Children and Social Media: Do You Know Where Your Children Really Are?

I grew up during a time when kids left the house in the morning, got on their bikes and disappeared for hours. You found your friends, played outside and came home when you were hungry or when the streetlights came on. Your parents did not have GPS tracking your every move, and they could not text you every fifteen minutes to ask where you were. Half the time, they simply had to trust that you were safe. When I started looking into children and social media, I kept thinking about how different childhood feels now. There was even an old public service announcement on television that an entire generation will remember: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” Television stations used versions of that warning for decades to remind parents to check on their kids.

Today, that question means something very different because most parents do know exactly where their children are physically. They are upstairs, in the bedroom, at the kitchen table or sitting on the couch ten feet away. The question is whether we know where they are online, who they are talking to, who is talking to them, what they have been watching for the last three hours and who has been influencing them without us even realizing it.

That is the part of this that bothers me. We spent decades becoming more protective of children in the physical world. Parents who once let an eight-year-old ride a bicycle across the neighborhood might hesitate to do it today. We worry about traffic, crime, strangers, drugs and everything else that could happen once a child walks out the front door. Some of that fear is justified and some of it is perception. Violent crime in America is considerably lower than it was at its early 1990s peak, and stranger abductions are rare, but the fear changed childhood anyway. Kids came inside more, parents supervised more and independence became more limited. Then, almost without realizing what we were doing, we gave children smartphones and put the entire world inside their bedrooms.

With that one device came friends, strangers, celebrities, advertisers, pornography, bullies, predators, beauty standards, influencers, gambling, shopping and endless entertainment. Then there are the platforms and algorithms behind that screen, learning what catches a child’s attention, what they search for, what they skip, what they go back to and what keeps them there. We still refer to this as “screen time,” but that phrase barely begins to describe it. A television was screen time. A video game was screen time. Social media is something much bigger because the child is not simply watching, the child is interacting with it while it is learning from the child.

This is no longer a small part of childhood. In 2025, Pew found that 36 percent of American teens used at least one of five major social platforms almost constantly. In another Pew survey, 45 percent of teens said they believed they spent too much time on social media. When anything takes up that much of a child’s day, it has to come at the expense of something else. Sleep, homework, exercise, reading, sports, time with family, face-to-face friendships, boredom and even those quiet moments when a child has nothing to do except think all have to compete with a device that is always available and always offering something new.

When I started looking at mental health, I expected the connection to be much more straightforward than it actually is. The research does not prove that social media caused every increase in depression, anxiety or suicide among young people, but what it does show is enough to take seriously. In the CDC’s 2023 national high school survey, 40 percent of students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 77 percent said they used social media at least several times a day. Frequent users were more likely to report bullying, persistent sadness or hopelessness and some measures of suicide risk. That is an association, not proof that one directly caused the other, but a 2025 JAMA Network Open study adds another piece. Researchers followed nearly 12,000 children over several years and found that when an individual child’s social media use increased above his or her normal level, depressive symptoms were higher later. The effect was modest, and the study still cannot tell us that social media alone caused those symptoms, but it is harder to dismiss when the pattern follows the child over time.

The children themselves are also telling us what they experience. In Pew’s 2025 survey, 45 percent of teens said social media hurt the amount of sleep they got, 40 percent said it hurt their productivity and 19 percent said it hurt their mental health. Sleep alone should concern parents because a phone does not have a bedtime. There is always another message, another video, another notification and another reason to stay awake. A child can be physically lying in bed while still being socially active, emotionally stimulated and mentally somewhere else entirely. We know how important sleep is to mood, concentration, learning and physical health, yet we have put one of the most stimulating devices ever invented inches away from children’s pillows.

The way children see themselves has changed too. Every generation had insecurity, and teenagers have always compared themselves with other people. The difference now is scale. A girl once compared herself with the girls in her class, a model in a magazine or an actress on television. Today she can scroll through thousands of faces and bodies in a week, many of them filtered, edited, posed, lit, sponsored or altered. The Surgeon General’s social media advisory reported that 46 percent of adolescents ages 13 to 17 said social media made them feel worse about their body image. When filters can change a nose, lips, skin and jawline in seconds, a child can become dissatisfied with a perfectly normal face because a camera just showed her another version of herself. It should not surprise us that children begin examining themselves more critically when so much of what they see online is built around appearance, comparison and approval.

