Social media is linked to anxiety and depression in girls. Instead of deep one-on-one conversations, girls now spend five hours daily scrolling through platforms, replacing meaningful connections with shallow, performative interactions that disrupt their social development.
Social media, especially Instagram, is harmful for girls, especially anxiety, depression.
Think about what girls are supposed to be doing developmentally. When we were kids, girls would talk on the phone. You talk one, you know, there was, you know, you talk to one person for hours, right?
Oh yeah, you, you, I would be on the phone with Jodi Brickin, and finally my mom would pick up from the kitchen phone downstairs and be like, would you girls get off the phone and go to bed? Like, yes, we would just talk and chat.
Right, girls need to connect. Boys, you know, we didn't do that. We would say, Hey, are you free now? Yeah, let's go meet here. Let's go play this game, whatever. So girls' and boys' sociality is different, and therefore getting a smartphone blocks their sociality in different ways. Once your child gets a smartphone, they're not going to have those 2-hour conversations because on average they're spending 5 hours a day just to keep up on social media on multiple platforms. So it's going to devastate the deep connections. They're not going to have the deep connections. They're going to have lots of shallow connections. That's really bad, especially for girls. That's one.
Why is it really bad for girls to have shallow connections?
As my friend Richard Reeves says, he runs the American Institute for Boys and Men, he says, girls, girls, girls like to, like to connect face-to-face. Boys like to connect shoulder-to-shoulder, like we're doing something together, we're hiking, we're building something, we're whatever. So the smartphone is gonna block the deep connections for girls. It's gonna cause lots of shallow connections. There's also an enormous difference between connecting and performing. And there are times when kids need to learn how to boast, how to impress others, but it shouldn't be most of the time, and it shouldn't be when they're with their friends. And as soon as girls get smartphones and social media, and now everything's about their profile and who liked them and why did he like her post but he didn't like my post, and all the stuff that girls do a lot more than boys about like the, you know, the going further on why they thought that or did that. Hmm. It drives them into just an endless loop of that kind of thinking, as opposed to just connecting and having fun and sharing secrets with a friend. Then there's the sexualization. You know, 8, 9, 10-year-old girls should not be thinking about skincare products and push-up bras and, and hair— I mean, you know, the— all of the, the— all the beauty stuff. We need to protect our girls from that for as long as we possibly can. But the day they get a smartphone and access to TikTok, is the day that they're going to be exposed to those videos. If you just think about what healthy development is for a girl, the British have a phrase, don't put your daughter on the stage, Mr. Worthington. It's from like an old play or something. But, you know, you don't want to raise a girl on a stage. That would be devastating to her because what matters is her looks. The world judges her for her looks, and that's what she cares about. So growing up on a smartphone and social media is just devastating for all the things girls need to do to turn into competent, happy women.
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