As federal lawmakers grill social media CEOs and discuss how they can help prevent harm to children, a local expert is chiming in on what parents can do.
Matt Mulvaney, an associate professor of Human Development and Family Science at Syracuse University, said parents should be paying attention to hearings with social media giants like Meta, X, and TikTok.
"We all need to learn more,” he said. “I'm not sure we can ever learn enough, but it's absolutely incumbent upon us to learn as much as we can about the world and the lives that our kids are living right now."
One of the main things parents can do to help is to develop a line of trust with their children as early as possible. Mulvaney said kids can usually tell if something isn’t right, and they need to feel safe telling a parent or other trusted adult.
He recommends sharing your own experiences and checking in regularly with pre-teens and teens. That includes asking, ‘What’s going on?” and not accepting, ‘Nothing,” as an answer.
"(Tell teens) ‘You gotta give me something. We're partners here, and you know I want to trust you, and I want to give you as much freedom as I can, but that's kind of a two-way street, and so I need to feel confident that you're safe. I need to feel confident that you're making good decisions, and if I can do that, I can feel a little bit more hands-off with you.’" said Mulvaney.
Also, talk to your kids about the lack of reality on social media. Mulvaney said adolescent egocentrism can make teens excessively self-conscious.
"They think people could be looking at them all the time, so it just heightens that concern about image, about appearance, and then it's coupled of course with those curated images of their friends' lives which aren't the realistic images and are done with not real photos either," he said.
He encourages parents to learn about different social media platforms and create a strong network of other parents, teachers, and experts to help support teens during an often challenging time in their brain development.
"The reward centers (of a teen's brain) are hitting a lot harder," Mulvaney said. "The reward centers around social cues and environment and stimuli are hitting harder. They don't have that control. This adolescent egocentrism is in place. It all makes for this sort of neurological brew that just makes (social media) so addictive."
Mulvaney recommends setting up experiences that don’t involve phones with kids and teens, like going to the beach or movies, and consider starting “screen-free” family dinners to give everyone more time to connect.
