What we often get wrong about teens and screen time

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4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s been a lot of debate lately about the potential effects of smartphones and social media on young people’s mental health. Some states like states like Florida and Utah have even tried to ban kids from using social media apps until they reach a certain age. But Mikey Jensen, professor of clinical psychology and director of the Interactions and Relationships Lab at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, said outright bans could do more harm than good.

On the show today: How smartphones and social media are reshaping our lives. And why we should focus on the quality of kids’ online time instead of the amount of it.

Then, we’ll get into the cost of a major ransomware attack for a health care company and its clients. And, the mini pencil economy and what a history professor got wrong about ancient Rome.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

- “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?” from Nature

- “The Phone in the Room” from The New York Times

- “I Asked 65 Teens How They Feel About Being Online” from The Cut

- “What the evidence really says about social media’s impact on teens’ mental health” from Vox

- “UnitedHealth to take up to $1.6 billion hit this year from Change hack” from Reuters

- “Change Healthcare stolen patient data leaked by ransomware gang” from TechCrunch

- “IMF Steps Up Its Warning to US Over Spending and Ballooning Debt” from Bloomberg

We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. You can reach us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us.
0:11.0	I'm Kyle Rosedahl. It is Tuesday the 16th of April and we're
0:16.0	going to talk smartphones today, social media and our lives, especially kids and
0:21.8	what it may be doing to them in many many many many
0:26.7	aspects of their lives.
0:28.7	For sure and you know in line with that you have states like Florida and Utah who are trying to implement laws
0:36.2	Much to the seagrin of the tech companies that would ban kids from social media apps until they reach a certain age and there's a big fight happening over that.
0:45.4	But we wanted to know what the science actually says at this point about the consequences
0:51.9	of these technologies.
0:53.0	So here to make us smart about this is Mikey Jensen.
0:56.0	She's a professor of clinical psychology
0:58.0	and the director of the Interactions and Relationships Lab
1:02.0	at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
1:04.1	Welcome to the show.
1:05.1	Hi, thanks for having me.
1:08.1	So I want to kind of separate out smartphones and social media and maybe take them one at a time.
1:15.6	What have smartphones done to our interactions and relationships?
1:20.9	I think you're right to pull them apart because smartphones and social media are not exactly the same thing.
1:26.2	We all get into different things via different devices and on different platforms and I think it does
1:31.0	behoove us to think about them separately.
1:33.0	Yeah, so if we're tackling smartphones first, I mean, we're at a point in kind of historical
1:38.6	time where virtually all of us are connected via smartphone.
	...

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