Dr. Wendy (00:00):

Adolescents who are posting may be feeling less authentic in their experiences online because they may be sort of feeling like they’re putting on a front. And one of the things, I’m a developmental psychologist, I focus on adolescents. One of the really key developmental challenges during adolescence is identity development.

Dr. Sarah (00:33):

Tech is impacting our kids in a major way. Yet so many parents are wading through these waters without clear research backed answers and guidance. That is why I am so excited for today’s episode. Joining me is Dr. Wendy Rote, a developmental psychologist and researcher at University of Southern Florida. Wendy is sharing the findings of the newly published Life In Media study, and they aren’t what you might expect. In this episode, we’re unpacking these surprising results, exploring which behaviors are actually linked to increased depression and anxiety, why public posting has been shown to be more harmful than passive scrolling, and how compulsive checking and anxiety can reinforce one another in really powerful ways. Wendy also shares brand new, not yet release data on how school phone policies are affecting students mentally, emotionally, and academically. If you’ve ever been wondering what the research really says about raising kids in a digital world and how you as a parent can support healthy tech habits without creating secrecy and shame, this is a conversation you do not want to miss.

(01:42):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(02:15):

Hello, welcome to the Securely Attached podcast. We are here with Dr. Wendy Rote. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Dr. Wendy (02:26):

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Sarah (02:28):

So I reached out to you because you have been working on some really interesting research that I was reading about, and I really wanted to invite you on the show to talk a little bit about the research that you are working on with respect to smartphone use among 11 to 13-year-old kids. And it’s a pretty big study. So can you tell us a little bit about how the study got started, why it’s important?

Dr. Wendy (03:01):

Sure. Yes. So I’m part of a group of researchers doing what’s called the Life and Media Use Study, and it is a currently the first wave we just completed. And so that’s right now, meaning we don’t have data over time on these kids, but we’re hoping and planning to get that later. And I’ll explain why that’s important later. But this first study is of about 1,511 to 13 year olds in Florida, and it was about a 30 minute survey of these kids really focused on all aspects of their media use and digital lives and relevant outcomes or predictors that we thought would be related to those things, including mental health, including parenting. We also looked at attitudes and beliefs about media use and news and news sources and things like that. So we’re really trying to get a deep dive on how media use, hopefully over time develops in children as they move from being really children into adolescents and hopefully over time young adults who are more and more involved with all the different aspects of the social media world, the news world, and that’s really what we’re trying to understand.

Dr. Sarah (04:38):

Yeah, that’s so interesting because this study is, I mean, I understand the stuff, the data you have so far is not longitudinal, right? This is phase one, right. But can you explain why longitudinal studies are so valuable when it comes to understanding development?

Dr. Wendy (04:56):

Yeah, absolutely. So there are two main reasons why longitudinal studies are really important, and longitudinal of course means tracking the same people over time, so measuring the same people over and over again. And one of the reasons is if you think about development and change, we really need to see how individual people increase or decrease on different behaviors and be able to compare them to themselves. Because if we just look at, let’s say a group of 13 year olds, a group of 11 year olds, a group of 15 year olds, it may be that the 15 year olds are higher on depression than the 11 year olds, but you don’t know if that’s because people get more depressed with age, or maybe something happened at a critical time in the lives of most of those 15 year olds that made them more depressed than the 11 year olds maybe when covid hit, for instance.

(06:05):

And so we really need to be able to see like, okay, well let’s take these 11 year olds and track them for four years, and are they themselves more depressed over time or are they increasing in their digital media use or their time spent on social media? So understanding trajectories those patterns and change, that’s one of the really important aspects of longitudinal research. The other really important thing about longitudinal research is that it helps start to disentangle the direction of effects. So by that I really mean what comes before what or what predicts what. So for instance, if you look at the time spent, the hours spent on social media per day and depression, we find that in this study, for instance, that children not surprisingly, who spend more than six hours a day on social media are more depressed. And we might as humans and parents and researchers say, well, probably spending all that time on social media isn’t good for you and it makes you more depressed. But with cross-sectional research, we don’t really know because it could be the other direction. It could be that kids who are feeling really depressed are not going out, they’re not doing other things. They’re staying home and they’re spending all their time on social media.

