Girls using social media for more than an hour a day have higher risk of developing mental health issues

For tweens and early teens, the rise in time spent on Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social media is really quite dramatic. Culture minister Matt Hancock recently suggested the government could impose limits on the amount of time children spend on social media. In February, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee launched a new inquiry to examine the health risks to children and young teens of increasing amounts of time on social media.

Our new study set out to look at patterns of behaviour among ten to 15 year olds in the UK, and their levels of well-being, to see if all this time spent online was having a detrimental impact on their mental health. We found that teenage girls are by far the highest users of social media, and those who are using it for more than an hour a day are also at the highest risk of developing well-being problems in later teen years.

We used the youth participants’ data from the UK household longitudinal study, Understanding Society, following almost 10,000 young people from diverse backgrounds across the whole country between 2009 and 2015.

We asked the young people to report on how much time they spent on social media on a “normal school day”. A few reported no internet access or no time spent at all, but some were on it for four hours or more. We found that 10% of ten-year-old girls reported spending one to three hours a day (compared with 7% of boys) and this increased to 43% of girls at age 15 (and 31% of boys).

We assessed two measures of well-being for these young people. The first was a combined score of their answers to questions about satisfaction with schoolwork, friends, family, appearance, school and life as a whole. The second measure was a well-established questionnaire which asked the young people about their social and emotional difficulties.

At age ten, girls who interacted on social media for an hour or more on a school day had worse levels of well-being compared to girls who had lower levels of social media interaction. Additionally, these girls with higher social media interaction at aged ten were more likely to experience more social and emotional difficulties as they got older. While our study was unable to say that the higher level of social media use among young girls directly caused the mental health issues, there was a strong association.