harvard medical school in the harvard th chance school of public health and as i was saying to any it's really thrilling for any of us from the center to be able to speak to parents directly especially because you're in the trenches at the ground floor so anytime we can kind of reach the masses with our research and our science it's it's really wonderful for us so thank you again for coming out on this kind of dreary tuesday evening so i want to start things off by showing you a video that actually came out of common sense media they did a huge survey study in two thousand and fifteen that basically looked at how adolescents are using media and specifically what media they're using and how much time they're spending on media so i'm going to go ahead and show that video we did have some technical issues earlier but hopefully all will go smoothly that's about it if i would add of all of you know the time and i used to think i would spend about seven to eight hours every day and when i was listening media i feel like i know what's going on you know you do feel a little connected in you know what people are up to i post pictures and videos all that comment on i don't think i'm addicted to it my phone i think it's like it's kind of the lead style because they always have to be on it and you know when i hear buzz i'm like oh i have friends i'm sauce i'm console on my p s four when i get home and i just you know vege out sometimes and play i have you know first person shooter like call of duty or battlefield and we also have a baseball game and i've been playing i absolutely think that there is an addictive quality to video games that sometimes all you know i'll just keep going if homework i'm like reading something and i like i get distracted by the t v or like i'll posit turn off the music and make i'll go through the problem again whatever i'm working on because i guess i was a little distracted if i'm doing my homework on my laptop i might be also having conversations with my friends or you know intermittently checking my phone sometimes if i just get too bored of my homework i might play like candy crush or something when i was younger i could go much longer without using media but feel so there's a lot to unpack in that video but i do want to focus on these figures that you see above here when this first came across my desk we got an embargoed copy so we saw it a week before before it went public these numbers actually didn't surprise me six hours and nine hours i know that teens and tweens are spending a ton of time on media but then when i delved into it a little bit deeper i realized six hours in the nine hours this is outside of school so outside of their physical time in a building such as this and outside of the time that they're spending on homework so that is a lot of time that they are spending constantly connected to two different device social media video games etc and then later this is a come excuse me a different common sense survey done in two thousand and sixteen this was a follow up study and this was basically looking at the term addicted do we feel addicted to these devices and i do want to preface this by saying that when they're talking about addiction it's very different from the medical context of addiction this is kind of the common vernacular feeling like we always have to check it but again not something that's diagnosable and basically they found that fifty nine percent of parents of the they thought that their teen was addicted whereas fifty percent of teens thought they were actually addicted versus the twenty seven and the twenty eight percent so we do see a large percentage of feeling like we have to be constantly connected and then over on the farther calmer actually the closer column to me you see that forty eight percent of parents feel as though they need to immediately respond and contrast that with the seventy two percent and that's something that we call foam or the fear of missing out so feeling is though as soon as you get a text as soon as you've got a social media alert you not only have to read it you have to respond to it in some sort of way so these numbers are profound i have another video for you and this is actually from a c b s local c boston report that followed up on this excuse me that followed up on that commonsense survey you'll see in this video dr michael wretch who is the center's founder and director and this is basically interviewing people on what they think that they think the think of excuse me the findings of these surveys and  also offer some advice which we will unpack later on when we see it all the time people so distracted by their cell phones that they'll walk into walls walk into fountains even walk onto train tracks well now there's  experts say that's impacting their schoolwork their sleep their safety on the road how often do you look at your phone and call the every five minutes four minutes or something teenagers glued to their phones suggests it's not just habit it's addiction it's also in texas how to be conducted by common sense media it finds fifty percent of teens feel addicted to their phones nearly eighty percent checking them hourly seventy two percent feeling the need to respond to messages right away more than a third of parents saying phones lead to fights with their kids every day this tool which connects us in a lower risk environment also can keep us from connecting with each other and really meaningful and deep ways media researcher and pediatrician dr michael rich says he's seeing the cellphone impact firsthand kids are not getting enough sleep because they're texting into the wee hours and of going to bed so much later because my phones always with me and parents they're part of this poll to sixty nine percent admitting to looking at their phone every hour fifty six percent while they're driving with teens viewing media from six to nine hours daily rich says it's time to unplug have a time when your kid turns it off and charges it in your room or in the kitchen or somewhere where they can't get to it now rich says the key is to set cell phone ruled early with your kids and i like this one don't be afraid to tell them it's not their phone you worse live in a satellite center luisa learn the news david lisa back to you ok so that gives you kind of a  perspective from last year this study actually came out on february twenty third of this year so just a couple weeks ago and this was conducted by the american psychological association that also took an in depth a dive into this issue of devices and the kinds of stress level it's causing not only parents but teenagers as well and some highlights from their report are that ninety four percent of parents say that they take at least one action to manage their child child's tech use forty eight so just a little under half say that regulating their child's screen time is a constant battle also something that we're definitely seeing is causing a lot of stress in the home and forty five percent say that they feel disconnected from their families even when they're together because of technology that could be anything from you know saying having dinner together but there's a screen in the background that could be t v or a pager if the parent is a doctor or on call in a scenario or if the child smartphone is also at the table and then finally fifty eight percent say that they worry about media's influence on their child's physical and mental health so we see that this is very concerning and that it's also a prolific  of concern in this realm but i do want to credit card to this presentation by saying that there is a difference between what we're you know what the actual situation is and being alarmist to say that news report i would qualify as somewhat alarmist one of our colleagues who is a boston based researcher kind of got sick of hearing all of this alarm over different media devices and she created this really humorous madlib and basically she was saying i'm sick of hearing study finds that