Silja Kosola - Surfing or drowning: Supporting adolescent wellbeing in the digital era

Transcript

This transcript is AI generated and may contain errors.

I probably should have started this whole thing like she told us yesterday.

Hey.

Because I am that Finnish person.

However, it's a tough slot after such an awesome presenter.

And after lunch, many of you probably ate and you're feeling a little bit tired.

So I'm going to do something else I always wanted to.

Are you ready?

Gouda, you are shopping!

Woo!

Thank you.

I'm feeling so energized already.

So I will go through three topics.

First, starting with adolescent brain development, because unlike the Renaissance pictures of tiny little toddlers in adult clothes, we know children are not little grownups.

But we should also know that young people are the same as us anyway.

Then I'll talk a little bit about the benefits, there are some benefits to life online as well, and more about harms, then how to support our young people in society.

So, to brain development.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write about young people and their development for a textbook in Finnish on student health care.

I didn't want to do it alone, because as much as I know, there are other people who know even more.

So I contacted this very clever psychologist in Finland, and together we came up with this table.

Internationally, adolescence is defined as roughly the age from age 10 to 25. The start of puberty to the end of brain development, that's not a very strict age line, but still there are some things that make early adolescences, mid-adolescence, and late adolesence clearly defined ages in the human life.

So if you think of early adolescents at the age of 10 to 13 roughly, they are starting to develop a separation, a clear separation and need for it from their parents.

However, there are very concrete thinkers.

Everything is black and white.

There are no shades of grey.

And they need a little bit of privacy.

They're closing the door to their room.

And some of them actually even want to meet a GP alone.

But when you come to mid-adolescents, these are all more pronounced.

There's starting to develop abstract thinking.

If you're sitting in an office with your GP, and the GP talks to them about taking risks in traffic, for instance, they will perfectly understand.

with bright eyes declare that I won't do any such thing.

When they go out of the office, they close the door.

They meet all their friends and they jump on their scooter.

It's a beautiful spring day in May like today.

And hey, I know how to pick up the front wheel of my moped.

No matter what's happening behind me, i will do it because I can.

And the same thing applies to many, many different situations in health the way.

And this has made young people a bit scary to grown-ups.

We never know how they'll react, we never what will trigger off a great big emotion in them.

They also often think that they're completely unique.

The first love.

No one has ever loved exactly this way.

Mom and dad, you do not know what I'm talking about.

When that first breakup happens, they truly often feel that this is the end of everything.

And how do you survive that?

How do tell them that I've been there too?

It hurt, but here I am at 51, and it's in the past, luckily.

And the day they turn 18, they don't magically, boom, become clever grownups doing things in the manner they should be done.

There's still a lot of room for all kinds of learning.

And this all happens because of brain development.

Humans have been very curious about the brain for a long, long time.

But if you're a pathologist and looking at a dead person's brain, you can never know what's actually happening in there.

And now we know.

During these years, from 10 to 25, and mostly between 14 to 16 years there's a growth spurt in the It doesn't happen outwards anymore.

You don't need to measure the head to know what's happening.

But it happens inside.

And the order is also very important because it happened from the deepest areas towards the surface and from behind towards front.

What's up here?

Our prefrontal cortex.

Our most sophisticated, continuous thinking, designing to the future, impulse control.

it's all up here and it develops less.

The first parts to develop are the ones that are responsible for the big emotions, the rewards that young people crave, especially social rewards.

And all the things that we do affect how the brain develops.

It's not just the genes, it's the everyday life.

And that's why, in school, repetition happens so often because it is a vital tool for strengthening that path in the brains connecting one area to the other.

We actually kill away little neurons, the Hercule Poirot loved so much, from areas that aren't used, and then we bring in myelin to make the transmission of news more efficient within the brain.

So keep that in mind when you move on to the online world.

Now, I do not want to say that I'm a dinosaur and oppose everything that is digital.

No, no, far from it.

Here I am using a couple little digital tools myself right now.

We have beautiful access to information.

Like shown in many of the presentations, you can go and look up the references, and we wouldn't want to take that away.

We want be able to connect with people, share some of what's happening from this congress online.