Physical health belongs in this conversation too, although it needs to be discussed carefully. About 23 percent of American adolescents ages 12 to 19 have obesity, and youth-onset type 2 diabetes has risen sharply. In the SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth study, incidence among 10 to 19 year olds increased from 9.0 cases per 100,000 in 2002 and 2003 to 17.9 in 2017 and 2018. Social media did not cause childhood obesity or diabetes. Diet, genetics, sleep, family habits, income and many other factors are involved. At the same time, a child cannot be sitting and moving at the same time, and the American Academy of Pediatrics encourages families to pay attention to what media is crowding out, including sleep, exercise, reading, play, homework and family time. What matters is what that screen is replacing. We created entertainment that can continue indefinitely while requiring almost no physical movement, and we put it in a device children can carry everywhere.

Attention is another part of this that parents and teachers are seeing every day. Short-form video is built around constant novelty. One person disappears and another appears. A joke becomes an argument, an argument becomes a dance, the dance becomes a product, and within seconds the child is somewhere else. A 2025 systematic review of school-aged children found that off-task smartphone and social media use was negatively related to academic achievement in most of the studies it examined. That does not mean every child with a phone will struggle in school, but the basic question is still worth asking: how easy is it for a brain accustomed to constant stimulation to sit quietly and work through something difficult for forty-five minutes? Learning requires patience, repetition, frustration and the ability to continue even when something is not immediately rewarding. The internet offers an escape from boredom almost instantly.

Friendship may be one of the most complicated areas because social media genuinely does help many children stay connected. Seventy-four percent of teens in Pew’s 2025 survey said it made them feel more connected to their friends’ lives, and 30 percent said it helped their friendships while only 7 percent said it hurt them. That matters, because online friendship is not automatically fake or meaningless. At the same time, 39 percent said social media made them feel overwhelmed by drama, 31 percent felt pressure to post popular content, 31 percent felt excluded by friends and 27 percent said it made them feel worse about their own lives. Friendship is not simply contact. It is also a skill. Children learn it by approaching someone, being awkward, reading a face, realizing they hurt someone’s feelings, apologizing, tolerating discomfort and working through disagreement. A child can have hundreds of followers and still struggle to walk into a room and make one friend because online communication does not practice every skill that life offline requires.

Then there is the question of who is influencing our children. We used to ask who they were hanging around with. Today someone a child has never met can spend hours speaking directly to him or her. Influencers know how to create a sense of intimacy. They talk into a camera from a bedroom, share breakups and insecurities, show routines, offer opinions and recommend products. Over time, a child can begin to feel as if this person is familiar or trustworthy even though the relationship is entirely one-sided. Psychologists call that a parasocial relationship. The Federal Trade Commission has warned that children can have difficulty recognizing advertising when it is blended into entertainment and may trust a message more when it comes from an influencer or avatar they feel connected to.

Selling a product is only part of it. Once someone has trust, that person can influence ideas as easily as purchases. A child can absorb a look, a diet, a lifestyle, a grievance, a political belief, a sexual norm or an entire idea of what kind of person belongs and what kind of person does not. Charismatic people have always influenced young people, but they never had this kind of access, repetition and reach. Behind them is the algorithm, which does not need to care about your child or even understand your child in any human sense. It only needs to learn what keeps that child engaged. What your child watches longer, replays, searches, clicks or ignores all helps shape what comes next. A child may think he or she is simply scrolling through the internet while the internet is learning how to keep that child scrolling.

What disturbed me most as I kept digging was what I found about sexual exploitation, because this is where the old question, “Do you know where your children are?” changes completely. A predator no longer has to approach a child at a park, outside a school or anywhere in the physical world. First contact can happen while that child is sitting safely at home. It may begin with a compliment, then conversation, then trust and secrecy, and eventually a request for a picture. Once an intimate image exists, shame, fear and threats can become leverage. NCMEC received 1.4 million CyberTipline reports concerning online enticement in 2025, including more than 80,000 reports involving sextortion and more than 800 reports in which an offender traveled to meet a child in person. NCMEC says these crimes occur across social media, messaging apps and online gaming.