blink media does blink bad thing to children and she has an excellent point i do want to make make it very clear that media are tools they are not inherently bad are evil and they're also not inherently good so i really hope that you take away from what you take away from this presentation is that we need to use media as tools in mindful ways and ways that are developmentally optimal for children so basically what is the relationship between media and health when it comes to adolescents we know that media provide the tools to accomplish the primary developmental goals for this time in their lives and again i'm going to focus more broadly on all of media but then hone in on social media but movies television and music they give teens a place to learn about themselves and their role in society mobile devices and the internet and i have this highlighted because this is where social media lives gives teens a place to meet with their friends develop identity and practice autonomy we have to remember that this is the developmental stage where teens are really kind of breaking free from mom and dad in the family and more friends are kind of becoming that all important and it and that social way if that helps them develop that autonomy and video games often give teens a place to relax be entertained and also provide a sense of mastery over something that typically their parents can't can't or don't master because they don't have the time so it gives them that kind of sense of control  now i want to turn to media this idea of media as a super peer and this term was coined by victor strasberg or who is a pediatrician and really a pioneer in this field he came up with this term in one thousand nine hundred five and we have not departed from it in fact the research is really only shown to bolster this idea but basically he said that media function to exert even greater pressure on teens than their peers do since media makes certain risky activities seem like normal behavior so if you're thinking about how much influence your teens friends have on them think about media when they're constantly connected so maybe that outlandish party that they're seeing in movies which by the way never happens in the teen world but all of a sudden they think that ok this somewhat risky party is actually normal because i've seen it in media and i've also seen it on social media a lot of teens will post pictures of themselves parties and those are the cool pictures suppose they won't post pictures you know selfies of them just studying  post pictures of them doing meet and fun things about it seems like normal behavior so this idea of media as a super peer is one that will definitely be one that you definitely have and kind of the back of your mind as we go through these things so in terms of what teens are learning from the super peer surveys indicate that adolescence less popular media as a major source of information on health interpersonal relationships substance abuse and sexual behavior and now the new data that we have on social media is that social media is kind of replacing this and they're going to social media for lessons on health interpersonal relationships substance use and also how to behave sexually so it has a huge influence on how teens what they learn so in terms of social media i would have to start with this because sometimes people don't understand what we mean by it but this is the definition that we operate under at the center and basically social media are websites and mobile apps that allow users to create and share information and content with other users and i'm going to this is the interactive part of the presentation a piper jaffrey survey that came out last year listed these as the top five so i want to see if we can recognize them just by are there icons so you can just yell out who's anybody absolutely number one with teens right now absolutely favorite of our president absolutely not true even though it is not the favorite snapchat is every teen has some sort of facebook account and we also have to remember that facebook instagram so they share that data which is just important to keep in mind other popular sites include you tube anyone know what this is musically yes absolutely which is really popular which i actually wasn't really aware of until a couple years ago  but yes and basically teens use it or anybody uses it to kind of share and make music videos so you can overlay an artist song and it's yourself dancing around and you can share it it's really fun  infrastructure but different news organizations have been using periscope but we're actually seeing a lot of teens on it there are a lot of privacy concerns with it but it's also an interesting platform and this is kick messenger  messenger is actually the number one social media platform in the world it has a really big international following it's not as big in this country but chances are if you are children are friends with an international a foreign exchange student something like that  the often use kik because it's a free service and it's available everywhere in the world so just things to keep in mind in terms of how many teens are using social media this is a pew research report from twenty fifteen but it is kind of the gold  standard and we find that ninety two percent of teens are on line daily while twenty four percent use the internet almost constantly and out of the smaller studies we're seeing that number is actually low compared to some of the data that we have from tw seventeen but again pew research this was a really wonderful longitudinal in depth study which is why we still use and of the seven most popular social media sites eighty nine percent of all teens reported that they used least one of these social networks and you recognize some of those names i'm always asked about gender differences typically and we don't actually see a lot of gender differences it's not that boys aren't on instagram but we do see that girls have a slight uptick in terms of visual social media says things like snapchat instagram facebook whereas boys tend to dominate the more text based so things like twitter and tumblr but otherwise they're still pretty closely matched so in terms of risks pretty much anything your team does anything you do has some risk associated with it and that is no different from social media so these are the three primary risks that we see with adolescent social media use that is peer harassment advertising and unhealthy messaging on these platforms and then large privacy and safety concerns and unfortunately the risks have some potential potential negative outcomes there are positives as well but i'm going to focus on the negatives and those include depression isolation which is really kind of sad and humbling to think about because the name of the game is social media and yet the more you use it i don't know if anybody saw there was a wonderful n p r study that actually came out yesterday that pointed to using social media more actually makes you feel more isolated and the study was carried out with young adults but we're certainly seeing in some of the research that we're doing at the center this is definitely true of teens as well we also see compromised health and when i have that up there i mean physical health as well as risky sexual behaviors and suicidal thoughts and in some extreme cases suicide attempts and actual suicide so i want to start around there in the science and research world this is the definition that we operate from and it's basically cyber bullying occurs when a child or teen threatens harasses or humiliates a peer using electronic technology or is the victim of such actions so it's kind of an overarching view which is why we really like to use it and in terms of popularity i guess you could say we know that more than one out of every four teens have bullying and this graph which i know is a little bit hard to read this actually this study actually broke down all the different types of cyberbullying so you can