Uh, we want especially include people from underprivileged areas with disabilities and so on, so that they can feel connected to other people as well.

We might want to even use some tools for creativity, especially for entertainment.

That's what so much of the online life is now.

We have some formal learning tools.

we have a lot of apps.

How many of you use Duolingo to brush up on languages?

I see some hands.

Yeah.

Uh, we a have lot health apps, all of these doing a of good.

But of course, Not many of these things are the things that young people use the online life for when they get to do what they prefer.

They might be connecting with some friends, they might engaged in entertainment, but that's mostly it.

Two of our colleagues, Livingstone and Stoilova, have proposed a model of four Cs, easy to remember in English, a little bit harder in many other languages, about the different areas, different types of harms that are online.

Now the content bit is quite easy.

There's violence and porn that we've always wanted to protect children from.

But nowadays, if you look at TikTok, there's a lot of self-harm body image content.

There's also this phenomenon of contagion of mental health symptoms.

And it's because we are animals.

If our friend is sad, we start to feel sad.

if our friends is really happy, We also feel happy for them and with them.

But it also happens with things like anxiety, depression, and so on.

The context that you can find new people online, some of them are not what they say they are.

Some of the actually are really, really horrible people with bad things on their mind.

In Sweden, there's a lot of organized crime targeting young people under the age of the legal limit for criminal responsibility, trying to get them to do the dirty work because they don't get any big problems from the system if they're caught.

And now that same phenomenon is also happening already in Finland.

Our central police officers have warned against this.

There's a lot of conduct problems, because the screens make us indifferent to the feelings of the other person.

Empathy is diminished, and so there's lot stalking.

Even parents with good intentions want to know exactly where their child is.

Why?

Where's the liberty, where's trust in raising a child that way?

And then there is the marketing side of things.

Do you know how many ads of unhealthy foods a teenager sees within one hour?

Any guesses?

52. Almost every minute, you'll see something promoting chips or hamburgers or something else.

So when they come to that office, they have 20 minutes with the GP.

They go home.

And they spend hours on TikTok looking at all of that other content.

How do you think this balance works out?

And then the whole social media ground has undergone a tremendous evolution during the past 10 years.

They are using all the scientific data that we know from human psychology about addictions when they develop their algorithms.

Now the endless feed has already been considered by a California court as something that should be illegal for young people to see.

But so many of the other things also play into the way social rewards are important to young and it makes the whole world so much more tempting and an unfair balance.

You're a young person with a developing brain and then you're facing this instrument that was actually created only to make you spend more time there than you actually wanted to to begin with.

In Finland, we have a school health promotion study that is run every second year for the whole population of our schools.

So the bars that you're looking at represent hundreds of thousands of young people in Finland.

From 2017, we've started asking five questions, excessive internet use questionnaire, that have such items as I think about life online when I'm not there, I have arguments about use with my parents, and I am online, when don't want to be.

If you look at the first three bar groups on the left, they represent boys of different ages, and they seem fairly stable.

And the 9% of middle school boys who report being excessively online is roughly the same percentage as gaming disorder in international literature.

Now, if you look at the bar groups on the right, those are the girls of different ages.

And looking at middle school ages, the prevalence of excessive internet use has risen from 7% in 2017 to nearly 15% Now the same survey also asks a lot of other questions so for the 2023 data set we combined many different mental health and cognitive functioning measures and it's a very busy slide but the point is you're taking into account the gender and whether they have excessive internet use or not And the boys and girls who have excessive use, sleep less, have more depressive and anxiety symptoms, more difficulties concentrating even on tasks that they find fun,

and in reading and math at school.

I wonder.

Since 2015, in all of our countries, we've seen a rise in mental health symptoms in the young.

We've see a drop in PISA scores in schools.

Any connections?

In another study, because we get a lot of questions about, well, these are only associations.

What do you know?

What are the young people doing on their phones?

You don't even know that.

So fine, we looked.

Nearly 600 young girls from first year in high school in Finland sent us screenshots depicting the smartphone use from the past week.

They also responded to validated questionnaires on several measures of well-being and their last school grades.

