(uplifting music) - Hello, and welcome to "Prairie Pulse."

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll hear music from the Minnesota-based singer/songwriter Lula.

But first, joining me now from Sanford is Sanford Health child psychologist, I get it all out.

Dr.

Katelyn Mickelson.

Dr.

Mickelson, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me here.

- As we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background.

- I am a child psychologist, and so I work with children with a variety of mental health concerns.

I work with children who might have an anxiety disorder who maybe had something scary or upsetting happen to them, who might have depression, who might have behavioral concerns, who maybe want somebody to talk to.

So I help them through those issues to build some healthy coping skills.

- Well, Dr.

Mickelson, you're here today to talk about social media on, I guess, well, young adults and children, but, you know, first tell what is child psychology?

- Child psychology is the study looking at how children develop, how they think, understanding more about their emotions and understanding their behaviors.

- So why did you choose to practice pediatric psychology?

- I enjoy working with children and as I have worked more and more with children, I have really learned that I love developing relationships with children and learning more about their experiences and helping them through this developmental period; I find that it's a really difficult time, and that if we can build coping skills early in childhood, that that can set them up for success throughout the rest of their life.

- Now before we came on the air, you were talking about different psychologies.

Can you talk just briefly about that?

- The overall study of psychology, which is going to look at human behavior, and then we have different types of psychology.

So we have clinical psychology, so if you go to a psychologist for assessment or therapy, you're probably seeing a clinical or a counseling psychologist who's studying more about mental health.

But we also can study cognitive psychology, which is learning more about how people learn, how they remember information.

But you could also do developmental psychology, studying development across the lifespan, not just children.

So there are many different parts of psychology.

- Yeah.

Well, we're here today to say to talk about the effects of social media, mainly towards high school students, but young people.

You know, how has the presence of social media apps affected, you know, your approach to your job and your patients, especially with the high number of teenagers reporting using it obviously?

- Yeah, it's really changed over the years.

So I haven't been practicing for a very long time, but I am a millennial, and so I grew up with social media in adulthood.

So, back when I was in college, that's when Facebook's, you still needed a college email to be able to join it.

And so I've really seen the development of social media throughout adulthood, and in my career, I would say that I have seen, it's become more pervasive.

So I think 95% of teens report having some sort of social media, whether that's YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat is a big one, and TikTok is another big one.

But also it's being used at younger and younger ages.

So I think we're seeing that even kids between eight and 12, about 40% of those kids are also using social media.

So we're just seeing more and more of this being consumed by kids, even younger and younger.

It's not too unusual now for, you know, five-year-olds to have smartphones.

- It's funny what they can do when they're handed a smartphone.

How do you discuss the use of social media with patients, I guess, especially if they're of high school age?

'Cause they, you know, when you're 14, 16, you think you know everything.

- You do.

And I approach it with curiosity, because I think any of us know that if we start to lecture a teenager on something that we think might be bad for them, they're gonna turn off, right?

And so when they come to me as part of my assessment, I ask them, like, "Tell me about your social media use and your screen use.

What do apps do you like?

How do you use them, and how do you feel like that might affect the problem that you're coming here today," and I wanna hear their story around that.

And then I wanna provide a little bit of education to the youth, on, we know that this can have an impact on mental health, not for everybody, but for some people.

And so maybe that's something we can approach and talk about more as we work together.

- In your years, and you have practiced for a few years now, have you seen a change in how teenagers interact with social media?

- Yeah, I think social media when it first started was a much smaller group of people that you would've been interacting with online.

So, Facebook I think was one of the first social medias, and that was usually centered around sharing things with your family and friends.

And so maybe you are staying connected with somebody that you don't see on a regular basis, but it's really expanded to something where we are interacting with a large audience very frequently.

And that's something I've seen social media shift from, where maybe you would've shared a video of your child's milestone on social media for your family and friends to see.

Well now it seems to be like you are talking to the camera as though you are talking to a larger audience, right?

Like, it's not just your small group anymore.

And so I'm seeing that children are engaging with more people online, they're connecting more, they're using it more, they're distracted by it more than I had seen earlier in my career.

- You know, when we talk about addiction, most of us think of drug or alcohol addiction.

Is there such a thing as social media addiction, and what is it?

