Apps like TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram are exacting a terrible toll on children’s mental health. Now a new group, Mothers Against Media Addiction, is fighting back.
As a journalist, Julie Scelfo had been covering youth mental health stories for various news outlets for years when something caught her attention that changed everything. She’d just completed a story about suicide on college campuses when she discovered that suicide was also increasing among teens. Even more disturbing was that this trend was beginning to reach younger and younger kids. “More 10-year-olds die by suicide at their own hands than cancer. That is just so messed up,” the mother of three tells me.
Scelfo’s research led her to place the blame for this tragic trend squarely on social media. ”We’ve known for decades that children who grow up with abuse or trauma suffer lifelong negative mental health effects,” she explains. “Social media is distributing traumatic information, images, and video at scale to children.” She also spoke to parent after parent who related stories of how their children had been bullied—not just during the day at school, but 24/7 on social media. Social media was overtaking their kids’ time at home and replacing their regular activities and relationships. And it was having other mental health effects as well—including eating disorders, depression, and anxiety among both boys and girls,
The information she collected was overwhelming, and disturbing. “My heart just hurt; I couldn’t live with this [knowledge] anymore,” Scelfo says. So she decided to take action. “This isn’t something that parents can address alone,” she says. “It’s going to call for collective change.” To that end, Scelfo founded Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) this past March. The non-profit is focused on giving parents the education and tools they need to fight back against social media addiction, as well as organizing them into grassroots groups all across the country to advocate for the changes needed—such as getting smartphones out of the classroom during the school day and demanding that safeguards be placed on social media. They recently held a rally outside the offices of Meta, the company behind both Facebook and Instagram, to call for the passage of two New York State bills that would place limitations on how much data social media platforms can collect from children and prohibit algorithms that are aimed at addicting kids to their social media feeds.
But why “mothers,” and not “parents”? “I’m such a feminist, I was reluctant to use the name—why do mothers have to fix everything?” Scelfo says. Nevertheless, PAMA just didn’t sound as good, she admits, and adds that “I think of ‘mothering’ as a verb. It’s something we do for one another in our society. MAMA welcomes anybody of any gender or family structures—you don’t even have to be a parent, you just have to care about kids.”
The group already has chapters set up in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and requests to form them are pouring in from everywhere. That’s good news, because MAMA is up against a formidable enemy, one with mega-deep pockets. “Big tech will stop at nothing to prevent any meaningful reforms, and they have spent millions of dollars on lobbyists who have prevented even the most basic regulations from passing,” Scelfo says. “But what gives me hope is that as soon as I tell someone about MAMA they say, ‘Oh my God, where have you been, and how can I help?’ So many of us desperately want to enable and empower our children to have healthy childhoods that I’m confident we’re going to beat these guys.”
PHOTO BY CHRIS BOESE COURTESY OF UNSPLASH
