社交媒体一代的父母感觉并不好

住在宾夕法尼亚州福吉谷的 45 岁的波拉克说：“我完全被吓坏了。” “我完全不知道她甚至感觉有点低落。当我问她这件事时，她只是一直说她想摆脱这一切......但我不知道这意味着什么。”

波拉克带她去了危机中心，该中心禁止任何人在办理登机手续时使用电话，她从女儿那里得知社交媒体的压力正在加剧她的焦虑。压力的主要来源：等待她的朋友打开并回复 Snapchat 上的消息和照片。

“这对 [她] 来说真的很上瘾——那种感觉，你必须一直在，而且总是必须回应某人才能被人看到或存在，”她说。 “她会看着她的手机，从平静到冲出车外，然后整夜都蜷缩在床上。”

波拉克打开了手机的一些家长控制，但她女儿很容易绕过。她把手机拿走了，但担心此举只会让她的女儿再次考虑自杀。她把手机还给她，却发现女儿在另一个社交应用 TikTok 上“自我安慰”——事实上，“她真的相信没有它她就睡不着。”正如波拉克所说，她的女儿“感觉很失落，就像，‘如果我不在社交媒体上，我不知道自己该怎么办。'”

Polak 是一代没有在社交媒体应用上度过童年的父母之一，现在他们正在努力理解和应对社交媒体在孩子成长过程中可能对他们的心理健康造成的潜在危害。在上个月的采访中，近十几位家长与 CNN Business 谈论如何应对遭受网络伤害的青少年，例如欺凌、身体形象问题和总是被喜欢的压力。大多数家长表示，这些问题要么开始，要么因大流行而加剧，当时他们的孩子与朋友隔离，社交媒体成为生命线，屏幕时间增加。

今年秋天，在 Facebook 举报人 Frances Haugen 泄露了数百份内部文件后，社交媒体对青少年的影响问题再次受到关注，其中一些文件表明该公司知道 Instagram 有可能对一个人的心理健康和身体形象产生负面影响，尤其是对十几岁的女孩。但豪根也谈到了对父母的影响。在 10 月份在国会作证时，豪根引用了 Facebook 的研究，该研究显示孩子们认为他们正在与身体形象和欺凌等问题作斗争，因为他们的父母无法引导他们。

“当我在推特上看到 Facebook 出现这些问题时，我感到非常难过。他们说，‘把你孩子的手机拿走吧。'但现实情况是，事情比这复杂得多，”她在证词中说。

“很少有这样的代际转变，其中的一代人，比如指导孩子的父母，有如此不同的经历，以至于他们没有以安全的方式支持孩子的背景，”她说。添加。 “我们需要支持父母。如果 Facebook 不能保护孩子，我们至少需要帮助父母支持孩子。”

Facebook 于 10 月更名为 Meta，一再试图诋毁 Haugen，并表示她的证词和对文件的报道错误地描述了其行为和努力。但 Haugen 披露的强烈抗议迫使 Facebook 重新考虑为 13 岁以下儿童推出 Instagram 应用程序。（目前 13 岁以下儿童不得在任何 Meta 平台上创建帐户。）

它还帮助激发了一系列关于科技产品如何影响儿童的国会听证会，其中包括来自 Facebook、TikTok 和 Snapchat 母公司 Snap 的高管。本周，Meta 旗下 Instagram 的负责人将出现在国会面前，因为立法者质疑该应用程序对年轻用户的影响。

在他们的证词中，TikTok 和 Snap 的高管们表现出谦逊，并承认需要采取更多措施来保护他们的平台。 Snap 全球公共政策副总裁 Jennifer Stout 表示，该公司正在为父母开发新工具，以更好地监督他们的孩子如何使用该应用程序。 Instagram 此前曾表示，它“越来越关注解决负面的社会比较和负面的身体形象。”

在本周国会露面之前，Instagram 推出了“休息一下”功能，鼓励用户花一些时间远离该平台。该公司还表示，它计划对推荐给青少年的内容采取“更严格的方法”，如果他们长时间关注任何类型的内容，则积极推动他们转向不同的主题。它还计划为父母推出第一批工具，包括教育中心和家长监控工具，让他们可以从明年开始查看孩子在 Instagram 上花费的时间并设置时间限制。

“你可以为父母提供工具，你可以让他们深入了解他们青少年的活动，但如果他们真的不知道如何与他们的青少年就此事进行对话，或者如何开始可以提供帮助的对话，那么这并没有多大帮助他们最大限度地利用了上网时间，”Instagram 安全和福祉负责人 Vaishnavi J 本周告诉 CNN Business。

