Most of us are hostages of our smartphones to one degree or another. Whether we’re texting friends, checking email, following the news, or clicking through travel photos and cute cat videos, it’s hard to resist this hit of dopamine. Even late at night it’s hard to stop the scroll, though we know full well we’ll regret it in the morning.
If smartphones have this effect on adults, what is the effect on children and teens, whose brains are still developing? This question has bothered Jim Winston, psychologist and director of the Winston Family Foundation. (Not to be confused with the Winston Foundation, a human rights funder. The Winston Family Foundation does not currently have a website, but one is in development.)
Several incidents stuck in Winston’s mind. When he drove his sons to school, he noticed the teens bent over their phones as they headed to class. “Always, high school students were glued to their phones,” he recalls. “There was a tight spot on the sidewalk, and they would inevitably bump into me. And they were polite enough to say, ‘Excuse me,’ but they wouldn’t look up from their phones.”
In another incident at a party, a woman took her phone away from her eight-year-old son, and the baby melted. “He proceeded to fire her,” said Winston. “For me, these were withdrawal symptoms.”
Winston, a psychologist who specializes in addiction, believes that these young adults are showing signs of dependence. “As a clinician, I’ve dealt with the consequences of people who start using drugs or alcohol early in life, and I’ve seen how that creates a really harmful pathway for them,” he said.
Winston spoke to experts in the field and read every study he could get his hands on, which only added to his concern about young people and their devices. During that time, he was also charting a direction to found his family. His father, James Winston Sr., a real estate specialist and investor, passed away in 2018 and left his fortune to the Winston Family Foundation. He had far more money than anyone in his family expected, and Jim, his sister and three cousins, all directors of the foundation, weren’t sure how to spend what turned out to be more than $100 million in assets.
Jim Winston spoke to fellow filmmakers about what he was learning about children and technology, and suggested the issue as one that the fledgling institution should address. “The idea was not just to educate, but to see if we could provide some scientific backbone for figuring out what’s really going on with kids’ brains,” he said.
Other board members agreed and the result was the Winston Family Initiative in Technology and Adolescent Brain Development (WiFi), which was founded at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018. Last March, the foundation increased its commitment by providing $10. $1 million to establish the National Winston Center for Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development at UNC-Chapel Hill. The center will educate students, conduct research, and provide resources to parents, educators, and the public about the effects of technology and social media on adolescents’ social and emotional development.
“The center’s goal is to help families and educators understand how the increased use of technology is affecting children,” Winston said when the center was announced.
Lots of screen time?
Reports of a growing mental health crisis for young people are everywhere. Last October, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association Declared a national emergency in the field of child and adolescent mental health. And last December, the US Surgeon General issued advice on the mental health crisis for young people. “Even before the pandemic, a worrying number of young people were experiencing feelings of helplessness, depression, and suicidal thoughts – and rates have increased over the past decade.” General Surgeon Vivek Murthy said.
The causes of this mental health crisis are many, and it would be wrong to attribute this complex phenomenon to a single cause. There is still evidence that technology and social media play a role. Facebook’s own research concluded that Instagram had a negative effect on young girls’ body image, for example, and a recent study found an increase in body tics among young men who watched TikTok videos containing tics. Images of dismemberment and other forms of self-harm are easy to find online, and one study concluded that those who viewed self-harming content on Instagram showed “more self-harm and suicide-related outcomes”. Research by psychology professor and author Jean Twenge found that “Adolescents who spend five or more hours a day online were 71% more likely than those who spend only one hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor.”
Jim Winston explains that so far, the evidence for technology’s effect on young brains is correlative rather than causal. “There are a lot of interconnected studies,” he said. “You can’t prove it, but in 2011 smartphone ownership topped 50%. That was the tipping point. Teens started getting their own smartphones. Concurrently, we’ve seen a rise in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among teens rising every year.”
Mitch Bernstein believes the new National Winston Center at UNC-Chapel Hill will fill in some of the gaps in understanding how technology affects developing minds. Bernstein, who co-directs the center, is professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC-Chapel Hill. He and co-director Eva Telzer, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, have launched several research projects and expect preliminary results soon.
Bernstein’s kids are about to turn ten and twelve, and as of now, he has no intention of giving them smartphones. “The centers in the brain that are activated when we see people respond to us on social media are the same centers that are involved in drug addiction,” he said. “Many well-meaning parents have handed an addictive device to their children, and they have done so at a particularly troubling time. Most children get phones in the seventh to eighth grade, the second most dangerous period of brain development in a human life, with the first beginning From birth to the age of one year.
The first generation of digital natives
The new National Winston Center will continue and expand the work started by the Winston Family Initiative in Technology and Adolescent Brain Development, conducting research and delivering classroom and curriculum development for K-12 students, and providing resources for teens, parents, and educators.
According to Bernstein, a college class called Social Media, Technology and the Teenage Mind, first introduced in 2020, is popular with students, many of whom have their own concerns about their generation’s focus on technology.
When we asked 20-year-olds to tell us about their own experiences on social media, many said they wish their parents hadn’t responded to their requests to give them phones as early as they did. We have our first generation of digital natives now able to look back and tell us they think it’s too much.”
Bernstein doesn’t expect children – or adults – to be giving up their phones anytime soon, but he believes there are ways to reduce risk, including sending a message that moderation and “conscious use of social media” are important. We often pick up our phones for a specific reason, like checking the news, and “find out that two hours later, a rabbit hole got sucked into TikTok.” He said. “Imagine, before you picked up your phone, you spent a moment thinking, ‘What are my goals, how long do I expect to stay, and how do I feel now?'” “
The new center at UNC-Chapel Hill is the first institution in the United States to directly address the issue of technology, social media, and the impact on young people’s brains. It’s a prime example of how philanthropy can provide seed funding to an emerging underfunded field of science — tackling a poorly understood social problem. Although motivated by a particular donor concern, funding could end up setting the pump for research heading in any number of directions. It also provides an interesting, if small, philanthropic weight to the profound impact that the technology industry has on our entire lives.
Jim Winston hopes that the National Winston Center will play a critical role as the national repository for the latest research and expertise on the topic. “Children’s mental health has become a major national issue,” he said. “It makes sense to have a national center where everyone can turn when they want to know more. It’s like COVID – you go to Johns Hopkins, they’ve been up front. Hopefully over the next five to 10 years, we can produce, in a hard science way, evidence of The impact of technology and social media on children’s brains.
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