- Dec 20, 2019
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Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
TikTok’s future in the United States may be in doubt. Regardless, the Chinese-owned social media company’s legacy is undisputed: short-form video has become the way that young people engage with content online. In the U.S., 11- to 17-year-olds spend an average of one hour and 52 minutes on the app daily.
TikTok has arguably been the primary pioneers of brief, usually phone-filmed content. But now, virtually every other social media platform now offers users a roughly equivalent experience, from Facebook to Snapchat, Instagram to BeReal, Pinterest to YouTube. Short-form video as a medium is here to stay—and it’s a format that comes with some significant problems parents need to be aware of.
If you’re a parent of a tween or teen and they have a smartphone with access to social media, you’ll likely already be nodding as you read through the following list of concerns. Trying to pry teens (I have three) away from TikTok et al. can feel like trying to pry a salmon out of a hungry grizzly bear’s paws—with results almost as fierce. We’ll talk about some strategies for doing that in a moment. But let’s focus first on the problems that often accompany these “little” videos.
Addiction. Compulsive engagement with short-form videos is, unfortunately, the norm rather than the exception. The reason why tweens and teens (and, if we’re honest, many adults, too) spend so much time watching these videos is because they’re like eating a bag of potato chips. You’re not going to eat just one, but you might just devour the whole bag.
Similarly, short-form video consumption starts with one video, then another, then … 15 more. Before we know it, we’ve spent an hour scrolling—in part because the algorithm feeding us these videos knows what we like and has plenty more to offer.
In October 2024, confidential information from TikTok’s own in-house research was released in conjunction with an ongoing lawsuit involving 14 U.S. attorneys general. It found that addiction to the app could happen within a span of just 35 minutes, or about 260 eight-second videos.
Attention Span and Mental Health Correlations. As we know, addiction almost never comes without a host of other potential consequences. And that’s true here. TikTok’s own in-house documentation (as reported by NPR) is a sobering statement about what their researchers have observed: “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.”
That is a significant list of outcomes I don’t think any of us want for our children. Those outcomes have been broadly summarized under the label “TikTok Brain,” which is shorthand for all of the ways short-form video can short-circuit an adolescent’s ability to cultivated sustained attention and focus. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Michael Manos, the clinical director of the Center for Attention and Learning at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital, succinctly described the problem: “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast.”
James Williams, author of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, summarizes: “It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables. We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”
Content Concerns. And all of those concerns about short-form video come before we even get to what kids are actually watching, i.e., the actual content. Much of it, of course, is humor based, often involving pratfalls, something unexpected, something ridiculous—not unlike the kinds of videos we’ve been watching since America’s Funniest Home Videos showed up in the pre-internet age back in 1990.
But while explicit pornographic imagery is generally prohibited on most platforms (X, formerly known as Twitter, being a big exception), kids may still encounter all manner of images and ideas that would raise a parent’s eyebrows. That list might include (among other things) sexually suggestive imagery and dialogue; videos glorifying risky behavior and lifestyles (including pro-anorexia content); and videos laced with harsh profanity.
Misinformation and Worldview Concerns. Anyone who has an opinion on virtually anything can air it out on social media and in short-form videos. There’s no vetting, no fact-checking, no one questioning the veracity of claims about, well, virtually anything. Only if content violates a given platform’s content guidelines with regard to hate speech or harassment will it be taken down.
Tweens and teens who are still formulating the ability to think critically may well accept a given claim at face value if it’s made by a content producer that they connect with personally. In effect, likeability equals credibility. According to a September 2024 report from Pew Research, 17% of all U.S. adults get their news from TikTok. But that percentage swells to 39% for those ages 18 to 29. In other words, more than a third of young people today are primarily having their view of reality in the world shaped by TikTok and short-form video, often (or perhaps usually) with no one interacting with them or giving them the critical tools they need to evaluate whether a given information source is truly credible or not.
So How Should Parents Respond?
Looking at the information above, it seems self-evident that limits on this form of screentime are hugely important for our kids to grow into well-rounded adults. And depending on the ages of our kids, we may feel a bit overwhelmed at the task of establishing and maintaining healthy habits in this area.
So what do we do to stem the tide or make necessary course corrections if necessary? Here are a few thoughts:
Examine our Own Habits. Before we make dramatic changes to our kids’ screentime and interaction with social media, we need to look at our own habits. How are we using screens? How do our kids see us interacting with them? Are we watching an hour of TikTok a day? To help our kids, we have to get our own house in order, too, as parents. We can do that on our own before asking our kids to potentially make changes. Or, if you have older teens, you can even invite them to make changes with you.