It turned out that they used their phone for six hours every single day and there was no difference between weekdays and weekends.

Two-thirds of that time, so four hours per day, was spent using social media.

Almost the rest of it was surfing or streaming content on Netflix and such.

So they're not using it for schoolwork, that's for sure.

One in six had possible social-media addiction, and this was using the most strict criteria that we could find in the previous literature, just to make sure that were not overestimating anything.

and all of the measures were associated with use.

Now we've also done some longitudinal analyses, and it seems that there's actually a vicious cycle happening.

The ones who are anxious start using more social media, the more they use social, they report anxiety.

There's also an accumulation of evidence all over the world.

There is this study called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, ABCD, in the US that has looked longitudinally at the same kinds of things.

And if you think of the table that I showed earlier about the different developmental tasks in young people, there's evidence on harm for all of them.

Depressing?

A bit.

So, what can we do?

I see a hall, more than a thousand people who are all potential advocates.

Let's get to work.

What is the right age for a child to own their own smart device, which is already harder for parents to control than if they didn't have one?

It's the same thing.

I really, really love my sugar.

So my best option is to not buy any candy home, because if it's there, the evening comes, I'm tired after work, and I haven't been enough out in nature, then I go and eat it.

Don't get it!

What's right age to access social media when these companies are doing nothing to protect our children?

Yesterday, we heard from our colleague in Scotland how it's a return to basics.

It's little bit boring sometimes, but it is what we really have to do.

And to make it a little less boring, I'm using this mental health hand from the Mental Health Finland organization, and I want to engage you in a exercise.

So, let's have a show of hands.

Now I showed you that young people who are excessively online don't sleep enough.

So boom, there goes the thumb.

They don't really have any time for hobbies and creativity because they're spending so much of their time online.

So boom, gone the little finger.

They often do not have time enough physical activity, they are becoming obese and having different kinds of musculoskeletal pains.

Boom, one more finger gone.

I don't know how many of you work in school health care, but those who do know that young people are skipping their breakfast rather than having a monster drink before school.

So boom, nutrition gone.

They don't often have enough human interaction with live people.

It's all happening online, so boom, the middle finger.

What is left is a fist of values from that online world.

And now they come to see you as healthcare professionals, and if you do not address these basic problems and instead give them a little bit of therapy, you're just winding up the Middle Finger.

Unsustainable.

We do not have enough therapists to deal with all of this.

So if I talk with young people, one thing that really gets to them is jet lag.

Say you have to wake up at 7.30 to get to school at 8, skipping breakfast and all that.

That's the minimum time.

And then you spend your evening online playing with friends.

On weekends, your parents don't force you to go to bed at any reasonable time, so you stay up until 3 a.m.

and wake up at noon or maybe even 2 p.

m.

It's the same as traveling to Thailand and back every single weekend.

And boom, you'll have a class full of young people with attention.

Seriously?

Seriously.

My message to parents, keep calm and carry on.

If you really spend the time and give the effort to be the best possible parent to your child with love, And limits.

Limit the screen time, but be there.

Care for them.

Respond to them, talk with them know what's happening in their lives.

You're actually protecting them from so many different problems.

Again, on a population level, of course, there's individual differences, But it's definitely worthwhile.

And talking from experience with n equals two, they'll still love you, even if you set the limits for screen time and other stupid things that they might do.

But then, as I said, I see a hall full of advocates.

We need these campaigns to support parents.

Parents are also feeling really lonely and at a loss of what to do.

So why not build a WhatsApp group or something for parents so that you can say that I know that Jack's parents think about the same thing.

No, you cannot do that.

You cannot play that game yet.

Ask the parents to set good examples.

Put down your phone when your kid comes to say, mom.

OK, down.

What?

I'm all ears.

That's a precious time, and it will pass.

At country level, talk to your representatives.

And I've heard that there's elections coming up in many of our countries.

So now is the time that they listen.

This is a time to actually impact policy.

And at the EU level, we need to stand strong because we're so much stronger together than if any individual country tries to set up legislation for age limits or something alone, it won't work.

But if we do it all together at EU-level, these companies will start to listen because there's 350 million people behind these policies.

Who's with me?