The addictive pull of screens: how social media is changing the young brain

By Barbara S. Boatwright

Dr. Barbara Boatwright.

Few inventions have entered childhood as rapidly — or as deeply — as the smartphone. For today’s children and young

adults, a screen may be a classroom, playground, entertainment center, social gathering place, news source, shopping mall and means of self-expression, all contained in a device that fits in a pocket.

The remarkable power of these technologies is also what makes them potentially dangerous. The concern is not simply that children spend “too much time” looking at screens. It is that many digital platforms are deliberately designed to capture attention, stimulate reward pathways, encourage repeated checking, and make disengagement difficult. For a developing brain, that combination can be especially powerful.

The United States Surgeon General now warns that excessive and harmful screen use presents meaningful risks to children and adolescents, including disruption of sleep, mental health, attention, physical activity, and healthy development.

A brain designed to seek reward

To understand why social media can become so compelling, it helps to understand the brain’s reward system.

Human beings are naturally attracted to novelty, social approval, and unexpected rewards. These experiences activate neural systems involving dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with motivation, learning, anticipation and reward. Social media platforms can repeatedly stimulate these systems through notifications, likes, comments, new videos, messages and an endless stream of novel information.

The important feature is unpredictability. A child may open an app without knowing whether the next video will be funny, shocking, exciting or personally rewarding. That uncertainty encourages continued checking: Maybe the next one will be better.

This is fundamentally different from watching a television program with a predictable ending. Many social-media environments have no natural stopping point. The feed simply continues.

After a while, the behavior can become habitual:  Boredom leads to the phone; anxiety leads to the phone; loneliness leads to the phone; waking up leads to the phone; going to bed leads to the phone. Eventually, the device may become not merely a source of entertainment but a preferred mechanism to regulate emotion.

That is one reason psychologists increasingly distinguish ordinary screen use from problematic or compulsive use. Warning signs may include strong cravings, spending more time than intended, unsuccessful efforts to cut back, irritability when access is removed, secrecy and neglect of relationships, school, sleep or other activities.

Why children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable

The developing brain is not simply a smaller version of the adult brain. During adolescence, systems involved in social reward, attention, emotion and risk-taking undergo major changes.

The American Psychological Association notes that beginning around early adolescence, young people become increasingly sensitive to attention, approval, and feedback from peers. At the same time, the brain systems responsible for mature self-control continue developing into adulthood.

That creates a particularly vulnerable period.

A teenager may understand intellectually that scrolling for another hour is not in his or her best interest, yet the immediate social reward can overpower the more distant consequences. The adolescent brain is essentially being asked to resist an extraordinarily sophisticated reward system at precisely the stage of life when sensitivity to social acceptance is naturally heightened.

Social media can therefore magnify ordinary adolescent concerns:  Do people like me? Am I attractive enough? Am I popular enough? Am I missing something? Where do I fit?

Instead of asking these questions occasionally, a young person can receive hundreds of social signals every day.

The cost of constant comparison

One of the most profound dangers is social comparison.

Children and young adults are exposed not simply to their friends but to carefully selected versions of thousands of other people’s lives. Photographs are filtered, moments are edited, accomplishments are highlighted and failures are usually hidden.

The result can be a distorted picture of reality: everyone else appears happier, more attractive, more successful, more adventurous and more socially connected.

The Surgeon General has specifically identified concerns about social comparison and appearance-related content. Research summarized by the APA has also found substantially worse self-reported mental-health and body-image outcomes among teens with the highest levels of social-media use, although these associations do not prove that social media alone causes those outcomes.

This distinction matters. Social media is not the sole cause of anxiety, depression, loneliness or poor self-esteem. Young people bring their own temperaments, family environments, circumstances and vulnerabilities to the experience. But digital environments can amplify those vulnerabilities.

The sleep problem

Perhaps the most underestimated danger is sleep. A teenager who stays up until midnight scrolling has not merely lost an hour of entertainment. He or she has lost an hour of a biological process essential to learning, memory, emotional regulation and healthy brain development.