Setting and Resetting Boundaries. The problem with short-form video is that it’s like a cup of spilled water on a cluttered dining room table. It goes everywhere, filling in the cracks. It’s easy to engage with the internet in general, and short-form social media, in the same way, unconsciously reaching for our phones to fill in every moment of our day that’s not occupied with something else. Changing that habit requires setting, and resetting as necessary, boundaries on where, how much and what we’re going to watch on our phones.
Intentional Engagement and Replacement. It’s been said that nature abhors a vacuum. And if we hope to change our family’s habits in this area, it likewise requires a proactive vision of how we’re going to fill the time that might once have been devoted to endlessly scrolling TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Parents, this is going to require an intentional effort from you, both in terms of potentially initiating different activities and in terms of engaging relationally with our kids. It could be as simple as having a family game night once a week, or taking a phone-free walk together after dinner. What do your kids enjoy (apart from TikTok, of course)? How can you do more of those activities together?
The Dessert Model. One of the reasons—and maybe one of the big ones—that we watch short-form videos is because they make us laugh. And as long as we’re not laughing at someone’s pain or otherwise inappropriate content, that’s a good thing. Instead of committing to purging funny short-form video completely, a family could treat it like “dessert,” a little treat for a few minutes after dinner. Spending a few minutes swapping funny videos turns this activity into something that builds relationship with each other. My wife, in particular, enjoys silly corgi videos, and I enjoy listening to her laugh when she watches them. Building in an intentional time to enjoy laughing together can be a good thing indeed.
Cultivating a Stewardship Mindset. As our kids get older, they may not respond well to limits being thrust upon them “for their own good.” One way to give ownership and agency in this conversation is to look at our screentime use in this area from a stewardship perspective. What goals do we have that we could pursue with that extra time? What skills or relationships might we invest in instead? Approaching this hot-button issue from this perspective moves it from being a conversation about being deprived of a beloved thing to talking about how we can best invest the limited time we have in what we truly care about.
The short-form video genie isn’t, in all likelihood, ever going back in the bottle. It’s a world we’re going to have to navigate together as families. Understanding the very real concerns with this form of media, as well as having a strategy for dealing with it, can help our families navigate this ubiquitous issue together.
The post TikTok’s Effects on Kids: What Parents Need to Know appeared first on Focus on the Family.
Continue reading...
Understanding TikTok Effects on Kids
TikTok’s future in the United States may be in doubt. Regardless, the Chinese-owned social media company’s legacy is undisputed: short-form video has become the way that young people engage with content online. In the U.S., 11- to 17-year-olds spend an average of one hour and 52 minutes on the app daily.
TikTok has arguably been the primary pioneers of brief, usually phone-filmed content. But now, virtually every other social media platform now offers users a roughly equivalent experience, from Facebook to Snapchat, Instagram to BeReal, Pinterest to YouTube. Short-form video as a medium is here to stay—and it’s a format that comes with some significant problems parents need to be aware of.
Short-Form Video: The Gateway to TikTok’s Addiction
If you’re a parent of a tween or teen and they have a smartphone with access to social media, you’ll likely already be nodding as you read through the following list of concerns. Trying to pry teens (I have three) away from TikTok et al. can feel like trying to pry a salmon out of a hungry grizzly bear’s paws—with results almost as fierce. We’ll talk about some strategies for doing that in a moment. But let’s focus first on the problems that often accompany these “little” videos.
Addiction. Compulsive engagement with short-form videos is, unfortunately, the norm rather than the exception. The reason why tweens and teens (and, if we’re honest, many adults, too) spend so much time watching these videos is because they’re like eating a bag of potato chips. You’re not going to eat just one, but you might just devour the whole bag.
Similarly, short-form video consumption starts with one video, then another, then … 15 more. Before we know it, we’ve spent an hour scrolling—in part because the algorithm feeding us these videos knows what we like and has plenty more to offer.
In October 2024, confidential information from TikTok’s own in-house research was released in conjunction with an ongoing lawsuit involving 14 U.S. attorneys general. It found that addiction to the app could happen within a span of just 35 minutes, or about 260 eight-second videos.
Mental Health Risks: TikTok’s Effect on Kids’ Brains
Attention Span and Mental Health Correlations. As we know, addiction almost never comes without a host of other potential consequences. And that’s true here. TikTok’s own in-house documentation (as reported by NPR) is a sobering statement about what their researchers have observed: “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.”
That is a significant list of outcomes I don’t think any of us want for our children. Those outcomes have been broadly summarized under the label “TikTok Brain,” which is shorthand for all of the ways short-form video can short-circuit an adolescent’s ability to cultivated sustained attention and focus. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Michael Manos, the clinical director of the Center for Attention and Learning at Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital, succinctly described the problem: “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast.”