(07:42):

And so what longitudinal research helps us do, it’s not perfect. We can’t get totally at causality because it’s not an experiment. We’re not assigning people to groups, but it does let us know what comes before what. And when you combine that with that change element, you can really see, okay, if a kid spends more time on social media than others when they’re 11, are they increasing in their depression more over time than a kid who doesn’t spend more time than others on social media when they’re 11? And the other way around does a kid who’s more depressed at 11 spend increased time on social media relative to less depressed kids? So it gives you some of those elements. And then actually with longitudinal data, you can do some really cool statistical stuff, and you can even separate out those between person differences.

(08:48):

I spend more time on social media than my sister does, and you can take that baseline level out and then you can just compare them to themselves and you can say, if I spend more time on social media next year than I did on average this year, does that, when I do that, does that lead me to then become more depressed than my own average later? So longitudinal data gives us a lot of information that we really just can’t get with cross-sectional data. Cross-sectional data is great for start because it tells us what’s related to what, but not those patterns and not the direction of effects.

Dr. Sarah (09:35):

Yes. That’s really helpful. To make clear. So in reading this research, which I get is this is cross-sectional, this is preliminary. You’re going to track these kids for hopefully a really long time and get more longitudinal data. But even just this cross-sectional research had some really interesting, and in my opinion, kind of surprising findings. Were you surprised by what you found? And can you share a little bit about kind of broad strokes, some of the highlight results from the study?

Dr. Wendy (10:08):

Sure, sure. Yeah. One of the things that we expected we might see is that kids who owned a cell phone, like a smartphone specifically, not just a cell phone, might show worse adjustment than kids who didn’t. And at 11 to 13, there’s a good portion of kids who don’t yet have a cell phone of their own. And the biggest newsworthy surprising finding is we actually found the reverse. We found that about 25% of our kids didn’t have their own cell phone. And about 75% of the 1113 year olds did, first of all, but those kids who had their own smartphone reported better mental health, so less depression, less anxiety, less anger, more wellbeing. They also reported actually spending more time with friends in person. They reported getting more exercise, and they reported less cyber bullying experiences than kids who didn’t own their own cell phones. And that was the big surprising finding.

(11:45):

And now that’s not to say that everything was roses for these kids. We did find that there were some behaviors that kids would engage in on their cell phones or on their digital devices that were problematic, particularly posting publicly on sites, social media sites, YouTube, things like that. Kids who posted publicly were more depressed and more anxious than others. We also, as I mentioned before, we didn’t find that kids an overall association between time spent on social media and depression and anxiety, but we did find sort of a cutoff point where kids who spent more than six hours on social media did report significantly more depression and anxiety. So it seems like it doesn’t really matter if you’re spending 30 minutes or an hour on social media a day or 30 minutes or two hours for your mental health for these 11 to 13 year olds, but if it becomes kind of this binging taking over your life element, that’s when we really see these problems.

Dr. Sarah (13:05):

But were you distinguishing then, you were saying the kids who are publicly posting on these platforms, was that regardless of how much time spent or was it…

Dr. Wendy (13:15):

That was regardless of how much time spent.

Dr. Sarah (13:17):

So if they’re passively consuming content for more than six hours, that’s a risk factor, but if they are actively posting about themselves publicly on social media, regardless of how much time they’re on, that’s a risk factor as well.

Dr. Wendy (13:35):

Exactly, yes. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that.

Dr. Sarah (13:39):

I think that’s important. It is. Yeah. There are different ways to use these digital platforms.

Dr. Wendy (13:48):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (13:48):

And both have, it sounds like both ways have risk factors, but one is really about what it’s displacing. I would imagine if you’re on social media for six hours a day, it’s not just consuming. I would imagine that’s probably not great. That’s a lot of time, a lot of time, but it’s also displacing six hours of other things that could really impact your overall health and wellbeing.

Dr. Wendy (14:19):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the things we were really hoping to get at in this study is what is being displaced. And so we asked about extracurricular activities, lots of different ones. We asked about in-person time with friends, we asked about online time with friends. We asked about all sorts of different things you could do online, including gaming, watching videos. What else did we ask about? Shopping, listening to music, reading the news. Not that our 11 to 13 year olds did a ton of that, but they did do some of that. I’m sure you can think of other things you might do online, but those are some of the major ones. And so that social media spending that amount of time on social media, I think you’re absolutely right that once you get to a certain amount of time that you’re doing that, it becomes problematic. Interestingly though, we didn’t find that for some of those other behaviors or digital media elements. So kids who spent more than six hours a day gaming, we didn’t find the association with depression and anxiety.