see that there's a lot of different types and when you take that when you kind of zoom out from that we see that it's one out of every four kids which is a significant number if you think maybe there's twenty kids in your class on the victim side nearly or excuse me on the offending side nearly one out of sixteen's  so that's also a profound number but in terms of what cyberbullying looks like this is an example that i chose just off the web this is a really cute video this teen lives over in ireland and i guess there was a rumor  that people with red hair and pale skin don't have souls and he decided to come back that rumor he posted this video on you tube and the title says ginger's do you have souls and it's just a really sweet i think it's a two minute video and it's basically this kid saying to the world like hey i'm actually a really nice guy like come and be my friend i do have a soul don't believe the rumors and then someone made this comment on it kind of blacked out the obscenity use here this is an anonymous comment unless for twenty eight boys this person's name which i highly doubt it and it's it's basically a one time reaction this is probably some sort of internet troll who didn't have a great day decided to take down this this video by posting a really neat comment it's most likely just regulated to the to the internet we don't think that a cowboy knows this this person this came from a us account so you know it's a one time thing however if that shows up on your video especially a video that you posted to kind of combat cruelty that can really have an effect on you it would have an effect on me and it would certainly have an effect on a teen as well on the flip side it can also be really personal so this is screenshot of someone's phone so clearly there is a personal relationship that's happening here someone has this person's number even if they're doing the cyber bulling anonymously the phone number there is there some sort of intimate contact that's happening here it can be repeated it so it can happen all the time remember those devices are usually in the back pockets and it can be linked to offline bullying as well so this person might know the bully and be bullied constantly at school and then still be become bullied online as well or on their phone so there are many different types and unfortunately these have really really negative consequences we know that adolescent girls are just as likely if not more likely than boys to experience  bullying it's happened less so in the past but usually i get a question or a common saying oh that's only a boy thing or that's only a girl thing it's slightly more of a girl thing but the gender association is pretty evenly matched just important to keep in mind we also found that saber bullying is related to low self esteem suicidal ideation which is just suicidal thoughts anger frustration and of are a variety of other emotional and psychological problems it's related to other real world issues including school problems anti social behavior substance use and delinquency and we do see a very prominent link between online bullying and offline bullying so it's kind of like when there's smoke there's fire if bullying is happening it's probably happening in the digital domain as well so definitely something to think about when you're speaking to your teen and this was a wonderful study that was carried out over the course of six months on them published and it's still going to have residual effects from that and the negative effects of several bullying extend above and beyond those of traditional bullying so basically what we're seeing is that the effects that we used to know with just bullying are exacerbated they become tenfold when they occur in the online space as well there is a pretty pronounced link between cyber bullying and suicide thirty seven studies found a consistent link between being bullied and suicidal thoughts and i do want to point out the date which i know is hard to read but this was it two thousand and eight study and we've only seen more research pointing to this exact fact and cyberbullying victims had more suicidal thoughts and attempts than others and there is this direct kind of causal link between being a cyber victim suffering from depression and also having a suicide attempt so the way that we can combat this is basically through knowledge and knowing the signs of cyber bullying these include trouble sleeping stomach aches headaches lack of interest in social events and frequent visits to the school nurse wanting to go home not wanting to be there making up  excuses this one below the extensive or troubling internet cellphone use this is the one that i think most parents actually notice and that's when we see a lot of patients coming into the adolescent health clinic and that secretive use or really the changes in attitudes about use teen might be very open in terms of saying oh it's so and so posted a funny video and laughing and giggling and then all of a sudden there's a change they don't want to see what's on their phone they're not joyful about anything that's coming on their phone that's that's a really great indicator that something's something something's wrong and it's most likely linked in some way to some sort of cyber bullying activity strong reactions to questions about their online habits of say you go to ask them they're like oh i don't want to talk about it it's fine everything's fine that's also really good they cater that everything is not fine and finally any kind of symptoms related to depression so i want to jump off of cyberbullying and focus now on advertising and unhealthy messaging and i do have a is all the more relevant even today and it shows you just what the landscape looks like when it comes to advertising in the social media  i absolutely adore the studio time and social media lets him share his obsessions with the world ok welcome to my room if you were to like go hog wild about somebody or put like one direction posters all over the wall i don't really know if these people might like to look at you weird but on the internet like people are like all about it and guess what getting people to be all about something is big business major corporations have long spent billions trying to get kids to engage with their products and brands introducing oriole big stuff now that the way kids consume media has changed the companies that want to reach them know they need to change t of this generation all her the like button the tweet but in the reebok button i mean this is the biggest transformation that we've had in terms of communicating with consumers in our lifetime in our lifetime and so to not learn how to participate in those channels is outrageous so to stand on the sideline is not an option as a corporate marketing executive bonnin ballenger stands that when kids like something it becomes part of who they are and if kids want to express themselves by advertising his company's products like oreo cookies he's happy to oblige the strategy was to reimagine pop culture through the eyes of oreo we called it daily twi take the issue of same sex marriage if you're in favor of it and want the world to know oreo is there to help here this platform gave something as simple as a cookie a cookie which is you know to chocolate and cream in the middle the ability to have a perspective on culture that was so profound oreos are game that one post alone had a million likes a million people took an action to say yes i associate with that i like that piece of content that piece of content speaks to me that's profound also big big numbers and those numbers are extremely valuable there is right now a huge huge commercial push or corporate push to collect as much data as possible and you hit like when you reach we when you make any expression online you're creating data you're creating a demographic profile of yourself  friends like his profile picture facebook sees who he interacts with the most information that would be valuable