与此同时，国会议员通过在这个问题上联合批评科技公司，表现出罕见的两党合作。一些立法者现在正在推动旨在增加儿童在线隐私并减少各种平台的明显成瘾性的立法 - 尽管尚不清楚此类立法何时或是否会通过。

对于一些父母来说，这些变化来得还不够快。不知道还能做什么，父母觉得他们必须单独行动，无论这意味着推动他们学区的变化，还是在他们认为给家庭带来痛苦的一些相同社交网络上寻求同龄人的建议。

一个越来越严重的长期担忧

甚至在 Haugen 披露之前，一些家庭就担心社交媒体平台给他们的孩子带来的风险只会越来越大。

凯瑟琳·莱克 (Katherine Lake) 说，在大流行期间，社交媒体成了她 13 岁孩子在家打发时间和与朋友联系的“一切”。她说她的孩子掉进了一大堆关于心理健康的页面，后来又发了一些关于自我伤害的帖子——她的孩子“在 Instagram 之前甚至都不知道”。这名少年在试图自杀后于去年春天住院。

“大流行肯定加速了我们多年来一直在应对的一些威胁和危险，”社交媒体安全组织的首席执行官马克·伯克曼说，该组织于三年前成立，旨在为人们提供技巧和预防性安全研讨会。父母。

一些数据还支持社交媒体上年轻人的心理健康问题呈上升趋势。 Bark 是一项付费监控服务，可以筛选社交媒体应用程序、个人消息和电子邮件中可能表示担忧的术语和短语，该服务表示，与 2021 年前三个月相比，发送的关于自残和自杀意念的警报增加了 143%。到前一年。 （当 Bark 检测到潜在问题时，父母会收到警报，以及儿童心理学家关于如何解决这些问题的专家建议。）

Bark 的首席营销官 Titania Jordan 说：“我们孩子的生活深深地埋在他们的手机里，而问题则存在于他们父母不去的地方的数字信号中。” “如果你不花时间在孩子上网的地方，你怎么能接受教育，又怎么能给他们指导呢？”

19 岁的福特汉姆大学 (Fordham University) 学生加布里埃拉·贝穆德斯 (Gabriella Bermudez) 告诉 CNN Business，她在中学时就开始为身体形象问题而苦苦挣扎，因为她暗恋的一个男孩开始在 Instagram 上点赞 30 岁模特的照片。

“我当时 12 岁，我看着她想，'为什么我看起来不像那样？'”贝穆德斯说。 “她是个成年女性。我张贴了自己的照片，让自己看起来比实际年龄大很多。”

但这开始在 Instagram 上吸引年长男性的直接信息。她说，她对父母隐瞒了这一点，因为她认为“他们永远不会理解[现在]年轻是什么感觉。”

“他们总是有社会压力，需要以某种方式看起来或以某种方式行事，但那是在杂志或电视上。他们本可以关闭它。对我们来说，我们一直都依附在手机上。当我们在公交车站等车或步行上课时，我们总是会想起这些理想。”

Parents of the social media generation are not OK

Last September, just a few weeks into the school year, Sabine Polak got a call from the guidance counselor. Her 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and had contemplated suicide.

"I was completely floored," said Polak, 45, who lives in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. "I had no clue she was even feeling remotely down at all. When I asked her about it, she just kept saying she wanted to get away from it all ... but I didn't know what that meant."

After taking her to a crisis center, which banned phone use for anyone checking in, Polak learned from her daughter that the pressures of social media were driving her increased anxiety. The main source of stress: waiting for her friends to open and respond to messages and photos on Snapchat.

"It became really addictive [for her] -- the sense that you always have to be on, and always have to be responding to someone in order to be seen or to exist," she said. "She would look at her phone and go from calm to storming out of the car, and the rest of the night, just curled up in her bed."

Polak turned on some of the phone's parental controls, but they were easy for her daughter to circumvent. She took the phone away but worried this move would only drive her daughter to think about taking her own life again. She gave the phone back only to find her daughter "self-soothing" on another social app, TikTok -- so much, in fact, that "she literally believes that she can't fall asleep without it." As Polak put it, her daughter "feels lost, like, 'I have no idea what to do with myself if I'm not on social media.'"

Polak is among a generation of parents who did not spend their childhoods with social media apps and are now struggling to understand and navigate the potential harms that social media can have on their kids' mental health as they grow up. In interviews over the last month, nearly a dozen parents spoke with CNN Business about grappling with how to deal with teens who experience online harms such as bullying, body image issues and pressures to always be Liked. Most of the parents said these issues either began or were exacerbated by the pandemic, a time when their children were isolated from friends, social media became a lifeline and the amount of screen time increased.