Dr. Sarah (15:34):

Interesting. Were there differences in boys versus girls in those categories? I would imagine.

Dr. Wendy (15:39):

I was just going to say yes. Some of that can be explained by gender because yes, when you get, although, okay, so first boys did tend to spend more time, they were more likely to do gaming as part of their digital media activities than girls were. But a lot of girls do some gaming. But when you kind of look at the really high levels, how much time you’re spending, yes, absolutely. It was much more likely to be girls who were going to be spending more than six hours a day on social media. I’m much more likely to be boys who were going to be spending more than six hours gaming.

Dr. Sarah (16:23):

That’s interesting. Also, I’m curious, is there differences between boys and girls on how much they were posting publicly on social media?

Dr. Wendy (16:34):

Oh, I could look that up very quickly. I don’t think we saw that. I don’t believe we saw significant gender differences, at least.

Dr. Sarah (16:52):

I’m trying to understand too, what do you think it is about the posting publicly that makes it so that creates such a vulnerability for depression and anxiety?

Dr. Wendy (17:04):

Oh my goodness. That’s one of the million dollar questions, and that’s one of the things that we’re really hoping to get at with our longitudinal study. So we are looking at potential what are called mediators, which is sort of those explanatory mechanisms. It’s like, okay, we see A is linked with C, but Y what is the B? What’s the thing that connects those? And we do have some of those in this current study. One of the main ones that we see explaining links is what’s called perceived technological impairment. And it’s basically because this was all children adolescents, that was about six questions asking about, do you not get things done you’re supposed to do because you’re on media online? Do you feel like it gets in the way of your social relationships? Do you feel like it? So it was questions sort of getting at a little of those potential mechanisms. And we did find that perceived technological impairment mediated, explained some of that association, but that was between just general time use and depression.

Dr. Sarah (18:39):

Okay.

Dr. Wendy (18:40):

Not time use on media, not specifically between posting. I have some theories, but we have to look into them because we didn’t collect these variables in this first wave. One of the things that we expect to be related is probably a perceived body image or something like that, because if you’re posting about yourself, you’re putting off in a lot of pictures and visualizations online. So that may explain some of it. Another thing that we want to look into is called authenticity. So basically it’s just a sense of whether you are being your authentic self. And that can be something in daily life where you feel like you’re kind of pretending or it can be online and you can be like, okay, well how much am I presenting who I truly am and how much am I kind of putting on a facade? And my guess, and again this is just a hypothesis, it’s not based in the data we have, is that adolescents who are posting may be feeling less authentic in their experiences online because they may be feeling like they’re putting on a front. And one of the things, I’m a developmental psychologist, I focus on adolescence. One of the really key developmental challenges during adolescence is identity development and that understanding of who you are and that you may be different, you may act differently in different situations, but how do you balance that with being true to what you believe is your underlying self?

(20:45):

And it may be that adolescents, especially early adolescents, when they’re posting, they’re sort of pretending to be something they’re not maybe to try to fit in or maybe to try to get likes, and that may kind of undermine their feelings of mental health, mental. So that’s one of my ideas. Also, we are going to look at just sort of whether maybe they’re very focused adolescents who are posting are getting disappointed more because they’re not getting the likes they want. They’re not getting the shares or the comments. Maybe they’re getting negative comments more. And so we’re going to look at some of those, maybe a little less psychological and a little more objective, measurable, potential explanatory factors. But yeah, there are a lot of potential explanations and fortunately we don’t have the data quite to parse that out yet.

