One group is fighting to protect kids from tech addiction.
Between the fear of fake news, scams, and simple tech overload, many adults are trying to be more mindful of their social media use. But should more attention be paid to the attachment between youths and their smartphones? MAMA, or Mothers Against Media Addiction, thinks so.
In recent years, it’s become widely known that excessive social media use can be detrimental to young users. Those with kids in their lives are likely familiar with the research that revealed children and teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of mental health problems, including increased symptoms of depression and anxiety, according to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy.
As parents across the country became aware of the risks, they probably tried to implement some restrictions to keep their offspring out of harm’s way, but one group is using this opportunity to attempt to make more sweeping changes via grassroots efforts on both state and local levels. Founded in 2024, the nonprofit Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA), which was modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), is hoping to combat what they consider a rising addiction to social media and other digital tools among kids.
“It’s abundantly clear that there’s a crisis of media addiction going on in American society,” the organization’s founder Julie Scelfo tells Katie Couric Media. She decided to focus her efforts on kids, however, because of their extreme dependence and vulnerability. “Our kids are glued to their screens — screen time is overtaking face-to-face human interaction and real-life experiences and it’s got to stop.”
It’s a smartphone life
While you might have gone phone-free your entire adolescence or played Snake when your teacher turned their back, times have changed. Phone ownership is widespread among kids. Just over half of children in the U.S. — 53 percent — now own a smartphone by the age of 11, according to the nonprofit Common Sense Media, which has been tracking this data since 2003.
As a parent of three children, Scelfo has seen first-hand a shift in kids’ attention to their screens and how it has exposed them to “a handful of highly dangerous risks that can happen online, that can’t happen in the real world.” For instance, a hacker targeted a young member of her own family by duplicating their social media account and linking to a porn site in their biography.
There has been a rise in sextortion schemes targeting minors, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This generally involves someone pretending to be a classmate or peer and coercing a kid to send sexually explicit material and then threatening to release that compromising material unless they receive payment. Sadly, these crimes have led to suicide in some cases: From October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations received over 13,000 reports of sextortion cases, involving at least 12,600 victims — primarily boys — that led to at least 20 suicides.”
Of course, aren’t out of virtual harm’s way: Videos and photos posted to social media platforms can contribute to body image issues that may lead them toward eating disorders or harmful dieting trends. Scelfo points out that this exposure has also created “an unrealistic beauty standard that makes it near impossible for parents to counter.”
She points to one trend that’s making the rounds on TikTok encouraging users to establish an eight-step beauty routine — shockingly, it’s being served up to users of all ages. “These advertisements and this viral content are actually training young girls to believe that their skin is inadequate and that if they don’t start now, they are going to ‘lose’ their beauty,” she says.
These are just a few examples of the risks awaiting young people on social media. There are also filters that put an extreme emphasis on appearance, one of which tells you what kind of job you have based on what you look like, and countless other hazards.
Addressing social media’s dangers
Before you call your kid over and sit them down to discuss some new social media rules you plan to implement, we have bad news: Scelfo doesn’t believe these dangers can be solved simply by parents talking with their kids about them. She says to effect real change, lawmakers need to create some safeguards to better protect all kids. MAMA’s main priorities are passing the Kids Online Safety Act and an updated version of the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (also known as COPPA 2.0). Both of these bills would reign in harmful data practices that fuel harmful algorithms targeting kids and teenagers.
Unlike most issues we’re currently facing, this alarm is drawing support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. For example, The Kids Online Safety Act has 65 co-sponsors in the Senate, which include both Democrats and Republicans. “The only people who don’t want this legislation to pass are the big tech companies that are profiting billions of dollars off our children’s addiction, so it’s certainly not a partisan issue.”
Even with apparent bipartisan unity, making laws and regulating companies takes time, not to mention a cultural shift. “As a society, we’re so addicted to the media — we have screens in our elevators, at our gas pumps, and in our restaurants,” says Scelfo. “It’s too much for anyone to hear about all of the tragedies and news in the world all the time, so we need to set some healthy limits for ourselves, and even though that’s hard to do we absolutely have to do it for our kids because they need help.”
Cell phones in schools
Scelfo gets the intricacies of combating these online threats — she says it’s virtually impossible to monitor all of the potentially dangerous content that a kid might come across. But she adds that banning students’ cell phone use is a good place to start.
“What I mean by phone-free schools is the requirement that children check smartphones in at the beginning of the day and don’t get them back until the end of the day,” she explains.
Still, some parents object to banning phones from schools because they want to be able to reach their kids to coordinate pickups — or worse, communicate with them in case of an emergency. In 2022 alone, there were at least 93 school shootings across the U.S. — which marked the highest level in two decades. Despite this uptick, security experts warn against the use of cell phones in schools. “The general rule is, when you’re in a lockdown, educators and safety officials don’t want kids on the phones because you want their full 100 percent attention on the teacher or other educators,” school safety expert Ken Trump told The Washington Post.
Beyond having the potential to make schools safer, Scelfo says phone-free environments can reduce distractions and help foster a much-needed sense of independence among kids.
“We live in a time where parents have an incredible amount of anxiety and the idea of reaching our children constantly helps reduce our anxiety a little bit, but it actually doesn’t make them safer,” she says. “It also deprives children of appropriate opportunities to separate from their parents and develop their own independence and resiliency when it comes to problem-solving.”
In the end, Scelfo believes that we collectively need to be more intentional with our screen time. “We need to move to a way of thinking that tech should not be automatically adopted just because it exists,” she says. “We should be really thoughtful about how, when, and where we add it to our lives. And it should be used only when it serves our humanity, not the other way around.”