to advertisers when daisy likes dozens of brands on facebook those brands can learn more about a potential customer and all her friends caylee and her friends re tweet news about the hunger games the movie studio is able to track the response in real time when tyler goes on you tube in search of the things he likes you tube which is owned by google his every move this is where the currency of likes turns into actual currency companies know how to take that data and turn it into money the people who are handing over the data because they're hitting i like this or i like that where they're telling all their friends will you please come like me they have no idea what the value of that is so all those soapies you take so that people like them on instagram they help that company so for a billion dollars send a tweet and you help raise the value of twitter to around thirty billion in facebook it's valued at hundred around one forty billion dollars those numbers aren't based on pro not yet anyway those prices are based on the volume of likes they can generate and likes don't generate themselves that's why companies need kids to stay online click it and like it you may not be as famous as taylor swift but your photo can be part of her promotion for diet pepsi yourself page and maybe it'll be included in this intro to beyond say a super bowl halftime player and i don't know if anyone saw the news but snaps snap which is the parent company of snapchat just went public and far exceed it far and away exceeded expectations and how did the stock exchange so we know that we're dealing with corporations and billions and billions of dollars and what i also love about that video is it shows some brands that are not exactly right you see coke you see pepsi oreo those are the kinds of brands that are advertising directly through these social media platforms to your children so it's just something to to keep aware to to keep in mind and be aware of but in terms of mental health we are in the midst of an obesity crisis still unfortunately in this country we know and  data we know that the percentage of children who are obese in the u s has more than tripled since the one nine hundred seventy s and we know that obesity is really linked to a lot of negative mental health outcomes we see a lot of lower self esteem we see a lot of bullying which again bullying and suicidal ideations so it's a lot of negative and again when you think about the brands that are advertising on these platforms you can see how big can contribute to this obesity crisis so in terms of food advertising the impact that it can have is that it increases preferences in our quest to parents and schools for advertise products it increases the likelihood of less healthful diet and it also increases negative diet related health outcomes and risks and this is of impulse control so if you're hungry and you're in social media which we know they are all the time and you're being advertised oreos and coke and pepsi and dominoes and things like that that's what you're going to immediately want to go out and buy and it's really easy and it's really excessi just something to keep in mind when you think about food advertising in terms of what it looks like it can be as simple as placing an ad on social networks such as facebook and twitter establishing profiles for companies on facebook and other social media and  embedding promotional content into twitter feeds or in certain posts so it's really interesting that you can now be friends with something like dominos or this was actually from my instagram feed this is just this is coca cola and when i first noticed something like this i was kind of upset because i don't follow coca cola i actually don't drink soda but this is what they call a promotional post i'm sure many of you have seen these kinds of ads and these are really now running rampant social media is kind of the wild west in terms of food advertising and food advertisers know this television is heavily regulated same with film so they're going they're flocking to all the new social media say it's especially as they know that their target demographic is they're the heaviest users this is my favorite example this is domino's anywhere campaign i had the pleasure of meeting i had executive a couple years ago who told me that domino's is actually not a pizza company it's a technology and innovation company and at the time but you make p into a pizza company and then i really thought about it and they have been on the tech and innovation edge since i was on college and i remember i hated domino's pizza but we would order it because they had those bags that would keep the pizza hot and they put a pattern on those bags so at least we knew that when the pizza came it would be hot this is a whole new realm so basically in these screenshots you can just tweet a pizza to domino's and your favorite pizza will be there in five minutes or less because they've already linked to your bank account they can to track the money they're also this i just took a couple days ago so now they're integrated with things like google home and google voice so alexia can order pizza anything any kind  technology that's out there a smart watch school order pizza and when you think about not having a prefrontal cortex already not having impulse control and then having it on your wrist it's very easy to order yourself an unhealthy meal this way so it's  wonderful example also really creative and innovative but again something that your teens are facing in terms of interacting with ads against social media that idea of interaction what this does is it helps spread the advertisers message and also leads to develop better targeting strategy and snapchat is really kind of king in this area this is a photo of myself this is with the snap chat filter for frosted flakes so not exactly a great healthy nutritional cereal but basically every single day snap chat will launch a new filter that is a promotional filter even though it doesn't say promotional they don't have to put it on there and it could be for something like a movie or a new t v show that's coming out but often it's food taco bell had a really successful campaign on cinco de mio you could make yourself into a taco and that just i mean teens were the most popular filter of the day and it was an ad and think about that that is an ad that is being sent to you by a friend so it is direct marketing and basically they don't have to pay much for that you're doing it for them over here this is again taco bell as is wonderful in this in this realm this is their twitter page and it's thing we're on snap chat so if you like us if you allow us onto your personal device we'll give you some sort of coupon offer so again it's just a really creative way that advertisers are reaching their teens now i want to flip now and talk about unhealthy messaging specifically with body image and disordered eating this is really nothing new when it comes to just plain old media research has shown that repeated in frequent exposure to media is associated with body dissatisfaction  adolescence nothing new we know this television magazines things like that pretty little liars was one of the top rated teen shows for a number of years everybody looked like a supermodel and mystic then these are the kind of beauty ideals that are being broadcast again through traditional media now that the landscape has changed a little bit we're seeing pro and pro mia social media sites and these are in support of anorexia and believe  isn't actually disordered but it's a lifestyle choice and they feel very very strongly in these communities that it is that is it is that it is their right and that again this is a lifestyle it's not disordered so you can imagine when your teen is is faced with these profiles and kind of support groups what that does to his or her overall psychology the content that is posted through these groups and through these profiles and accounts which you can search easily through  and