Dr. Sarah (21:51):

Yeah, I’ll be very interested to see what you find. I have some of my own hypotheses. I think your point about identity development makes so much sense to me and that idea of even just that false self. Being split like that versus feeling integrated and feeling like my whole self is I can show up and be connected to my entire whole sense of self in more places than I don’t. We always move in and out of our true self, but the more you kind of get entrenched in a false self, the more you feel fragmented all the time. And especially with, I mean, I’m imagine in really extreme cases where you have these kids who do kind of get an audience and start to be sort of stuck in whatever profile they’ve created, like

(22:47):

Child influencers or things like that. But even just in a smaller world, the popular girl at school who has everybody watching everything she does, and now she’s stuck in having to continue to produce content and keep this false self kind of fed, and that I could see being really damaging to that core sense of self and that identity development just then. There’s all kinds of layers of the kids who are seeking that and not getting it, like you said, but then also the compulsive behavior of checking. If I’m just consuming content, I don’t have to do a lot of work. I go on and it feeds me. But when I post something about myself, I would imagine if you checked how many times they opened that app after posting, that would be really objectively much, much, much higher. And just that compulsive checking can feed its own self. It becomes almost an addiction in some cases. Very much a habit certainly wired into the brain, that seeking system, that dopamine system of like, I have to check, check, check, check, check, and then I hit it. We have that intermittent positive reinforcement like a slot machine, and it’s really, really strongly reinforcing that behavior. And then we get stuck in that social media

Dr. Wendy (24:17):

Vortex. I love that. I love your insights into this. And I love the idea of seeing if we can measure that compulsive checking because that’s not necessarily captured by when we ask, how much time are you online? Because you could be online for 30 seconds each time, but you’re constantly doing it and it doesn’t add up. Or maybe you don’t even recognize because this is self-report, right? Maybe you don’t even recognize how much time you’re actually spending online if you’re doing that compulsive checking.

Dr. Sarah (24:51):

And I have kids in my practice, I see a couple teenagers who we talk a lot about their phone use and they will tell me, I just pick up my phone and check four, five, ten, fifteen times a class.

Dr. Wendy (25:07):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (25:09):

And they’re not spending a lot of time checking. They’re just checking to see if someone comments on their posts. They’re just looking to see what their stats are on something they posted about themselves. And then we know with anxiety disorders that compulsive checking if you have OCD or an anxiety disorder, it’s like chicken or egg. Is it that anxiety makes me check or the checking makes me anxious.

Dr. Wendy (25:38):

Absolutely. So I love that and I really appreciate your insight there because I think we will try to add a question about that in

Dr. Sarah (25:47):

Amazing. That’s cool.

Dr. Wendy (25:49):

Yay. Yeah, absolutely. That’s so fun. That’s an interesting comment though about checking during school because we actually, we had a little information about this in the published report, but we’ve been looking deeper into the data, starting to publish academic articles, which of course take much longer. I don’t know how much your audience knows about that kind of timeline, but where a published report, you can put it together and you can put it online that you could do in a month or two, an academic report or an academic article. Once you analyze things and you write it up, you submit it to a, then it needs to be peer reviewed, and that can take three months for the first review that comes back, you address those questions, you send it back, they look at it again. So a lot of times it can take nine to 12 months for something to go from initial writing to actually being published in an academic journal.

(27:04):

So none of that has come out from this study yet because we haven’t had that time. But we recently looked at data on whether kids, what kind of rules were in effect in their schools regarding cell phone use and we divided it well when we asked them, it was divided into it’s completely, cell phones are completely banned from the premises. Cell phones are confiscated at the beginning of the day and you don’t have them at all throughout the day and you get them back. Cell phones are confiscated, but you can use them or confiscated, it’s kind of a harsh word, but they’re put in a little cubby or something like that and you can only access them at certain times of the day, maybe lunch or I can keep my cell phone with me. And it’s sort of up to the teachers to have specific classroom-based rules. And we found about 70 some percent of kids fell almost exactly 70% actually fell into one of the kind of confiscated groups as opposed to the keep it groups. This was again, 11 to 13 year olds in Florida in November of 2024. So very specific, there are laws going into effect, but what was really interesting that we found is actually kids who went to schools where their phones were confiscated were showed worse mental health, they showed more depression and anxiety and they did not show better grades.

Dr. Sarah (29:02):

Do we have any sense of why?

Dr. Wendy (29:04):

Not yet? And this held controlling for experiences with cyber bullying, though they did also show more cyber bullying.

Dr. Sarah (29:18):

So that’s happening outside of school then?

Dr. Wendy (29:20):

It must be happening outside of school. So we don’t know why yet. One possibility is just that we didn’t ask how long these rules had been in effect. It’s possible that there are some benefits to some of these school bands that we just aren’t seeing yet. We also didn’t measure attention span or things like that. An interesting thing we did find though was in schools where they banned or confiscated cell phones, there was kids were one and a half to two times more likely to agree with statements. I feel relief when I can’t use my cell phone or social media causes more harm than good. So it seems like there’s some sort of disconnect. We’re not quite, we haven’t unraveled it yet. It seems like these bands may be helping, but there may also be some feeling of pressure or control or frustration.

