Recently, I read an article in The New York Times about some teens on Long Island who started a newspaper. And what was interesting to me about this was why they did it. Several of them were quoted as saying they were bored with scrolling on their phones.
They wanted something else to do – something to get them out of their bedrooms, interacting with each other and using their minds.
Even teens are getting bored with scrolling.
We all assume that teens love both their phones and the social media they can access on them. But, as it turns out, there are other feelings involved.
Delany Ruston, MD, founder of Screenagers, says she sees a lot of teens in her medical practice who wish they didn’t spend so much time on social media but who find cutting back really hard.
And, in fact, she has put together a program, Boostingbravery.com, to help teenagers support each other in making healthier screen choices.
In her recent post, Dr. Ruston talks about an interesting phenomenon amongst screen users, including teens: people who scroll out of boredom often feel even more bored after scrolling.
But, she says, it’s not just how much teens and others use screens, it’s also how they use their screens. She quotes Katie Davis of University of Washington’s Digital Youth Lab, who has done research in this area. Davis has found that while scrolling can lead to boredom, active use of screens to create something, message someone, post something meaningful or search for specific content can lead to more positive feelings.
Evidently, using a screen actively promotes very different feelings than being the passive recipient of news, videos and everyone else’s posts.
How about helping your teen (and possibly yourself…) to learn more about the feelings evoked by these various types of screen use – and to exercise some new choices?
Try some of these suggestions:
1. Take a hint from the Long Island teens who started a newspaper and support your teen if they want to start a project with friends, go somewhere (safe) outside of the house or engage in projects at home. Do all you can to keep these activities going.
2. Tell them about what you’ve learned here. Make sure they know that active use of their screens to create something new can lead to more positive feelings than just passive scrolling.
3. Plan activities outside of the house at least once a day on weekend and vacation days. Make sure you get buy-in from your teen. And try to make at least some of these activities ones that require your teen’s full attention so that you don’t have to forbid phones – but the phones have to be put down as part of the activity. It’s almost summer: try canoeing, kayaking, learning to row, hiking, a picnic, swimming, snorkeling, visiting a local garden, museum or art gallery, planting and taking care of some herbs and vegetables, going to minor or major league games, walking around a nearby city, taking a train somewhere new.
You get the idea.
4. Start the conversation. Talk about scrolling and boredom. Tell your teen if you have felt bored while scrolling or after doing so – and ask them if they have.
5. Ask your teen what new things or new projects they would like to start. If they have no idea, don’t start making a million suggestions – just tell them to think about it and get back to you.
All of these ideas are good – but don’t get discouraged if your teen stares you down and goes back to their phone when you suggest them. Just bring up the issues I’ve mentioned here now and then, and hope for some discussion.
This is the seventh post in a series on The Transition to Motherhood.
In her book, Matrescence, Lucy Jones discusses the idea that society — and women themselves — often feel that childbirth and caring for young children diminish their memory and cognitive capacity. While they are pregnant and after they give birth, women often complain of not being able to remember anything, being scatterbrained, or feeling stupid.
But when looking at the research, Jones found the opposite!
In fact, it seems that having a baby concentrates the mind. Brain structure and the neurochemistry of the brain actually change during and after pregnancy in order to aid the mother to tune into her baby and her baby’s needs. It may be that some of the old things the mother used to think about are less the focus of her attention after her baby arrives and she may feel less capable of concentrating on them — but this is far different from being “stupid.”
In fact, Bridget Callahan, a researcher at UCLA, found evidence of enhanced learning, memory, and cognitive capacity after childbirth (Callahan, et al, 2022).
Of course, this makes sense, because new mothers need to expand their ability to tune in to their babies, to learn what helps and doesn’t help their babies to feel comfortable, and to learn how to solve the many problems of everyday childcare.
In fact, in reviewing the literature, researchers Erika Barba-Müller et al found that there are structural and functional changes in the woman’s brain both during pregnancy and following delivery which stimulate her to progress from being an individual with self directed needs to being responsible for her baby. These changes are highly adaptive and aid in the woman’s transition to motherhood.
Similarly, in a review of the literature, Winnie Orchard found that there is evidence that the brains of pregnant women become more flexible, efficient, and responsive.
Minor difficulties in word finding and short-term memory often make women feel less competent during pregnancy and early motherhood — but this is not all that is going on.
Referring to Orchard again, Lucy Jones says that the lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain may be positive and that the cognitive load of adapting and adjusting to one or more growing children may help the brain to be resilient.
Think about it: So many people have started doing the daily word puzzles put out by the New York Times — as well as doing all sorts of gaming apps on their phones — in order to preserve and enhance their cognition. But these do not provide even a portion of the challenge that comes up in a day for the parent of a newborn or child of any age!
For a first-time mother — and her partner — the day they come home from the hospital is often a terrifying day. Suddenly, they realize that it is up to them to figure out how to care for their new baby and to keep them alive. Soon it is clear that caring for a newborn requires a completely new set of skills. And there is a great deal of trial and error. Every day new problems need to be solved. So much has to be learned — not just about babies in general — but about this particular baby, her sensitivities, and her preferences. And then, just as the parents are getting the hang of it, the baby starts a new sleep pattern, develops new feeding preferences, or enters a new developmental stage. And learning how to deal with these things requires a great deal more problem-solving.