things like that even though they are technically illegal within all of these platforms teens are very savvy so they'll just change the hash tag so as soon as one is flagged it goes down they all come together and change the hash tag and that could be as some something as simple as like adding a number to the house tag these were two really popular ones that made the news so you might have heard of them this was hash tag gap so it's supposed to be the gap between your thighs you're not supposed to have any fat there and you're supposed to take  these and post them so that people can comment and say well that's so great keep up the good work you know maybe you could shave it down a little bit more and this was bikini bridge and the idea here is that your your bathing suit top shouldn't rest on its skin or anything normal it should just rest on the top of your protruding hip bones and these were incredibly popular again they made the news it was what got all the social networks to sign this bill basically saying ok we're going to make it illegal but again we're kind of dealing with the wild west here so even though they're technically outlawed in these domains they're impossible to keep track of yes exactly yes and if they're flagged basically it means that they can shut down the account so if twitter recognizes that you're  promoting this kind of content they'll flag your account and disable it you can easily get it back on and again the content still exists but it was a great question thank you and at boston children's hospital we have a wonderful eating disorder clinic one of the best in the world so we see a lot of really really difficult patients that come through our doors and we know that the adolescents who report more hours in gauging with this kind of content they're the hardest ones to treat are eating disorder patients are already some of the hardest ones to treat so you can imagine how much this exacerbates the issue and typically we have to say you know you have to give up your phone or you have to lie in this hospital room and be completely disconnected which no one would love but it's primarily because they'll be in the hospital room and they'll be engaging with this kind of content so something to keep in mind that's out there and healthy messaging on the other side we're dealing with substance use drugs has been a really prominent news story my father is the medical director of an addiction clinic up in new hampshire and he's just seeing younger and younger children coming and it's just really sad because the facility is for adults but we're also seeing what's interesting about this graph is that yes it's a problem it's also a concern for your teens so this should kind of give you give you would a door opening if you will to really talk about this with your teens i used to think that it was going to be social pressure and academic pressures i would have actually reordered these entirely but really what we're seeing is that drugs is number one then social pressure then academic pressure so we know that this is on the forefront of teens mind so they're definitely feeling the pressure and we need to know why they're feeling that pressure it's not just coming from their peers it's also coming again from this idea of a super peer the social media presence that they're having or that they're engaging with other and we know from research that adolescents exposed to alcohol and tobacco advertising or promotional merchandise are more likely to initiate drinking or smoking so these are some c d c facts and figures i pulled a direct quote from the c d c because they very very rarely use a language that points to causality usually  correlational research right we see an association but this is actually saying that these images cause this kind of behavior so that's really really profound and we're seeing this as a trickle down effect with social media yes it's movies but you t also full of movies so we really have to remember that when we're dealing with both domains and recent survey data from the and see which is the national center on alcohol and substance abuse found that compared to teens who do not typically spend time on social media those who do are five times likelier to have used to back up products three times likelier to abuse alcohol and twice as likely to have used marijuana and this is before the legalization or the upcoming legalization in this state and this chart i just i found really interesting at first i didn't find it interesting at all but this is basically the data charted individual and the red is no time and the blue is anytime and was really interesting about this data is any time is a minute so even if you say ok my child really isn't on social media all that much if they're on for more than a minute it's having that kind of effect so i just i find that mind blowing but again sixty seconds  and this is what it can look like so over here we have a facebook post kids just partying over here this is a lovely instagram class this was all by the way public none of these teens protected their accounts or their privacy so i could just easily go on and snap all the snow of all these pictures but basically these teens you know got fake i d s and decided to post about their net on the town and being able to access all this i'll call this girl is my favorite if it weren't clear that she she has a voice bubble that says i'm drunk over here we have a teen smoking at a concert i don't know what she's smoking exactly and in the middle here this is a pinterest post so summons very excited for all their  beeping accessories that are coming out of her pinterest was filled with a bunch of these kinds of things and i just want to remind everybody and i'm sure you're well aware that colleges look at these colleges look at these social media accounts in certain areas high school admissions especially for private high schools things like that everything that you do in this domain can be accessed my brother is a lawyer and he's just you know they just cull through these kinds of things and these images were actually images that were taken and used in legal cases so the college party that got out of hand this one in the center me in the news this is an instagram post basically in this case the teens really didn't get in trouble but the host of the party got in trouble for serving minors  and that was an incident on the way and finally compared to teens this is this is similar data but compared to teens who have not seen post on social media of kids getting drunk passed out or using drugs tee have seen these pictures are more than twice as likely to say that they are very or somewhat likely to try drugs in the future and now perhaps you're saying ok i know all of my teens friends they're all really good kids they're not really posting this kind of content one that's amazing that's great keep doing you're doing that's great however teen influencers such as justin bieber who is pictured in the corner who is drinking under age this is somewhat of a dated picture these are the things that they're sharing on their social platform so see your teen has a great peer group their peer influencers the people who they like to engage with because they're movie stars or music stars things like that might be posting questionable content that would make maybe make them think twice about oh ok well it doesn't doing it it can't be that bad i'll probably be fine i'll be more likely to try it in the future if it's offered soon moving on to our final category is privacy and fifty so i do want to  start by saying that the idea of privacy when you're speaking to an adult is very different from the idea of privacy when you're speaking to an adolescent so we do need to kind of level the communication playing fields which we realize a couple years ago when the messaging just wasn't wasn't getting through and that is privacy so sharing passwords and things like that that's social currency especially with adolescence so if i have a best friend