health. They “found strong longitudinal evidence that a high BMI in childhood is linked with an increased risk of depressive symptoms multiple years later” and discovered that body dissatisfaction accounts for a significant proportion of this link, finding strong evidence that being unhappy with one’s appearance at the age of 11 is linked with increased depressive symptoms during the teen years.