Australian research shows alarming rise in social media use among kids
Australian research reveals a dramatic rise in social media use among children and teens, with daily users soaring by more than 200 percent from 2019 to 2022, Xinhua reports.
University of South Australia (UniSA) researchers tracked more than 14,000 South Australian students aged 11-14 from 2019 to 2022, uncovering a dramatic shift in how young people spend their time, according to a UniSA news release on Wednesday.
Over the four years, daily social media use jumped from 26 percent to 85.4 percent, and non-users plummeted from 30.6 percent to 2.6 percent, while participation in sport, reading, music and art has sharply declined, according to the study published in JAMA Network Open.
The share of children who never read for fun rose from 10.8 percent to 52.6 percent, and those not involved in arts activities up from 25.7 percent to 70.4 percent, it said.
"There's no doubt that social media has become deeply embedded in children's daily lives," replacing activities that support healthy development, said UniSA researcher Mi Zhou, one of the study's corresponding authors.
The findings come as Australia prepares to implement a nation-leading restriction on social media access for children under 16, providing an essential baseline for evaluating how such interventions affect young people's after-school activity patterns.
To note, Kazakhstan mulls social media age restrictions.