So as for “Mom Brain” — yes, there is such a thing, but it is not what we often think it is. The Mom Brain is a more flexible, more competent, more resilient brain than the non-mom brain.
References
Barba-Müller, et al (2019). Brain plasticity in pregnancy and the postpartum period: links to maternal caregiving and mental health. Arch Womens Ment Health. 2019; 22(2): 289–299. Published online 2018 Jul 14. doi: 10.1007/s00737-018-0889-z
Callaghan, B. et al., (2022) “Evidence for cognitive plasticity during pregnancy via enhanced learning and memory”, Memory 30(5) , p. 519-536.
Jones, Lucy (2023). Matrescence.
Orchard, E. R., et al., (2022) “The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: Effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers”, bioRxiv
In her book, Matresence, Lucy Jones says that pregnancy is a metamorphosis. Like a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly, the woman’s previous identity must melt away in order for her new identity and concept of self to emerge.
And during her own first pregnancy, Jones found this process very disturbing. She says, unlike other stages of life for which there are parties and ceremonies to mark the transition of one stage of life to another, during pregnancy, for which there are no ceremonies in our culture which celebrate the mother, the woman can feel profoundly awkward and alone.
Jones talks about how, during adolescence, she felt similarly awkward. She felt like she didn’t know what was going to happen next or how to be; she felt unsettled by the changes in her body.
But, she says, she had friends going through the same thing and films and articles and music which addressed the strangeness and alienation of adolescence, so she didn’t feel completely alone.
But as she went through her pregnancy, she did not feel accompanied. Part of this may have been because she, herself, did not understand what was happening to her mind, her body, or her self — and therefore she could not really talk about it with others.
She says that missing from pregnancy books or health apps was information about how pregnancy affects a woman’s mind – and her actual brain. She quotes Rosemary Balsam from the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society as calling this the “vanished pregnant body.”
She suggests that the very idea of the pregnant woman, of being two people in one, may make other people uncomfortable.
For example, there’s the the story of the runner, Allyson Felix. Felix was an Olympic medalist and many time US National Champion when she became pregnant. One of her sponsors, Nike, cut her pay by 70% and refused to offer her reasonable pay protection during her postpartum period. Felix reports being told “runners should just run” – in other words, women runners should not be pregnant.
Clearly having a premier spokesperson be pregnant was uncomfortable for Nike. And Jones talks about how it was uncomfortable for her – as it is for so many women — and not just because of the bodily changes, but also because of the emotional disequilibrium she felt and because of the changes in the way she perceived others as seeing her.
Experiencing this was hard for Jones because she felt external pressure to “pretend that pregnancy was a less dramatic and drastic event” than what she felt it to be.
And it is a dramatic and drastic event. For all women.
Thank goodness for Lucy Jones for saying so and letting us all heave a sigh of relief. We didn’t have to say it. But she did.
Toward the end of her pregnancy, Jones describes bowing out of work and not feeling guilty. She realized this was not typical of her — but she felt that she wanted to be at home and she didn’t mind being alone. She says that she felt “calm and placid, pleasantly vague, like nothing could touch me”.
Later she found out that this is normal — that there are physiological changes that accompany each of the many stages of pregnancy and that at the end of pregnancy, the reactivity to stresshormones is dampened. No wonder she didn’t feel the normal pressure to work and perform and please her boss. And luckily for her, she had the ability to step away.
The biology and neurobiological literature supports Jones. When she reports that she felt that her brain was changing during her pregnancies, she was right. In one study by Niu et all (2024), ten pregnant women were followed over the course of their pregnancies. Changes in brain structure were charted. Reductions in gray matter volume were found over the course of pregnancy. In other words — the pregnant woman’s brain actually shrinks! Their conclusion? There are profound neurobiological changes during pregnancy.
Moreover, in a review of the literature, Esel (2010) found evidence that the brains of pregnant women and women with children are very different from the brains of women who have not had children who are within the same age range. Moreover, Esel found ample evidence of neurobiological and hormonal influences on women and their feelings and behavior. She says that maternal behavior develops over the course of a woman’s life, including during pregnancy. This happens through the development of special neural networks, which are cooperatively developed by genetic, environmental, and hormonal factors.
In fact, the biology is fascinating. Esel points out the importance of hormonal influences in preparing women for motherhood. She says that estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin stimulate maternal behavior after birth — and that the stimulation of the vagina during birth initiates the release of oxytocin, so important for the initiation of maternal behavior as well as milk production. She also discusses the finding that women are prepared to become mothers from their own birth. She says that early exposure to estrogen during the perinatal period in their own early lives may be responsible for women’s greater interest in and facility with social relationships over that of men. She suggests that this capacity primes women to be interested in and to relate to their infants once they become mothers. Then, during pregnancy the capacity for relating to their own infants is further primed by the high levels of progesterone and estrogen which are secreted. Furthermore, she says that the hormonal exposure of the brain during pregnancy plays an important role in the development of maternal neural networks and systems.