- Currently, it's not a medical term we use, so it's not in our diagnostic manual that we use for mental disorders.

But I do think people will use it as a term.

And so social media addiction would refer to somebody who's maybe being impaired by the use of their social media.

So maybe they're struggling with being able to work, or maybe they're struggling with being able to go to school because they're using their social media so frequently.

So I think it's something that's still being studied and researched.

It's not an official diagnosis that you could go to a psychologist for, but we are learning that social media is impacting some of the same brain pathways that we see being impacted by other addictions.

And so I think it's definitely an area for further study.

- Well, I think, as I said, we're talking about high school a lot here.

You know, how does social media affect mental health, especially those in high school?

- We are seeing that teens who have problematic social media use as defined as using it for more than three hours a day, and it's interfering with some of their life, areas in their life are having increased rates of anxiety and depression.

What we don't know is this the chicken or the egg, so are people who are more prone to anxiety and depression using social media more, which might be making it worse, or is the use of social media what's causing the increase in anxiety and depression?

So we haven't quite teased that out yet, but we are seeing that there are increases in mental health concerns, especially when you're using social media more frequently.

And what's important to know is I think the most recent, I've seen a variety of statistics around how much kids are using social media specifically, but I've seen upwards of 50% of youth are using social media for three or more hours a day.

So we're seeing a lot of time being spent on these apps and we know that the more time you spend on the apps, the more likely there is to be mental health concerns.

So I find it something that we should really be addressing.

- Well, when you keep using about, I think you said three hours a day a time or two, but so many people think they've got Facebook up and open all the time.

How do you decide when you're on social media and when you're not?

- I think people use it quite frequently, right?

I remember a time when we used to go out into waiting rooms at a doctor's office and people would maybe be sitting there, maybe they would be knitting, maybe they would've brought a book, maybe they would, we don't even have magazines in our waiting rooms anymore.

But now I go out and everybody is on their phone.

And so I think we're using it when we're bored, when we wanna be distracted, without even thinking about it, right?

It's so easy to just pick up your phone and look at it.

So I do think it's important to notice that and think, "Is this bringing value to my life?

Is this bringing meaning to my life, or are there some other things that I wanna be adding in during those times when maybe I have to wait or maybe I feel discomfort," to build that frustration tolerance back again.

- Yeah.

What are the devices that company use to kind of keep teenagers engaged in their apps?

- Social media companies have their own psychologists that they have on their teams who are there to help increase engagement with the app.

And so they are really trying to hit our reward systems, and they're, I would love to know more of all of the devices that they use.

I think that they know how to hit our reward systems, kinda like gambling, right?

Like, if they know how to withhold the likes and when to send them out to you.

That will increase your engagement.

They know when you've gone a longer period of time without engagement and to send you a notifications so that you think to go on there.

They know that you used to be in a relationship with this person and you're no longer in a relationship with this person, and so this new person is messaging this person, and that that might create an emotional reaction in you so that you go and engage with their app.

And so they have all of these different things that they can do, but I think they're also really good at knowing based on the information you are giving them about what you engage with, they know more about you and your personality.

So maybe we send you likes, you know, around lunchtime, but maybe somebody else, we send them more frequently, or we send notifications more frequently so that they can really tap into our own reward system so that we wanna go and engage more so that they can make more money.

- So does this often affect other parts, of course I'm talking high schooler, again, their life, like homework, social life, even their personal image?

- Yeah, we're seeing in their research that I think there was a recent study that came out that looked at kids who had a smartphone before the age of 12 were more likely to have depression, obesity, and issues with sleep.

And so we're seeing that even owning a smartphone, not even necessarily going on social media apps, that that has an impact on mental health and other health factors.

We're also seeing with youth.

Girls I think tend to be more impacted by the relational aspect of social media, where boys are more looking to social media to learn about, like fitness, which is related to self-image, but it's more about achievement.

And so we're seeing that it's kind of, it shapes your self-image, right?

To be putting things out into the internet and consuming things into the internet, and thinking, "This is what the world thinks I should be, and so this is what I'm going to try to achieve," usually through marketing, right, and different products.

- Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about how screen time affects one's sleep?

- Yeah, I'm seeing, especially with youth, that instead of sleeping, maybe they are staying up later.