i'm automatically going to give her the passwords to my most treasured accounts if i have close friends who are not exactly my best friend but outside of those friends they're going to have some passwords to my accounts maybe not all of the accounts things like that so it's private so when they're saying oh yeah it's private it's password protected ask them how many people have that password ask them who they're sharing this content with because again the notion of privacy is very different for many many teens and we also we have to understand that it's a legitimate definition we can say well actually that's not privacy you're wrong they're not wrong we just have to meet them where their ads and let them understand that there's a lot of potential risks so one of the biggest risks and this is also for adults sharing any kind of image online and again going back to my brother if you put it on line it's no longer yours you no longer own it you don't have any claim over that image it can be taken by anyone and do anything so this is an example i love to use this is a boy it doesn't look like he took the picture it doesn't look like a selfie but he was just outside enjoying what seems to be a parade this image was posted and then it became a mean so someone turned him into batman which is creative and then someone you know took that mean and turned him into all other things so this is relatively innocuous this doesn't seem to be terrible although i'm not sure how that boy feels about being pictured as kate winslet but that could be hurtful but again he has no control over that and we know now that you know thing large platforms especially things like facebook and snapchat their facial recognition software is amazing so again tagging these images having yourself come up in a google search as oh look it's me as kate winslet that's not necessarily something your teen may want to have as the number one hit on google so just something to keep to be aware of also and having that advocate when we're posting pictures of our kids are posting pictures of others asking them first you know saying is this ok to post before you put it up on social media again where you have zero ownership so privacy issues that teens really need to know again what is posted on line can't be retracted so say they had an issue you know that post went up and boy found out about it he wanted it down it's already i mean it's already i mean it's out of it's out of control there's nothing you can do about it the internet owns  it the question of knowing all their friends and what they consider to be a friend that's really important who do you trust and why and also knowing that people can pose as you when you have given out your passwords say i have a huge falling out with my best friend my best friend can then log into my account pretend to be me share all of this information are on privatized photos that were just meant for me on my accounts and we're seeing more and more and more and there are zero legal ramifications or you can't even school ramifications you can't say oh well this is terrible but how did they get in while i gave her my password you don't really have a leg to stand on in that regard so it's just again important to talk to your teens about these kinds of issues sexual behavior  social media as you can probably imagine this is a very hard area to study first of all getting teens to one volunteer first study such as this is very hard getting parents to sign off on a study such as this is increasingly h d so we do have a couple of ongoing studies both out of the center at children's and at harvard we need a lot more data but so this is just basically what we do you know in this scenario when it comes to social media sexual behavior again we know that their attitudes and behaviors are influenced by their peers also that super peer idea in the united states about twenty percent of teens have sex it or receive unwanted sexual images through some sort of social media platform this is data is actually in it but i did want to share it with you and there is some limited evidence linking sexting and depression and this this one is actually one of the most interesting ones to me and some of the research that i'm working with is that some teens view sexting as a safer alternative to real life sexual activity and the studies that we're looking at now we're wondering if this actually is a better alternative because if you think about it you can't spread sci's or s t d s through a sex you also can't get pregnant through sexting so before we kind of become alarmist about this we really need to understand what's happening more and understand the ramifications also you know beyond the physical we want to understand their mental health and how this is impacting them but it's important to take a holistic view so it's really important when ever you hear news reports about sexting to know that we know very little and just keep that in the back of your mind in terms of the sexting thing narrows these are the three most common there are often an exchange between a boyfriend girlfriend or girlfriend girlfriend people who are in some sort of romantic relationship the these exchanges when it becomes problematic is if someone decides oh ok that will this picture is really great i want to share it with my friends too obviously huge breach of privacy that's happening and the third this is the one that's most problematic but it's exchanges between people who are not yet in a relationship but where one often hopes to be so whether that person is asked for a sex to or not and that sexual images exchanged usually we see a large breach of privacy that's when these images are usually shared with a number of people especially across the campus like a high school campus or a middle school campus college campuses things like that and there are huge legal ramifications this is a bill that was just being proposed in california this has to just do a school and being exposed surreal life real world consequences i'm sure many of you heard about this this was the front page of the new york times last year about this issue that happened in the colorado school basically they found a few kids that had these images went to prosecute and found out that the whole school had images on their phones so what do you do done on the local level all this this was happening in plymouth again i'm sure many of you heard of this and the issue is that we don't have really great laws and this is from this is from i'm speaking just this is where in massachusetts we should know our own laws child pornography laws are big at best but basically if your child has a picture of another child somebody under the age of eighteen sometimes it's nineteen that is in any way shape or form nude they're in possession of child pornography and it really you know it comes down to lawyers how good is your lawyer versus how good is their lawyer things like that we're working with if you're interested in this we're working with the berkman  ter which is part of harvard law school trying to parameters on this trying to you know work out the legal issues especially between minor and minor but it is a vague issue so what can you do this video will play on so i want to show you a c n n report a very quick report it's under three minutes and basically it kind of gives a recap of some of the issues that we've been speaking about but also gives a really great directive at the and so i don't again i don't want this to be alarmist and i think that there are a lot of things that you can do as parents and as educators example more about being a parent at the moment than my kids entering the social media age how will i possibly keep tabs on everything they're doing and how will instagram twitter facebook and all the other yet to be created social networks impact them a two year a c three sixty investigation being thirteen inside the secret world of teens found that we parents don't really have a clue what's going on from people who just say