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Social Media and Internet Misuse Top Parental Concerns, Says Study
As children return to school, two problems have risen to the top of their parent’s concerns, the impact of social media and the internet on children’s life.
According to the University of Michigan Health CS Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, more than half of parents rank mental health issues as the top health concern for their children and teens.
Overall, mental health and technology use topped this year’s top ten list of parent worries about health-related issues for children in the United States, surpassing childhood obesity, which parents ranked as the top children’s health issue a decade ago.
“Parents still view problems directly impacting physical health, including unhealthy eating and obesity, as important children’s health issues. But these have been overtaken by concerns about mental health, social media and screen time,” said Mott Poll co-director and Mott pediatrician Susan Woolford, MD, MPH.
Two-thirds of parents are worried about children’s increased time on devices, including overall screen time and use of social media, taking the No.1 and No.2 spots on the list of children’s health concerns this year, according to the nationally representative poll.
“Children are using digital devices and social media at younger ages, and parents may struggle with how to appropriately monitor use to prevent negative impacts on safety, self-esteem, social connections and habits that may interfere with sleep and other areas of health,” Woolford said.
Screen time became a growing concern for parents during the pandemic, previous reports suggest. Woolford encourages parents to regularly evaluate their children’s use of technology and consider limiting use if they notice signs of unhealthy interactions or behaviours. Certain social media and device settings can also help protect kids.
Mental, and emotional health concerns are top of mind.
The poll findings, which are based on 2,099 responses collected in February, also demonstrate parents’ continued concern about children’s mental health. The majority of parents view depression, suicide, stress, anxiety, and related topics like bullying as big problems.
And nearly half of parents expressed concern about a lack of mental health services. “The mismatch between the growing number of youth with mental health concerns and the limited access to mental health services has serious implications for children’s well-being,” Woolford said.
Parents also shared a high level of concern about school violence, which may reflect direct experience with school shootings or fights as well as media coverage about such events, Woolford says.
She added that changes to the school environment, such as metal detectors, armed guards and locked doors, as well as active shooter drills may remind children and parents about the potential for school violence. Parents may struggle with how to manage their own stress and anxiety while they try to reassure their children.
“Parents may want to talk with their child periodically about how safe they feel at school and what they’ve heard about violent incidents,” Woolford said. “They should tailor the information to their child’s age and avoid sharing graphic details while offering reassurance about safety measures that their school has in place.”
Parents in low-income households were more likely to view several children’s health issues as a major concern, including depression and suicide, bullying, school violence, unsafe neighbourhoods, drinking and drugs, smoking and vaping, teen pregnancy and sexual activity, child abuse and neglect, parental stress, discrimination, COVID, and health risks from pollution.
Meanwhile, parents in middle and high-income homes are more likely to rate overuse of devices and social media as significant problems.
“Differences in how parents view children’s health problems may reflect their day-to-day experiences dealing with environmental challenges such as unsafe neighbourhoods, as well as discrimination that may be more frequently experienced by children from low-income homes,” Woolford said.
Concern about a greater number of child health issues may be reflected in this group’s higher reports of parental stress as a big problem, Woolford added.
But parents across income groups rated other topics similarly, including unhealthy diet, obesity, healthcare costs, and lack of mental health services.
Falling just outside the top 10 children’s health concerns are obesity (48 percent), guns/gun injuries (47 percent), lack of mental health services (47 percent), poverty (45 percent), drinking/using drugs (44 percent), child abuse/neglect (42 percent), followed by unequal access to health care (35 percent), parental stress (35 percent), inaccurate/misleading health information (31 percent), teen pregnancy/sexual activity (31 percent), discrimination (31 percent), unsafe neighbourhoods (30 percent), gay/gender issues (LGBTQ) (29 percent), and health risks from polluted water and air (23 percent).
At the bottom of the list: the safety of vaccines (16 percent), over-involved parents/parents doing too much (13 percent) and COVID (12 percent).
“Today’s school-aged children have experienced dramatic shifts in classroom environments, technology norms and increased mental health challenges,” Woolford said.
“Parents should partner with schools, mentors and their child’s health care providers to address both ongoing and emerging health concerns. They should also regularly revisit conversations with their children and teens that encourage them to share any concerns they might be experiencing, both physically and emotionally.”
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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