Woman's Hour - Parenting: Teens and social media

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

We’re used to hearing about the negative impact that using social media can have on girls – it can cause sleeplessness, low mood, depression and anxiety. Edwina Dunn, a data entrepreneur and founder of the educational charity The Female Lead, thinks differently. She believes that used in the right way, social media can be a force for good and can improve teenagers’ mental health. She joins Jenni to explain her theory and the research she commissioned from Cambridge University, along with Dr Anne-Lise Goddings, Clinical Lecturer at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Jenny Murray welcoming you to this week's Podcast for Parents. Now, it's generally assumed that social media is not necessarily a good thing for girls. Too many selfies, too much worrying about not getting enough likes, and too much attachment to influencers who concentrate on makeup and clothes. Well, some research carried out at Cambridge University and commissioned by the educational charity The Female Lead has found that if it's used in the right way, social media can be good for teenagers and their mental health. Well, I'm joined by Dr. Anna-Lisa Goddings, who lectures at Great

Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, and Edwina Dunn, the founder of The Female Lead. Edwina, what did you want to find out when you commissioned this research? Well, we knew, we found out through some quantitative research that girls in their millions were following a diet of almost exclusively males, boy bands, and pretty much nothing else, celebrity and fashion. Whereas the contrast with boys was a much more diverse diet of sports people, business people, politicians, gamers. And so we were already aware of the fact that there was a very very distinct divide between girls and boys consumption and Dr Terry Apter had been interested in the female lead campaign and we decided to do

some you know really qualitative research in schools with young girls 11 to 17 and asked them. And what did the research show? The research showed that girls were very much taking on a diet of almost exclusively celebrity and fashion. They even called it a kind of cringe binge, which involved, you know, Love Island and Kardashians. They knew it was bad, but they were, you know, almost with peer pressure forced into participating. And Alisa, what would you say we know about the impact of social media then on teenage girls, if that's the kind of thing they're looking for? So the research that's available is quite

contradictory. Some studies show quite a close link between using social media and poor mental health particularly in teenage girls. We conducted a recent study that looked at nearly 13,000 young people and looked at how they reported their own mental health and well-being and how that related to how much they access social media. And we found there was, for both girls and boys, a link between those young people who access social media a lot and poorer self-reported mental health, as well as life satisfaction, happiness and higher levels of anxiety. But the interesting thing about the study we did was we tried to look and see what might be driving that. And particularly in girls, we found that a lot of the underlying association seems to be driven by cyberbullying and being subject to cyberbullying, as well. So that social media itself doesn't have to be negative, but the things that it stops you doing otherwise

and what you're accessing and what you're being exposed to can result in higher levels of mental health concerns and problems in young people. Edwina, I know in the 1990s you were behind the Tesco club card and I wondered how does your experience of kind of spying on people's shopping habits influence your interest in the behavior of teenage girls? I think what big data has shaped for me is the idea that measuring what people actually do versus what they say they do is very revealing

and once you know the problem you can actually do something about it. And so although all my work was until now very commercially orientated, this was something that, you know, really interested me when we were looking at social media. people behave and of course the opportunity is then to intervene in some way and to say can that flow be changed in some way and and make that a force for good. Annalisa I know your interests lie in the way the adolescent brain develops and what might happen if say they miss a lot of school. What have you learned about the way they develop socially as their brains develop? So there's now a building area of research looking at social development and social brain development during adolescence. And over the last 15 to 20 years, we have learned a huge amount about the fact that this is a really key period of time for adolescents. So they go

from being children very much in the family unit. And then during adolescence, they work out who they are. They work out how to navigate in a social world. They work out what their own opinions are and how that relates to other people. And this is an amazing period of opportunity for young people to establish who they want to be and to realise how many things there are they could do in the world. But on the flip side, it's also a period of profound vulnerability. And this may be why adolescents in particular are vulnerable to social media and the negative aspects of it, because their emotional development is key

and how they associate with their peers and how they fit into the world at this time is crucial. So what are some of the positives of social media that you suspect, even if it's not yet proven that it can be good? So adolescence still is a period where you can become anything, where you have so much potential and so much opportunity to look beyond what you've seen within your own family, within your own upbringing.

And social media gives you the opportunity to access that in a way that nothing else has done before. So wherever you come from, you have the opportunity to associate with an astronaut, to associate with a singer, but perhaps somebody who's really interested in the singing rather than just the social side of their lives. Whatever you might want to go into,

even if you don't know that person. And we know within my own field of medicine, actually, if you've never met anybody who's a doctor, but you kind of quite like science, you think you might like to do it, potentially social media gives you avenues to connect with people who might be able to open doors and make that possibility a reality. So Edwina, I know you're concentrating on the kind of role models that social media can provide. How can you provide the astronaut, the doctor, the kind of people Anna-Lisa is talking about?

Yeah, I think today the way social media works is that the more you consume, the more you get served exactly the same content and so the campaign that we've devised is called disrupt your feed so the study we did was to take young girls and to say we're not going to change what you love consuming but we're going to introduce up to four new women who may be in the sphere of interest like science, like saving the planet, like business. And so we introduced just up to four and measured these girls over a period of year to see whether that had changed their outlook and their belief in their future and their career opportunities.

And the research that Dr. Terri Apter did basically showed an absolute link between new feeds that were more in their sphere of interest and an outcome that led them to believe that they could do this. So, Annalisa, what kind of advice would you give to a parent? I know your son, because he's here, but with his dad very very small so far but to parents with children who are older how can they control this or help them control it? So as I say our study shows there are definite things that seem to drive some of the mental health problems associated with social media use so from that we would think about cyberbullying as a huge issue, particularly for young people.

So engage with your children. Children now learn about safe online use and internet and social media use. So learn what they're learning. Make sure you've got things set up to protect them, but also engage with them as to why they're doing it. And then if young people are getting cyber bullied, we know that most of them don't tell adults, they don't tell their parents, and they don't tell other trusted adults. So making sure that your young teenager

has got somebody they can talk to, whether that's you or whether that's others. And then thinking about what young people aren't doing because of social media. So good sleep practices, not using Facebook, not using social media in that sort of hour before you go to bed so that you have a safe space and a safe time. And thinking about whether or not you should be out doing things with real friends and exercising as opposed to just social media. Dr. Annalisa Goodings and Edwina Dunn, thank you both very much indeed for being with us. And don't forget, we always want to hear from you. If you have ideas for things we could discuss about being a parent, do let us know. You can send us a tweet or an email and we'd love to hear from you. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year

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