Banning social media for children under 16 will improve their mental health if rigorous evaluation is implemented

The scientific community broadly agrees that social media can both benefit and harm children and adolescents. As stated in the APA's Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence, using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents' online lives both reflect and shape their offline lives. In most cases, social media effects depend on adolescents' personal and psychological characteristics and social circumstances, intersecting with the specific content, features, or functions offered by many social media platforms. In other words, social media effects likely depend on what teens can do and see online, their pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up. One example is this journal [1], which concludes that short negative morning affect affects the degree to which adolescents use their phones and potentially social media. In this case, one's mood or prior history of symptoms of mental health issues predicts one's future social media use, not the other way around. In a case of mental health issues, children under 16 might turn to social media and heavy phone use as a brief dopamine/mood boost, eventually leading to addiction and worsened symptoms. Based on this observation, one might argue that bans try to fix a problem they cannot solve. Removing social media does not automatically resolve mental health issues in children under 16 and therefore will not bring positive effects. This article [2] argues that banning social media makes things worse and that the solution is to end bans and help them regulate their emotions. They argue that adolescents gain benefits like less loneliness and access to important information from social media. Removing bans leaves them with nothing. However, it is important to consider the following: 1. Social media bans don't solve the problem completely, but that does not invalidate it as a tool that could be used to affect the mental health of children positively. We can identify the most harmful spaces and ban them. Regulations and policies can be upheld together with the ban 2. This will help remove the need to default to social media or heavy phone use anyway. Making clubs and sports accessible can support important aspects of child development, like increasing physical connection. It is agreed that social media bans on their own do not automatically produce relief. Still, they can be part of the equation, as long as they're healthy bans that invest sufficient resources to support a rigorous evaluation. [3]