The APA advises that adolescent social-media use should not interfere with sleep or physical activity and notes that technology use — particularly close to bedtime — is associated with sleep disruption.

There are several mechanisms at work. Notifications and emotionally stimulating content keep the brain alert. The habit of checking the phone can delay bedtime. Anticipating what might happen next can also make disengagement difficult.

The irony is striking: a tired teenager may reach for a screen because he or she feels stressed or bored, while the screen itself contributes to the fatigue, irritability and emotional instability that make escape into it more attractive.

What children lose while they are online

Another danger is harder to measure — opportunity cost. Every hour spent scrolling is an hour not spent sleeping, reading, exercising, talking with parents, playing outside, practicing an instrument, building something, solving a difficult problem or simply being bored.

Boredom itself has value. It gives the mind room to wander, imagine, reflect and create.

Likewise, face-to-face conversation teaches subtle skills that text, emojis or short videos cannot fully reproduce:  reading facial expressions, tolerating disagreement, listening patiently, negotiating, apologizing, showing empathy and understanding another person’s emotional state.

The Surgeon General emphasizes that social media should not displace opportunities for reciprocal, in-person social interaction.

Screens are not all the same

It is important not to treat every screen as equally harmful. A child using a tablet to learn mathematics is not doing the same thing as a child endlessly scrolling short-form videos. A teenager videochatting with a grandparent is not engaging in the same activity as a teenager comparing his or her appearance with influencers for two hours.

The content, context, purpose, timing and emotional effect of screen use all matter. The surgeon general similarly emphasizes that social media’s effects depend on factors including the amount of use, the content encountered, the nature of the interactions and whether screen use displaces sleep and physical activity.

The goal, therefore, should not be to declare technology the enemy.

The goal is to prevent technology from becoming the master of attention.

Reclaiming the human brain

The answer is not necessarily to eliminate screens. It is to establish boundaries strong enough to protect the developing brain. Families can create screen-free meals and bedrooms, disable unnecessary notifications, establish technology-free periods during the day, protect bedtime, encourage outdoor activity and face-to-face friendships and teach children to recognize when an app is manipulating their attention.

Parents also have an important responsibility to model the behavior they expect. A child is unlikely to believe that phones are dangerous when every adult in the room is continually checking one.

Most importantly, children need something to move toward, not merely something to move away from:  conversation, friendship, nature, sports, music, books, creativity, service, work, faith, family and the satisfaction of mastering something difficult.

The central question is therefore larger than how much screen time is too much?

It is this:  What kind of human being is a child becoming while spending these hours looking at a screen?

Technology can expand the mind, connect people, educate, entertain and create extraordinary opportunities. But childhood and adolescence are also the years when attention, self-control, identity, relationships and habits are being formed.

We should therefore be cautious about allowing commercial technologies engineered to maximize engagement to become the primary environment in which young brains develop.

The Surgeon General’s current message is appropriately sobering: children need protection from harmful and excessive screen use, while families and communities need practical ways to help young people reconnect with the physical world.

The objective is not to raise children who fear technology. It is to raise children who can use technology without being used by it.

Want to learn more?

Dr. Lisa Strohman, JD, Ph.D., a leading national expert on the impact of screens and technology on the developing brain and mental health, will be speaking in Charleston at two upcoming events.

A free forum introducing Digital Citizen Academy, an educational curriculum designed for educators and youth ministry leaders to train responsible technology use for Grades 1 through 12, will be held Wednesday, October 14 from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. at St. Andrews Church, 440 Whilden St., Mt. Pleasant.

To register, please visit: www.myliferesources.org/dca-forum.

Also, The Gathering Dinner with a keynote address by Dr. Strohman entitled, The Power of One:  One Intervention, One Connection, One Life Changed, is Thursday, October 15 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at The Cedar Room at the Cigar Factory, 701 East Bay St.

Advance ticket purchase is required; to do so, visit: www.myliferesources.org/events.