Dr. Sarah (30:40):

Yeah, I mean the kids may not like that. They don’t get to have their phone, which could be leading to other types of feelings. That’s interesting though. I’m surprised by that. I’m not surprised to hear that kids say they feel relief. I find that across the board when I ask kids, would you prefer not, how would it feel to not have to have your phone with you all the time? And they’d be like, oh my God, that would be so nice. But my world is tied up in it, which is why I wasn’t So at first when I read the study and it was like smartphone use was not only not necessarily correlated with lower wellbeing outcomes, but it was actually almost better than kids who didn’t have it At first. I was like, whoa, that’s surprising. But then I thought about it and kids who have smartphones are per what I was reading in the study, they’re reporting that they’re spending more time in person with friends and they’re having better feelings about their social relationships. And that doesn’t shock me that much because if you are wanting to participate in the social mill, you right now and you don’t have access to a device to connect with your peers, you’re going to miss the invitations. You’re going to be a bit outside of the group, which can really be difficult at 11, 12, 13 years old.

Dr. Wendy (32:08):

Exactly. And that’s actually the argument that I made to the group as well when we saw that finding is that there are books like the Anxious Generation for instance, that say, we should be not giving kids cell phones until even a basic cell phone until 14 and not letting them on social media until 16. And that may be all well and good if everyone could do it.

(32:37):

But the big issue is like you were saying, if it’s just you and your family keeping your kid from being online and their whole social world, all their peers are online, you may be keeping them isolated. You may be kind of doing some sort of trade off, right? Yes. They won’t have to worry about checking. They won’t have to be seeing things that their friends are doing and that they may be missing out on. You might protect them from some elements of hear peer bullying or online aggression, but on the other hand, they may feel that in person. They’re kind of outcasts. And so…

Dr. Sarah (33:32):

The study did too, it seemed like you found that kids who did not have smart phones reported more cyber bullying. How did that happen? Is it that they couldn’t defend themselves because they weren’t there in the digital space?

Dr. Wendy (33:48):

I think that’s a great, I was actually just going to mention that because it does seem kind of strange. And one thing to understand about that finding is we divided kids who owned their own smartphone from kids who didn’t, but a good portion, in fact, almost I think all but three kids out of 1,510, all but three kids said that they have access to a smartphone. They go online. It may be their parents, it may be shared with siblings, it may be something that doesn’t have a sim card, but they’re using wifi. Maybe it’s just a tablet, whatever it is. And so I think one, yes, they may not be able to defend themselves very much. They may be seeing that people are attacking them, but not really able to make their own accounts or participate in the social world in a way to defend themselves. I think that they also, they are going online, but they’re not going online under their own control as much. And so that may limit what they have the ability to do if they need to respond to need to is a terrible word. But if they would want to or if most of their friends are able to respond to something quickly and they may feel like they’re getting picked on because they have to be waiting for access.

Dr. Sarah (35:41):

Right. How do we deal with it? Because I’m trying to think of really practical applications for this information. I’m listening as a mom of two kids, fortunately younger than this cohort, they’re seven and six, so I haven’t yet had to navigate some of these things with them, but I’m very, very acutely trying to make my plans now because it’s like, and things are changing so rapidly. But I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast have kids who have devices are either this age of this group and they’re already really in it and trying to navigate it, or they have younger kids, but they’re trying to create skills now so that they can be smart consumers of digital media when they do get access to this stuff.

(36:33):

I am torn. On the one hand, I’m like, I think it’s hard to teach kids to be literate in this space if they don’t have access to practicing. I feel like it’s something that is probably best done with parents as a collaborative training ground when they’re younger so they can have some support as they’re learning these and get into the lighter waters first, just the banks of the river. To use a metaphor that of a mentor of mine, Alay Duarte, he has this whole metaphor he uses to teach digital literacy to kids and parents. We have an episode, actually, he came on the podcast and talked about it. I’ll link it in the show notes because it’s a phenomenal episode, but he talks about the river and how the river of digital use has different currents, right? There’s the warm waters, there’s the adventure stream that’s like feels really good.