The issue of social media's impact on teens gained renewed attention this fall after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked hundreds of internal documents, some of which showed the company knew of Instagram's potential to negatively impact one's mental health and body image, especially among teenage girls. But Haugen also touched on the impact on parents. During her testimony before Congress in October, Haugen cited Facebook research that revealed kids believe they are struggling with issues like body image and bullying alone because their parents can't guide them.

"I'm saddest when I look on Twitter and people blame the parents for these problems with Facebook. They say, 'Just take your kid's phone away.' But the reality is that it's a lot more complicated than that," she said in her testimony.

"Very rarely do you have one of these generational shifts where the generation that leads, like parents who guide their children, have such a different set of experiences that they don't have the context to support their children in a safe way," she added. "We need to support parents. If Facebook won't protect the kids, we at least need to help the parents support the kids."

Facebook, which rebranded as Meta in October, has repeatedly tried to discredit Haugen and said her testimony and reports on the documents mischaracterize its actions and efforts. But the outcry from Haugen's disclosures pressured Facebook to rethink the launch of an Instagram app for children under 13. (Children under the age of 13 are not currently permitted to create accounts on any Meta platforms.)

It also helped spur a series of congressional hearings about how tech products impact kids, featuring execs from Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat's parent company, Snap. This week, the head of Meta-owned Instagram is set to appear before Congress as lawmakers question the app's impact on young users.

In their testimonies, the TikTok and Snap executives showed humility and acknowledged the need to do more to protect their platforms. Jennifer Stout, Snap VP of global public policy, said the company is developing new tools for parents to better oversee how their children are using the app. Instagram previously said it's "increasingly focused on addressing negative social comparison and negative body image."

Ahead of the Congressional appearance this week, Instagram introduced a Take a Break feature which encourages users to spend some time away from the platform. The company also said it plans to take a "stricter approach" to the content it recommends to teenagers and actively nudge them toward different topics if they've been dwelling on any type of content for too long. It's also planning to introduce its first tools for parents, including an educational hub and parental monitoring tools that allow them to see how much time their kids spend on Instagram and set time limits, starting next year.

"You can offer tools to parents and you can offer them insights into their teen's activity, but that's not as helpful if they don't really know how to have a conversation with their teen about it, or how to start a dialogue that can help them get the most out of their time online," Vaishnavi J, Instagram's head of safety and well-being, told CNN Business this week.

Meanwhile, members of Congress have shown rare bipartisanship by uniting in criticizing tech companies on the issue. Some lawmakers are now pushing for legislation intended to increase children's privacy online and reduce the apparent addictiveness of various platforms -- though it remains unclear when or if such legislation will pass.

For some parents, these changes aren't coming quick enough. Unsure what else to do, parents feel they have to go it alone, whether that means pushing for changes in their school districts or looking for advice from peers on some of the same social networks they feel have caused their families pain.

A longtime concern that's getting worse

Even before Haugen's disclosures, there were concerns in some households that the risks social media platforms posed to their kids were only growing.

Katherine Lake said social media became "everything" for her 13-year-old child during the pandemic to pass the time at home and connect with friends. She said her teen fell down a rabbit hole of pages about mental health and, later, posts about self harm -- something her kid "didn't even know about before Instagram." The teenager was hospitalized last spring after attempting suicide.

"The pandemic has certainly accelerated some of the threats and dangers that we've been dealing with for years," said Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety, an agency founded three years ago to provide tips and preventative safety workshops for parents.

Some data also support that mental health issues among young people on social media are on the rise. Bark, a paid monitoring service that screens social media apps, personal messages and emails for terms and phrases that could indicate concerns, said it saw a 143% increase in alerts sent around self-harm and suicidal ideation during the first three months of 2021 compared to the year prior. (Parents receive alerts when Bark detects potential issues, along with expert recommendations from child psychologists for how to address them.)

"Our children's lives are buried deep within their phones and the problems live within their digital signal in places that parents don't go," said Titania Jordan, chief marketing officer of Bark. "If you're not spending time in the places where your children are online, how can you be educated and then how can you give them guidance?"

Gabriella Bermudez, a 19-year-old Fordham University student, told CNN Business she started struggling with body image issues in middle school after a boy she had a crush on started Liking photos of a 30-year-old model on the Instagram.

"I was 12, and I would look at her and think, 'Why don't I look like that?'" said Bermudez."I was covered with pimples. My hair, it was awful. ... It never resonated that she was a grown woman. I posted pictures of myself to make myself look a lot older than I was."

But that started to attract direct messages from older men on Instagram. She kept this from her parents, she said, because she thought "they'll never understand what it's like to be young [right now]."

"They always had societal pressures to look a certain way or behave a certain way, but that was in a magazine or on TV. They could have turned it off. For us, we're attached to our phones all the time. When we're waiting at the bus stop or walking to class, we're always reminded of these ideals."