you know the provocative pictures the are posting might not match how they're feeling about sixty percent of parents underestimated how lonely worried and depressed their kids were and about ninety four percent underestimated the amount of fighting on social media parents just don't realize how subtle the social aggression can be everything from posting a group photo and intentionally not tagging someone in the picture to sharing a photo with the main goal of trying to hurt all the people who weren't invited to that event i think what adults need to remember is that for a lot of thirteen year olds they really have one social group who they care a lot about and that is their friends at school and if they're left out of that one group that feels that a stating so what's  parent to do well experts say sign up for the social networks your teens are on and follow them and talk to your kids if they seem upset after being on their phones ask them about it because the a c three sixty investigation did have one very encouraging finding and that is kids whose parents were involved were less likely to get upset about social media so that should be really encouraging i'm hoping so basically anything that you can do to combat these negative effects is what you're already doing and that is being good parents so it really doesn't extend beyond that this is not something that else that you have to add to your overflowing plate this is just being a good parent offline and also being a good parent online and what we found to be most effective in terms of the research is research is having that authoritative parenting style so that is something that is when you're high in warmth so expressing that you love your child even your teen who probably isn't expressing that they love you back that's really valuable and also high in control knowing where your kids are and something else that i wanted to point out in that video signing up and creating these social media accounts is key and if you're already saying well my kid is already on all of these social media platforms i didn't sign them up they're just on it have their passwords you know their prosper it's a privilege to have a phone it is a privilege to have a social media account that privilege is doled out by you in an exchange you have their passwords and that is so that you can go into their accounts not every day every hour certainly nothing like that and let them know that you're doing it let them know that you're monitoring their accounts don't violate their privacy but they will behave so much better if they know that mom or dad can check in on them any time and check in on what their their friends are doing also if they have if they know that you have their passwords also it is again illegal i'm using that term too for a child that is under thirteen to have a social media account on all those plans on all those platforms that we need before all those icons that you saw children really should not be on social media before the age of  thirteen and there's a lot of research to back up that point so we know that parents who do have this authoritative parenting style have teens who are less likely to meet someone offline who they met online and they were also the least likely to share personal information so to have those kids that have you know suffer from some sort of privacy breach and again so the coming from the flip side the kids that we see that are  well had more printable rules about the content of their internet use more parental monitoring of their internet use again that's having their passwords things like that they had a higher quality of communication about their internet use i mean when i say this people are like well what do you say it's really just asking them to asking them about what they're doing online it's you don't really have to go above and beyond it's just having that that quality time ask them and also pay attention to them don't just ask them in passing when they're leaving the room be prepared that if they have an answer you're going to be there to listen to them and also had parents who use that authoritative style so the high warmth and high control general principle monitoring this is what people are like well what does that mean how much should we be monitoring i mean that's really just anything in the offline world to knowing when your kid has school when they have activities outside of school when they're having a birthday party things like that again this is not going above and beyond we're talking about online versus offline  it's really just again what you're you're already doing but kids who have this kind of parenting are linked to less online harassment this is as a victim and as the perpetrator which is very interesting it is true for older and younger i do lessons as well as males and females we don't see a really large discrepancy between the genders or or the age gap and they had better it's basically better than internet research and we get asked a lot of questions about what kind of software to buy you know what kind of parental monitoring systems to install on the home wife i things like that and we always advocate for don't don't buy those talk to your kids instead if there is an issue that extends beyond that then we can talk about those things but that certainly should not be your first line of defense and again i have this underlined bolded but involved and engaged parenting helps reduce the online and offline risks of all children and adolescents so it should be great news for everybody hopefully advice for parents having again that open dialogue open communication making media a part of the public space doctorate spoke about that in the first c b s video that i showed you he was saying like media should be in an open space and what we mean by that is when they're doing their homework and things things on line of that nature have the computer or the laptop or the tablet in the kitchen or in the living room some room where you're walking in and out and can just glance casually over at their computer screen they should never ever have electronic devices allowed in their bedrooms and this may be really hard this is usually the hardest kind of adaptation that families have to make these devices should not be in any kind of bedroom especially at night and doctor spoke about this set up a charging station and if you're worried about your kid going downstairs to check set up the charging station in your bedroom and that way they'll out all their friends know that between the hours of ten p and you know six am they can't be contacted their sleep can't be disrupted and you know if it is mom or dad is going to hear it so you better not text me during whatever hours and make sure also that your rules have consequences and they should be spelled out right make it fair for your kids make the rules  together and then also have consequences if those rules are broken don't have all these rules set up all this plan that a slip up happens and then you don't do anything make sure that you follow through again as with anything that you do as a parent and finally under this if if they're the rules are consistently broken things are happening and they're problematic nothing seems to be working that's when you consider some sort of web monitoring program or software or things like that and again make sure that your team knows that this is being installed chances are if you just install it anywhere they're probably going to google out how to dismantle things like that so they make sure that they know what's going on in the home this is probably one of the most and i'm sorry it's over most important slides but basically when you're when you're advising adolescents talk to them about all the issues that we explored here today talk about cyber bullying both about what it means to be the victim and also what it means to cyber bullies someone else sometimes kids don't realize that the right sometimes they took that photo of their friend and made it into a mean