(37:38):

You lose track of time, but it’s very rewarding. And then there’s stressful waters and then there’s the dangerous vortex where it’s like harm is done. He’s a somatic experiencing practitioner. So a lot of his work is about sensory awareness and being tuned into your nervous system signals, but helping kids kind of understand what does it feel like in these different places and speeds and occurrence and how do you notice when you’re moving deeper into the current so that you can pull yourself out. I think at the beginning there’s a lot of scaffolding that jolts need to have to make sure that we’re not allowing our kids to get taken by the current too fast and they need to be able to, we need to be a bit of a bridge.

Dr. Wendy (38:25):

Absolutely. And I to mean agree with everything you’re saying. I have a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old, so I’m right there on the brink. I’m with you. I’m just little ahead, not quite all the way there. My 11 year old’s boy, so he’s not quite as precocious as when it comes to some of these social things. And we do have some research, well just talk in personal experience. We do have some of the research even in this where we looked at parenting behaviors and one of the things we looked at is, if you can think of it as parental monitoring, it’s often talked about as media mediation, but don’t worry about that. But there are different ways of doing that. One is what’s called restrictive mediation, which is where you’re setting lots of limits. You’re saying, okay, you can’t see these shows, you can’t watch these things.

(39:25):

You can only be online for an hour a day, whatever it is. But you’re setting limits. And the other is called active mediation, which is all about talking, being there with your kid and talking with them about what they’re seeing, learning opportunities. And then we also had whether you can engage in either of those behaviors in more controlling manner where it’s like, this is my way or the highway. Don’t argue back. And you can do that even when you’re talking about things. You could be like, those shows are terrible and I don’t know why you’d want to see them. They’re just bad for you. Which would be a very controlling way of being an active mediator. Or you can do either of these things in a much more what’s called autonomy supportive manner, which is much more democratic. It’s much more discussion based. It’s trying to explain your reasoning, listen to the child’s opinions, talk about maybe come to a consensus or at least an understanding of why maybe some rules are important, trying to get them to understand and perhaps even value some of these choices.

(40:50):

So for instance, that might be something where we do this all the time with my daughter with YouTube shorts where we’re like, okay, we only want you to watch a little bit of these a day if you’re going to watch ’em at all. They’re like, they’re like candy. They’re like snack food for your brain. They’re fun. They may taste good, they may feel good, but they’re not good for your brain and they’re bad for your attention span. They make it harder to focus on things. And so we really try to talk with her about what her goals are for herself and what our goals are for her. And that would be much more of at least I hope, autonomy, supportive parenting when it comes to an active mediation. And what we found was not surprisingly parents who, regardless of how much autonomy supportive mediation they did, if they were low in controlling mediation, they had kids who were better off and as long as they were also mediating, as long as they were also actively participating with their child and talking with their child about things, whether they actually set structured limits or not, didn’t matter as much as whether they were hawking with their kids about what they were seeing, what they were doing, why it was good or bad. And I think that comes down to that sort of helping them wade in the water. And I think one thing we as parents sometimes, or at least I as a parent sometimes forget, is I can set a limit and it may even work. I may say, okay, you get two hours online, but if my kid doesn’t endorse it, if my kid doesn’t understand it, at least may not endorse it. They may not want to do it, but they don’t understand why. They’re often just sort of frustrated by it and they feel controlled.

(43:03):

And I think if you’re trying to teach them to wade in the water, I love that metaphor and if you sort of think about it as if you don’t allow them to ever get in the water or you say you can’t go more than two feet in ever, or you always have to wear water wings. That may work at first, but then eventually if they ever jump in, they’re going to be swept into that whirlpool, whereas it’s going to be a lot better to basically be like, you know what? I’m not going to put a limit on where you can go, but I’m going to be there with you so that you can learn to swim while I’m there to help guide you, and then I can not be there and you’re still going to be able to avoid that Whirlpool. We saw it together and we learned that it has a really strong current, and it’s scary.

Dr. Sarah (44:02):

I think it helps kids too, to not go underground. I know you do a lot of work on secrecy and communication that is more open and I think when there’s, there’s connected to this, right? If we are with them and we’re not putting all these controls and setting all these limits, which I’m not opposed to, I just think you got to be really, you have to know why you’re doing something. You can’t just do it and go blind as a parent. Unfortunately, the why is more important than the what.

