Fourteen-year-old Armita Mojazza is a huge Harry Styles fan, and TikTok knows it.
Videos of Styles are “pretty much always” showing up as Armita scrolls through the platform, she said — “the feed obviously adjusts to your interests.”
Those videos, combined with notifications from Snapchat and other social media outlets, lure Armita, of White Plains, New York, into up to five hours of screen time on weekdays and at least eight hours on weekends, she said.
Her mother, Shahrzad Mojazza, said she was shocked to learn how much time her daughter spends online. “I feel like I’m waking up to this news,” she said.
A new report about kids and their smartphone use may offer other parents a warning: Children like Armita are inundated with hundreds of pings and prompts on their phones all day and all night — even when they should be paying attention in class or getting a good night’s rest.
It’s a “constant buzzing,” said Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a group that studies the impact of media and technology on kids and families. “They literally wake up and before they go to the bathroom, they’re on their phone.”
New research Common Sense Media released Tuesday finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications on their phones every day. About 25% of them pop up during the school day, and 5% show up at night.
In some cases, they get nearly 5,000 notifications in 24 hours. The pop-ups are almost always linked to alerts from friends on social media.
“They’re constantly forced to respond socially on Snapchat or TikTok or whatever to their friends,” Steyer said. “It’s a dominant factor in all of their personal lives.”
Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, the interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by the findings.
Such a “highly stimulating environment” may affect kids’ “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.” Maxwell was not involved with the Common Sense report.
The study is based on surveys of 203 young people ages 11 through 17. The subjects also agreed to install an app on their phones for nine days so researchers could track their smartphone use. The app provided time-stamped data about which apps were running and when, as well as the numbers of notifications that popped up.
The social media apps tracked in the survey included TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Discord.
Fifty-nine percent of kids were online from midnight to 5 a.m. While some were engaging with social media, many were listening to music or white noise to w
