Social media ban for kids not feasible, but need to promote healthy use, say experts | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Should India ban the use of social media among children? With the Australian parliament passing a bill to ban social media use among children under 16, the question has gained a lot of traction. However, experts say, while the decision is well intended, it is difficult to implement.
Recently, the American Psychological Association (APA) also issued a health advisory on social media use in adolescence, and it stated that excess or “problematic social media use” could impair the ability to engage in daily roles and routines among adolescents. It can also present risk for more serious psychological harms over time, the advisory said.
Banning the use of social media among children is a welcome step but it will be difficult to implement a complete ban. “There is a need for promotion of healthy use,” Dr Rajesh Sagar, professor of psychiatry at AIIMS-Delhi, said.
Dr Pramit Rastogi, child and adolescent psychiatrist at STEPS Center for Mental Health, said that the ban proposal captures the reality that children whose minds are not developed enough to have access to and to regulate screen-time are being given these devices without the necessary checks and balances in place.
“Having said that, this will run into second order difficulties like development of unregulated and illegal social media channels. We should let the west first go through one iteration of this so that we can learn from it and then introduce the second generation level of social media ban. For example, inability to access mainstream social media on school premises, internet providers offering these parental controls at the provider level rather than individual device level checks and balances, which parents have to do right now,” he said.
According to Dr Roma Kumar, senior consultant psychologist at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, widespread access to digital and social media has drastically altered the nature of adolescents’ interpersonal connections. “Depression, anxiety and suicidality have all sharply increased in adolescents over the past decade,” she said.