Dr. Wendy (44:42):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah (44:43):

So if we’re going to, it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like a harm reduction model versus an abstinence model, which we tend to find is not as effective than the harm reduction it’s going to happen. If it was, like you said, if we could control the whole situation and have no kids have phones, it would be a much better place for all these kids. We can all agree on that, but the kids do, and how not only do we teach them how to navigate it, we also allow them to take risks to be participants in their social world, but importantly, we’re also giving them, I don’t know, trust. And that’s a whole separate issue that has nothing to do with phones. It’s just playing out in that space. When kids feel trusted by us, they tend to come to us when they have problems, when they don’t feel trusted by us, they tend to go underground when they have problems. And that’s where I think the real harm can really start to get take hold.

Dr. Wendy (45:46):

Absolutely. I think that makes tons of sense and it aligns. We don’t have a ton of work on that in this specific study, but I do, as you said, a lot of research on autonomy development, family decision-making, adolescent disclosure and secrecy, and that’s absolutely what we found. Going back to another idea of what we as parents can do, not in this study, but in some other published research, there’s work on child level rules versus family level rules.

(46:28):

And the difference between that is basically saying, okay, you can’t be on your phone. You can’t be on any screens an hour before bedtime versus, okay, all of us are going to make sure that we don’t go on our screens an hour before bedtime, or no one is going to bring their phones to the table, or we’re all going to make sure that we don’t keep our phones in the bedroom with us or whatever. Or we set one of those self limits where you can’t get to your apps after a certain time. And those family level rules, not surprisingly, are much more effective.

Dr. Sarah (47:15):

They probably help the health of the family too.

Dr. Wendy (47:17):

It helps. Exactly. Exactly. It makes the kids feel like they’re not being singled out. It avoids the whole do, as I say, not as I do thing. And it avoids modeling problematic behaviors when you’re trying to get your kids to not do those same behaviors. So I think that’s one really, I think important point as well. Think about what you are doing and modeling and trying to be present, trying to model healthful online digital behaviors at the same time as you’re trying to teach your kids them.

Dr. Sarah (48:03):

I was literally, I was at a friend’s birthday last this weekend and a dad was talking to me and I told him what I did, and he’s like, oh, screens, what do we do? And I was like, oh man. The wrong question unfortunately is what do we do about our kids screen use? I think, and I have to swallow this pill myself. The real question is if we want to raise healthy kids or kids who have healthy screen habits, we actually have to stop asking, how do I give my kid healthy screen habits? I think we have to say, what are my screen habits and are they healthy first? Because as a parent who very much raises her hand, when I have horrible screen habits, I am ashamed of the amount of time my children will say to me, can you get off your phone?

(48:55):

I’m trying to talk to you, or You’re not paying attention to me or I am. It’s not great. But I really think that if I don’t first address my own phone behaviors, I could set all kinds of rules in my house for my kids when it’s time for them to navigate this stuff, but they are going to take me far less seriously when I am actively contradicting everything that I’m trying to get them to do. So I feel like I’ve got a couple years to really get my screen addiction and phone addiction under control, and it’s a work in progress, but it sucks. But we have to first look at our own. Adults are very, very susceptible to phone addiction.

Dr. Wendy (49:44):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Another thing that we might be a good piece of advice as you start navigating your kids wanting to connect with their peers on social media, or maybe not even social media, but maybe chat apps or things like that, is to try to help them, and I just said, don’t put too many restrictions, but restrictions with justifications can make some sense. Restricts them to only connecting with peers that they actually know in real life because that can help foster that pure inclusion element while keeping them maybe from trying to do too much self fake presentation and being constantly, I mean, I know they’re all going to chat with each other. My son, for a very brief amount of time got added to the girls chat. This was in fifth grade, beginning of fifth grade by the way, got added to the girls Facebook Messenger chat or maybe it was a Apple chat.

(51:04):

I don’t know. I also was not as involved maybe as I should have been. And my God, he got kicked off of it after half a day because boys shouldn’t have been on there and he wasn’t participating enough enough. He got I think 26 messages within the first five minutes. It was nuts. These girls were back and forth and back and forth, and I don’t remember where I was going with this, but at least there was a lot of, he was like, well, it’s okay because if I don’t respond, I’ll talk to them. I’ll talk to them in school. Well, they know that I’m busy. There was a little bit less. Now of course, that’s a boy way of looking at it, and that’s my son’s way of looking at it. But I think that using it as another way of sort of quick connection with our friends as opposed to sort of a presentational.

