Digital Smarts - New Study: Children May Benefit From Social Media

Social media use, such as scrolling through Instagram and texting, had positive findings for 9- and 10-year-olds participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a project of the National Institutes of Health. The study, launched in 2015, gathered information about how young people's brains develop and how they navigate adolescence. The study's results showed that when comparing different types of screen time, social media use led to more physical activity, less family conflict and better sleep compared to time spent watching TV or playing video games. As the author of the study put it, “The most important thing is that not all screen media is bad, if you want to put it in a nutshell. There's a lot of pre-existing biases that if we expose kids to media, something terrible is going to happen. What we show is that's not the case."