In the same vein Esel says that in humans, the ability to establish social relationships is inversely related to levels of fetal testosterone both in females and males — so in other words, men, from birth, are less primed to establish social relationships.
No wonder women feel different when they are pregnant — and no wonder they feel a shift in both body and identity. The hormonal influences on their brains, their bodies, their feelings and their behavior are powerful.
I look forward to reading the rest of Jones’s book to find out more about the research on the physiological and psychological changes that come about during pregnancy. I know too little about this.
In fact, most of us know too little about this.
Scientists are looking at aspects of the woman’s experience during pregnancy in a way that they might not have considered doing years ago, even though we have needed this information for a long time. But perhaps, as Jones suggests, science waited until there were enough women in the field to make this a priority.
Yanbin Niu, Benjamin N. Conrad, M. Catalina Camacho, Sanjana Ravi, Hannah A. Piersiak, Lauren G. Bailes, Whitney Barnett, Mary Kate Manhard, David A. Cole, Ellen Wright Clayton, Sarah S. Osmundson, Seth A. Smith, Autumn Kujawa, Kathryn L. Humphreys (2024). Neurobiological Changes Across Pregnancy: A Longitudinal Investigation, bioRxiv, The Preprint Server for Biology doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.08.584178
Ana is a psychologist in private practice in Philadelphia. She is the mother of three children and she enjoys outdoor adventures.
At what age should we let kids use social media?
As a clinical psychologist and mother of three, I’ve been grappling with this question. My oldest child is 13 and he claims that everyone has Snapchat except him.
Looking at the scientific research, the wider mental health trends, and what I know about adolescent development, I’ve decided he will have to wait until he’s at least 15.
Here’s why:
First, there are concerning trends in adolescent mental health. The rates of teen anxiety, depression, and suicide have risen significantly over the last decade. Numerous studies show that teens report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness at significantly higher rates and that mental health professionals are diagnosing higher rates of depression. Most alarming is that the suicide rate for 10-14 year olds increased 139% for girls and 70% for boys over the last decade. And what does this have to do with social media?
Adolescent mental health started to decline sharply in 2012, which is the year that we started using the word “selfie” and the year that Facebook acquired Instagram.
Is there evidence that social media has played a role in these worrisome mental health trends?
Yes.
You may recall that Facebook was initially only for college students and was rolled out at different colleges at different times over the course of two years before opening up to the general public. One study found that the rates of anxiety increased by 20% and the rates of depression increased by 7% at each college in the year following the introduction of FB.
Several recent studies actually demonstrate causation, not just correlation between social media use and decreased mental health, and the apparent pathway is social comparison. In other words, use of social media causes people to engage in more social comparisons and fear of missing out (FOMO) and this in turn increases depressive symptoms and decreases self-esteem, body image, and self-perceived social acceptance.
And it has been found that the harmful effects of social media are stronger (worse) for girls.
Some of the studies I just referenced were done on young adults, and it’s important to consider that there are several reasons why social media may affect adolescents even more than it affects adults. During adolescence, the brain regions associated with attention, feedback, and reinforcement from peers become more sensitive as teens navigate identity formation, acceptance, and social status. This is a normal part of adolescent development, but with so many peer interactions occurring online for all to see and possibly even enshrined forever on people’s social media feeds, the stakes seem higher than they were pre-social media. If adults feel pressure to curate a certain image on social media, of course it’s even more fraught for teens.
Teens have always had a tendency to think they have an audience that notices their every blemish, and we used to try to quell their anxieties by telling them that no one is paying nearly as much attention to them as they think. Now that argument doesn’t work.
Social media, which started out as a vehicle for social connection seems to have turned into a way of quantifying social status.
So why do I recommend waiting until age 15?
One large study in the U.K. found developmental windows of increased sensitivity to the harmful impact of social media. Apparently, the onset of puberty and the onset of adulthood are especially vulnerable times: age 11-13 for girls, age 14-15 for boys, and age 19 for all genders.
I’m under no illusion that we can control our children’s online activity at age 19, but let’s try and hold out until at least age 15. When many teens in a community are on social media, it impacts everyone negatively, even those who don’t use it, so I think it’s worth thinking through this together as a community of parents. Most of us have felt the dopamine-fueled pull of social media on our adult brains, and I doubt we will regret holding out a little longer before unleashing it onto our kids.
Adolescence, with all its developmental tasks and hormones is certainly hard enough.
Lee (2022). The effects of social comparison orientation on psychological well-being in social networking sites: Serial mediation of perceived social support and self-esteem. Current Psychology.
(social comparisons on SM and mental health)
Burnell, George, Vollet, Ehrenreich, & Underwood (2019). Passive social networking site use and well-being: The mediating roles of social comparison and the fear of missing out. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace.
(causal pathway: passively using SM🡪social comparisons and FOMO🡺worse mental health)
Thoughtful Parenting 