Parents want their kids to be social, but with less social media

This week, we are looking at how kids use social media and the risks and rules around it. It’s part of our new series “The Infinite Scroll.” Monday, we talked about how habitually checking social media can change adolescents’ brains, making them more sensitive to feedback from their peers.

Today, we’re going to look at what it’s like to be a parent monitoring their kids’ social media. One thing’s clear: It can be a lot of work.

“Ugh. I’m gonna just tell you that it’s exhausting,” said Jessica Tighe, who lives near Philadelphia. She has three kids, ages 20, 17 and 14. They weren’t allowed to have smartphones until they entered eighth grade. And to start, the devices had no social media apps.

“The phone lives in the kitchen,” Tighe added. “It certainly doesn’t go to their bedrooms.”

As the kids get into high school, they’re allowed to add a social media app or two, starting with a 15-minute-a-day time limit. Tighe said her goal is to raise kids who are digitally savvy, but also have lives outside of their devices

One big challenge is that a lot of her kids’ friends have had phones and been on social media for years. “My kids used to say, ‘I’m at a friend’s house and everyone’s on their phones, and I’m just sitting there doing nothing.’ And I don’t know what to do about [that],” Tighe said.

Her youngest child, Milo, is in eighth grade. He’s complained that by not being on social media, he’s missing out. “Like, all the big drama updates in my school come off of Snapchat or Instagram, and so I have to just scrounge around my friends to get the information that they’re getting,” he said.

Milo added that he’s also missing trends, like what the kids are saying, literally. “‘Rizz’ — that word I got last,” he said. “Everyone else was saying it, and I had to piece together what it meant.” It’s slang for “charisma.”

Still, Milo said he understands why these rules exist. “I really don’t like them, but I guess I just like that I know they’re going to help me later on, when I’m not in college just sitting up until 2 a.m. scrolling on my phone because my parents aren’t there to tell me to get off.”

Jessica Tighe, Milo’s mom, said she wishes it was technologically easier to put limits on kids’ use. Enforcing the rules herself takes a lot of time, she added.

“It’s just endless monitoring, endless work, endless conversations, endless removal of the phone.”

One person who’s thinking about how to regulate time on social media is Ravi Iyer, a technologist and psychologist at the University of Southern California. Tech platforms do make a variety of tools available for parents, he said, but “unfortunately, most parents don’t know they exist. They’re too hard to use.”

Iyer, who used to work at Facebook, said he’d like it to be easier for parents to set the default settings on social media. “We should be able to tell our phones, ‘This is my broad preference’ — not the individual feature level for every single app, but just broadly — ‘I don’t want to be contacted by strangers. I don’t want to be encouraged to spend more time on my phone. I want my data and my images to be more secure.’ And then, all the apps should respect those preferences.”

He pointed out that, as 14-year-old Milo knows, there’s often pressure to be on social media to be part of your community.

“It’s a hard argument when they say that all the other kids are doing these things,” said Iyer. “Like, how do you stop your kid? It’s not good for a kid to be left out either.”

There’s a balance between not wanting your kid to spend all of their time on social media and supporting their need to be social. And Iyer said that’s the thing parents are battling.

If you or someone you know is struggling with online harassment or cyberbullying that has resulted in mental health problems or suicidal thoughts, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit the 988 Lifeline website.