So research is showing that teens are often staying up past midnight to be on their devices.

And we know that teenagers, their sleep cycle tends to go to bed later and wake up later.

That's the natural sleep cycle.

And that is not impacted by social media, but they are going to sleep later.

They're also waking up in the middle of the night and using their devices.

They recommend that you lock up devices at night so that teens aren't going on them.

'Cause if you go on your device, it's going to be harder to fall back asleep because you are engaging with something rather than using some other coping strategy that might help you to be able to fall asleep.

So those are things I really talk about with my family so that we can make sure that kids are getting the sleep they need for that optimal brain development.

- How has the integration of AI, you know, generative artificial intelligence, AI, on the platforms done anything to social media with high school students?

- Generative AI is able to take in a lot of different information about the things you may like, and it amplifies the concerns that are already present with social media.

And so, and I think also, thinking about for younger kids too, I think it's becoming harder and harder to know, is this real or is this an AI video, and explaining that to younger kids is also really difficult.

- Yeah.

Well, of course, earlier this year a California jury found Meta Platforms, of course, the owner of many social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, liable for the damages they caused to a young woman's mental health.

How do you anticipate the trial outcome to change how you approach discussions of social media and mental health with, you know, teenage patients?

- I think it can help to give some evidence that we're seeing that a variety of people can be impacted by mental health and that we're able to see that social media companies are using things that can be negatively impacted by our mental health.

We learned with, in the early 2000s, they used to have all of these campaigns to help prevent teens from using nicotine, from using cigarettes, and telling kids that it's bad for you, telling it's bad for your health, doesn't necessarily work, but having them be against the system, so they created this media campaign against big tobacco, that big tobacco was the problem; that worked.

And so I think it's the same thing with the social media, whereas we can see that the social media thing is the system that we're against, not necessarily these bad effects.

'Cause that's long term, right?

Like, kids think very in the moment, but if you can make them against the system, they're much more likely to think about that, and be more likely to integrate that in.

- Yeah.

We're talking about sort of the negatives, but obviously, you know, there are positives to this too.

Is the answer moderation?

- Always, right?

I think everything is being able to think about how is this impacting my life, both in negative and positive ways.

I will have youth who've learned to crochet using YouTube, or they found a recipe on TikTok that they wanted to make.

I don't think that's all bad.

And so I think it's about thinking, "How does social media help me live a valued, meaningful life, and in what ways does it not, and how can I continue to do things that help me feel like this is bringing value into my life?"

- Yeah.

What are your thoughts about states like Minnesota putting forth legislation that would limit the amount of screen time for children based on their age?

- I'm curious to see how they decide how much screen time is too much and how they would implement that.

I do think that children should be doing a wide variety of things.

So part of that might be engaging with something on a screen, but I also wanna make sure that children are sleeping, that they're eating meals regularly, that they're playing.

Play is so important.

That they're moving their bodies, that they're reading, and that they're doing a variety of things.

And so I think, you know, having legislation that's helping us do that, parenting practices that are helping us do that, and media companies also doing what they can to help kids, I think it's a multifaceted approach to being able to help with some of the negative effects.

- So can you recommend for parents what age for children using social media in a safe and responsible manner and how to do it?

- The experts recommend waiting until 16, which sounds so late for people, but if you can wait until we have had more brain development to be able to manage some of the difficulty that comes with self-image, and the the addictive parts of that as well.

So the longer you can wait to start something, the less likely you are to become addicted to it.

That's what they're recommending, which sounds really late for a lot of people, but I think it's something to think about.

- You know, what are some of the signs maybe parents should be aware of if their child's dealing with negative symptoms?

- Some things I look for when I'm working with a family is how do you do when the child has that device taken away?

And so, if the kid is able to, okay, I go, you know, watch a few YouTube videos and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna color, I'm gonna do something else.

I'm not as concerned as somebody where I'm having to say, you've been on this for six hours, I take it away and you have a meltdown.

So if we're seeing changes in their behavior, if we're seeing that they're not sleeping, if they are getting irritable when it's removed, then I think it's something that I might talk with your pediatrician or mental health provider to see if they have any recommendations on how to manage that.

- Well, I wish we had more time, but we are about to run out.