James Williams, author of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, summarizes: “It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables. We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”
Navigating TikTok Content Concerns for Parents
Content Concerns. And all of those concerns about short-form video come before we even get to what kids are actually watching, i.e., the actual content. Much of it, of course, is humor based, often involving pratfalls, something unexpected, something ridiculous—not unlike the kinds of videos we’ve been watching since America’s Funniest Home Videos showed up in the pre-internet age back in 1990.
But while explicit pornographic imagery is generally prohibited on most platforms (X, formerly known as Twitter, being a big exception), kids may still encounter all manner of images and ideas that would raise a parent’s eyebrows. That list might include (among other things) sexually suggestive imagery and dialogue; videos glorifying risky behavior and lifestyles (including pro-anorexia content); and videos laced with harsh profanity.
Helping Kids Overcome TikTok Misinformation
Misinformation and Worldview Concerns. Anyone who has an opinion on virtually anything can air it out on social media and in short-form videos. There’s no vetting, no fact-checking, no one questioning the veracity of claims about, well, virtually anything. Only if content violates a given platform’s content guidelines with regard to hate speech or harassment will it be taken down.
Tweens and teens who are still formulating the ability to think critically may well accept a given claim at face value if it’s made by a content producer that they connect with personally. In effect, likeability equals credibility. According to a September 2024 report from Pew Research, 17% of all U.S. adults get their news from TikTok. But that percentage swells to 39% for those ages 18 to 29. In other words, more than a third of young people today are primarily having their view of reality in the world shaped by TikTok and short-form video, often (or perhaps usually) with no one interacting with them or giving them the critical tools they need to evaluate whether a given information source is truly credible or not.
Practical Tips for Managing TikTok Effects on Kids
So How Should Parents Respond?
Looking at the information above, it seems self-evident that limits on this form of screentime are hugely important for our kids to grow into well-rounded adults. And depending on the ages of our kids, we may feel a bit overwhelmed at the task of establishing and maintaining healthy habits in this area.
So what do we do to stem the tide or make necessary course corrections if necessary? Here are a few thoughts:
Examine our Own Habits. Before we make dramatic changes to our kids’ screentime and interaction with social media, we need to look at our own habits. How are we using screens? How do our kids see us interacting with them? Are we watching an hour of TikTok a day? To help our kids, we have to get our own house in order, too, as parents. We can do that on our own before asking our kids to potentially make changes. Or, if you have older teens, you can even invite them to make changes with you.
Setting and Resetting Boundaries. The problem with short-form video is that it’s like a cup of spilled water on a cluttered dining room table. It goes everywhere, filling in the cracks. It’s easy to engage with the internet in general, and short-form social media, in the same way, unconsciously reaching for our phones to fill in every moment of our day that’s not occupied with something else. Changing that habit requires setting, and resetting as necessary, boundaries on where, how much and what we’re going to watch on our phones.
Intentional Engagement and Replacement. It’s been said that nature abhors a vacuum. And if we hope to change our family’s habits in this area, it likewise requires a proactive vision of how we’re going to fill the time that might once have been devoted to endlessly scrolling TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Parents, this is going to require an intentional effort from you, both in terms of potentially initiating different activities and in terms of engaging relationally with our kids. It could be as simple as having a family game night once a week, or taking a phone-free walk together after dinner. What do your kids enjoy (apart from TikTok, of course)? How can you do more of those activities together?
The Dessert Model. One of the reasons—and maybe one of the big ones—that we watch short-form videos is because they make us laugh. And as long as we’re not laughing at someone’s pain or otherwise inappropriate content, that’s a good thing. Instead of committing to purging funny short-form video completely, a family could treat it like “dessert,” a little treat for a few minutes after dinner. Spending a few minutes swapping funny videos turns this activity into something that builds relationship with each other. My wife, in particular, enjoys silly corgi videos, and I enjoy listening to her laugh when she watches them. Building in an intentional time to enjoy laughing together can be a good thing indeed.
Cultivating a Stewardship Mindset. As our kids get older, they may not respond well to limits being thrust upon them “for their own good.” One way to give ownership and agency in this conversation is to look at our screentime use in this area from a stewardship perspective. What goals do we have that we could pursue with that extra time? What skills or relationships might we invest in instead? Approaching this hot-button issue from this perspective moves it from being a conversation about being deprived of a beloved thing to talking about how we can best invest the limited time we have in what we truly care about.
The short-form video genie isn’t, in all likelihood, ever going back in the bottle. It’s a world we’re going to have to navigate together as families. Understanding the very real concerns with this form of media, as well as having a strategy for dealing with it, can help our families navigate this ubiquitous issue together.
The post TikTok’s Effects on Kids: What Parents Need to Know appeared first on Focus on the Family.
Continue reading...