because they thought it was funny and creative and shared it with all their friends but really it hurt that person to really talk to them about what cyber bullying is this is a this is a very complex issue that many adults actually don't understand either but something to really get at talk about what they do and see online something might be really upsetting and they actually want to talk about it with you but they don't know necessarily how to broach that subject make sure that you ask again ask about how their day was online as as it is offline talk about issues of privacy remind them of the grandma rule that's our favorite rule at the center and that's basically don't post anything that you wouldn't want your grandmother to see or your mom or dad to see anybody who they have a close relationship with them want to remain in good standing and also make sure that they understand that anything they post texts snap acceptor is never really private and they no longer own it when they send it out into the ether that is the world wide web  and discuss sexting and the legal ramifications again use the words child pornography because they don't think that many teens understand what that is and to they really don't want to be associated with something like that to talk about digital citizenship and remind them that their online behaviors reflect who they are as much as their offline behaviors and they can have a real impact on their real world and including their friends other people by association and you know where they sit in terms of college applications job applications things like that all of their online behaviors have offline consequences and again good and bad in terms of advice for family is this is a twenty sixteen report that we did  partnership with the keep safe coalition and we were looking at cyber balance in a digital culture and we are finding that children eight to ten years old teenagers and adults have huge sever balance issues  and that impacts their sleep which we know impacts all areas of health impacts their work or their home work or school work things like that it also impacts how they feel their social lives things basically every area of life cyber bonds impacted and this goes back to also the report from the a p a that came out a couple weeks ago looking at the stress levels we didn't monitor stress in this particular study but again everybody across the boards of the they had large cyber balance issues and for the sake of time i'm not going to delve completely into this research but if anybody has any questions and more than happy to give you the hard and fast details and numbers but basically what we're saying is we're trying to move from this and this might look like your family household actually my household we were never sitting at the table like this but basically everybody is on their devices their idea of being together but not together because of the technology that's surrounding the table and what we really want to do is move towards this and i used to follow up that slide with a picture of a happy family just eating dinner eating breakfast and everyone's happy and loving each other and i actually got some pushback on that because people really bad it's not how it transitions work people don't just jump from one extreme to the other which is completely fair so i swapped it out with this cartoon and the caption reads it's the next step in social media it's called talking around the dinner table and you can see that not everybody is thrilled with the idea of not having a device and having to talk to each other so sometimes these true transitions take work but then you will eventually get to that happy shiny family that's really excited to be with each other and maybe they're not really excited to be with each other but it's really protective and probably one of the best things that you can do  for the for the health of your teen or adolescent and the great news is that it works we followed up in this study and we saw that when people set rules when parents set rules in the household teens actually follow and i want to point out this one down at the bottom parents feel that seven out of ten teens obey family media rules that's better than half that's better than than most rules that are set so you're actually parents have the biggest role in all of this parents and teachers it's not researchers it's not academics it's parents and then also in this orange box here this one i also loved from the study it's one out of four t chose to have a media free day occasionally which is pretty big a self directed day of unplugging we call it a digital sabbath at the center and something that we weren't expecting to come out of this data to come out of these rules but something that the tweens opted into  on their own so really great success stories i also do you want to say that the center is he is definitely there for you we go all over the world but it's great because you guys are in massachusetts and we're in massachusetts we're really close we really hope that you'll use our resources and our facilities so i just want to plug a few of them this is a screenshot of our website and we do have a whole section dedicated just to parents with a number of resources and i do want to say all of these resources are free and readily available we have tips i put to you out front but they're all downloadable and printable we also have something this is our most popular web feature and again this is global and this is called ask the media attrition and dr michael rich who saw before he is he's a pediatrician at children's he's also a professor at harvard medical school and the school of public health and he basically we get questions from all over the world that deal with media and child health and some of them range from you know it how much t v should my two year old be watching the answer is none you know i just found all of the sex on my teenagers from i don't know what to do about it so they really range  in kind of like extremes i guess but the great news is that it takes us a while to answer these my answer them along with dr edge and they're all steeped in the latest science and research which we will make readily available so what i would recommend is if you have a question go and search chances are that some parent has already asked your same question and we have it there and if not please use that portal it's anonymous and we'll certainly do our best to answer that question for you  resources the american academy of pediatrics just in october of last year finally recognized media as a huge issue on pediatric health and wellbeing so they recognize it officially part of that official recognition was to create a family media use plan our center had some input in designing that plan that plan can be found at healthy children dot org it's a wonderful resource it's a little clunky but even if you don't have the time to kind of go through all of it i recommend that you explore it it's for children of all ages from infant to i believe twenty five and again it also deals with adults too so if you want to put yourself on a family meeting plan it's worth a shot to look at common sense media that those were  the initial facts and figures that i gave they deal with mostly survey data and parental opinion so not hard science but certainly a wonderful resource to go to my recommendation for p b s s frontline generation like anything frontline is amazing this one is is wonderful in terms of marketing and things like that also men women and children was a movie that came out in two thousand and fourteen starring jennifer garner and adam sandler it presents a great kind of overview of really extreme issues possible situation and finally i'd like to end with the fact that social media can be really really health positive i don't want anyone to leave here and say you know say to give me your phone i'm deleting all your applications or no one's going online anymore because all these horrible horrible things that can happen