So if people are interested in finding out and learning more, where can they go?

- One thing I recommend people read is the Surgeon General's report on social media and youth.

I know it sounds heady and maybe intimidating, but it's very approachable, very short, and has fantastic information in it that can help parents decide what's best for their children.

In that report, they recommend healthychildren.org that has some social media information, and then there's also commonsensemedia.org as well; that has information on all the different platforms and what you can do with your child collaboratively to create healthy screen time use.

- Well, we're out of time.

Thank you Dr.

Mickelson.

- Thank you for having me.

- Stay tuned for more.

(uplifting music) Lula is a Minnesota-based singer songwriter who has accomplished years of classical music training.

Her transition into expressive musical freedom has been a journey of passion and soul searching.

The result can be found in the heartfelt stories she tells in her music, which are full of emotion, empathy, and universal truths.

(classical inspirational music) ♪ Don't you know you have a lavender child ♪ ♪ He's never still, no, he's always wild ♪ ♪ Don't try to tame him but he'll always run ♪ ♪ He moves too quick, you'll be stuck in the dust ♪ ♪ Oh my I've fallen For this lavender voice ♪ ♪ Oh my I don't think I had a choice ♪ ♪ I can't be here if he's always gone ♪ ♪ But let me bask in his lavender love ♪ ♪ Don't you go on with his lavender ways ♪ ♪ They will consume you with all of their grace ♪ ♪ The fields he grow are never enough ♪ ♪ You'll find him gone when you've given too much ♪ ♪ Oh my I've fallen for this lavender voice ♪ ♪ Oh my I don't think I had a choice ♪ ♪ I can't be here if he's always gone ♪ ♪ But let me bask in his lavender love ♪ ♪ Oh my what does it mean to miss his lavender eyes ♪ ♪ Oh my to miss his schemes ♪ ♪ Behind his beautiful mind ♪ ♪ Oh my I will fight against his endless goodbyes ♪ ♪ Oh my I'll watch him shine bright in the lavender sky ♪ ♪ While it's dark from my place tonight ♪ ♪ At least he has his dreams taking flight ♪ ♪ Cold and dim and covered in white ♪ ♪ He leaves to live in his lavender sky ♪ ♪ Don't you know you have a lavender child ♪ ♪ He's never still, no he's running wild ♪ ♪ Don't try to tame him, for he'll always run ♪ ♪ Just learn to sit in his lavender love ♪ (upbeat acoustic music) ♪ Sinking down, floating in, sun beats out ♪ ♪ In the openness, is there more ♪ ♪ What did I miss, should I go ♪ ♪ And make some sense ♪ ♪ Should I go and make some sense ♪ ♪ With what I did ♪ ♪ Floor it down, there's no mistake ♪ ♪ Kick up the dust, hit the interstate ♪ ♪ They had it comin' when he said her name ♪ ♪ You'll never see me comin' ♪ ♪ My engine will keep running through this state ♪ ♪ Feel the wind gainst my skin ♪ ♪ Follow the northern star to loneliness ♪ ♪ The moon stays low in this closing shift ♪ ♪ Are they here, do they know what I did ♪ ♪ Are they here to forgive my sins ♪ ♪ Floor it down, there's no mistake ♪ ♪ Kick up the dust, hit the interstate ♪ ♪ They had it comin' when he said her name ♪ ♪ You'll never see my comin' ♪ ♪ My engine will keep running through this state ♪ ♪ Coming home I saw her dress ♪ ♪ The air was tense, he was turning red ♪ ♪ Next thing I knew, his hands were on my neck ♪ ♪ Broken bones, shattered hearts, washed out eyes ♪ ♪ All torn apart, we tried our best ♪ ♪ But some paid the price in this tangled mess ♪ ♪ I made it out alive ♪ ♪ Floor it down, there's no mistake ♪ ♪ Kick up the dust, hit the interstate ♪ ♪ They had it comin' when he said her name ♪ ♪ You'll never see me comin', my engine will keep running ♪ ♪ You'll never see me comin', my engine will keep running ♪ ♪ You'll never see me comin', my engine will keep running ♪ ♪ Through this state ♪ (upbeat acoustic music) - Well, that's all we have on "Prairie Post" this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(uplifting music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts & Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.