In September 2026, UNICEF reported that across 21 countries an estimated 20 million children ages 12 to 17, almost one in five, experienced at least one form of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse during a single year. More than half of those experiences occurred on mainstream social media platforms, and fewer than 1 percent were reported to authorities. More than 15 million were exposed to unwanted sexual content, 9 million were asked to engage in sexual conversations or share sexual images against their will, and 4 million had sexual images of themselves shared without consent. Those numbers are hard to read, but parents need to know them because the danger is not limited to girls and it is not limited to some distant corner of the internet. The FBI has warned that victims of financially motivated sextortion are often boys ages 14 to 17.

Another part of this is how children can be groomed into situations adults later describe as choices. Under U.S. federal law, when a minor is involved in a commercial sex act, prosecutors do not have to prove force, fraud or coercion for it to qualify as child sex trafficking. That matters because people will sometimes look at a teenager and say she participated willingly. But what does willingness really mean when a child has been groomed for months, when attention became affection, affection became secrecy, secrecy became sexualization and then money, gifts, threats or emotional dependence entered the picture? A child can be manipulated into participating in his or her own exploitation, and calling that a free choice does not change what happened.

Parents also need to understand how much their response matters. If a child comes to you terrified because an image has been sent or someone is threatening him or her, that is not the moment for anger. That child needs to know immediately that he or she is not facing it alone. Shame is one of the things that keeps children silent, and silence gives predators more power. The same applies to the smaller things too. If children believe that telling the truth about what happened online will automatically lead to screaming, punishment or losing everything, they become more likely to hide exactly what parents most need to know.

We also have to be willing to look at ourselves. Adults are on their phones too, at dinner, in the car, on the couch and sometimes while our children are talking to us. Researchers even have a word for technology interrupting parent-child interaction: technoference. A 2025 meta-analysis covering more than 60,000 participants found a significant association between parental technoference and problematic media use by children. That does not mean every parent checking a message is causing harm, but children learn what normal looks like by watching the people around them. If every quiet moment sends the adults reaching for a screen, it is difficult to expect children to develop a completely different relationship with theirs.

None of this means social media is entirely bad. Children learn extraordinary things online. They create art, discover music, find tutorials, maintain friendships across distance and connect with people who share interests that may be uncommon in their own schools or neighborhoods. A lonely teenager can find support, and a curious child can learn almost anything. Those benefits are real. I do not think the answer is as simple as saying phones are good or bad. I want to know how a child is using one, how young that child is, how many hours are disappearing into it, what that phone has replaced in his or her actual life and who now has access to that child because of it.

That is where parents still have power. Know the apps your child uses and who can contact them. Know whether location sharing is turned on. Keep phones and social media out of bedrooms at night whenever possible, and create parts of family life where phones simply do not belong. Ask what your child is seeing online without making every conversation feel like an interrogation. Put something back where the screen has taken something away, whether that is sports, music, reading, church, time outdoors, friends at the house, volunteering, dinner together or even boredom. Children still need a real life that is rich enough to compete with the one on the screen.

Most importantly, make sure your child knows that if something frightening, humiliating or dangerous happens online, you are the person they can come to first. If there is sextortion or exploitation, preserve the messages, stop contact, report the account and contact law enforcement or NCMEC. Do not let shame isolate the child.

What I keep coming back to is this: we brought our children inside because we were afraid of the world, and then we gave them the world through a device small enough to fit in their hands. We gave them access to more information than any generation of children in history, but we also gave advertisers, influencers, bullies, strangers and predators a route directly back to them. We gave them endless ways to connect and fewer reasons to knock on a neighbor’s door. We gave them entertainment whenever boredom appeared, then wondered why boredom became unbearable. We gave them filters, follower counts and instant measurements of approval, then wondered why they became anxious about how they looked and what other people thought.

A smartphone is not simply another toy. It is a door, and before we hand a child the key, we should know where it leads, who can walk through it and whether our child is ready for what may be waiting on the other side.

“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”

Maybe the question never became outdated. Maybe “where” just changed.