Dr. Sarah (52:16):

Right? It’s that authenticity that you were talking about earlier. If I could just use this and be practiced in showing up authentically, just chatting with people that I care about and know and I trust, they know me and I don’t have this urge to perform. I’m building that muscle of being of authentic communication in a different form.

Dr. Wendy (52:36):

And I think it is helpful because it can also give them a little more as they’re moving into pre-adolescence, as they’re moving into adolescence, feelings of autonomy, feelings of self-direction and control. If they can be like, oh, I talked with these people and we all want to go to a movie this weekend. They can start taking that on and setting up some of those choices. And it may be as it often is with my 9-year-old where it’s like, oh, well, we all plan to sleepover for tonight. Well, it’s a Wednesday night and we have school tomorrow, and that’s actually not going to happen happen. But it does give them a sense of control and practicing that.

Dr. Sarah (53:21):

Yes, it’s a new playground. We have to have them help them figure out.

Dr. Wendy (53:26):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (53:27):

Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was so interesting. I love diving into the actual research and data behind this, and it’s helpful to know sometimes it’s counterintuitive and it’s not what we think is always going to be the case.

Dr. Wendy (53:42):

Absolutely. And one more thing I do want to just mention from the study that I didn’t mention, but is a really important finding is we found that if you’re going to do one thing, I don’t know how effective it’s going to be. I can’t do it in my own life for some reason, but it’s trying to get your kids not to keep their phones in their rooms because that is really problematic for sleep. Particularly if they sleep with their phone in their hand or in their bed within arm’s reach. If it’s just in their room, it’s not as bad. But kids who were, had their phone in their hand or in their bed at bedtime got almost 30 to 40 minutes less sleep a night than kids who had their phone just in a different room when they went to bed. And that actually broached the recommended amount of sleep. Whereas kids who didn’t have the phone in the room got nine hours or more, and kids who had the phone in the room at all, but particularly in their hand or in their bed, got closer to eight hours and eight and a half, eight hours and 20 minutes.

Dr. Sarah (54:55):

Sleep matters.

Dr. Wendy (54:55):

Another thing to keep in mind,

Dr. Sarah (54:58):

If people want to follow your work or read other things that you’ve worked on, how can they connect with you? How can they follow along?

Dr. Wendy (55:07):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don’t know if you’ll have the link to the Life In Media study.

Dr. Sarah (55:12):

We will link that for sure in the show notes and the show description.

Dr. Wendy (55:16):

Yeah, so that’s one way. Another thing people can do. So they can, unfortunately, I don’t have a talking about social media. I don’t have my own social media handle or anything like that, but if you’re looking for academic work that I’ve done, if you go to just Google Scholar. So you just type in Google Scholar, you go there and you type in my name or any of the other authors of the studies names into Google Scholar, most of us will actually have an account on Google Scholar, and you can click on that and you can see all the work we’ve done. Another, if people are interested in trying to read some direct research that’s being done, there’s a site called Research Gate, and that is a place where a lot of researchers will actually post preprints of their articles, or you can actually contact researchers through it and they’ll send you a copy of the research, because I know a lot of research is behind paywalls. And so I would say those are two really good ways of accessing the research if you’re interested in trying to get to it. And then also, if you look me up or look up any of the co-authors, we’re all from University of South Florida. We all have web pages there, and that’ll have our contact information.

Dr. Sarah (56:56):

Okay. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a delightful conversation and very illuminating.

Dr. Wendy (57:03):

Absolutely. Thank you. And I really will try to include that compulsive checking. I love that idea. Amazing.

Dr. Sarah (57:10):

I’m excited to see the results as they roll out.

Dr. Wendy (57:13):

Absolutely. Yeah, we’re excited. We’re still looking for more funding to maintain a longitudinal study, but we have some grant submissions underway, and so we’re hopeful and we’re hopeful we’ll get some funding to be able to continue this research.

Dr. Sarah (57:32):

Well, it’s worth it. Thank you.

Dr. Wendy (57:35):

Thank you very much.

Dr. Sarah (57:42):

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