How parents can tackle social media stress with therapy

If you have found yourself lying awake at night wondering what your child is looking at on their phone, or watching them drift further away like less present at the dinner table, less interested in the things they once loved, you are not imagining things. And you are absolutely not alone.

Across the UK and beyond, parents are sounding an alarm. Quietly at first, and then louder. Something has shifted in their children. Something difficult to name, yet impossible to ignore. The research is now catching up with what many families have instinctively felt for years, that smartphones and social media platforms designed to be in children’s hands are having a profound, measurable impact on their developing brains, their mental health and their sense of self. Not to mention their overall personal identity and emotional safety.

This article is written for parents who care deeply, who are trying to understand and who may be wondering whether the support of a therapist could help you and your child, or your family navigate this increasingly complex digital landscape.

The scale of the problem – what the research tells us

A 2022 Pew Research Centre survey found that up to 95% of teenagers aged 13 to 17 in the United States reported using social media, with over a third describing their use as ‘almost constant’ (Vogels et al., 2022). In the UK, NHS Digital (2020) reported that one in six children aged 5 to 16 years had a probable mental health disorder, a figure that has risen sharply since 2004.

What is particularly striking is the overlap between the rise of smartphone ownership and the deterioration of young people’s mental health and well-being. A landmark staggered roll-out study cited in the US Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory found that the introduction of a single social media platform across university campuses was associated with a 9% increase in depression and a 12% increase in anxiety, affecting an estimated 300,000 additional young people (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023).

Closer to home, a whole school survey conducted for the Channel 4 documentary Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones (2024) revealed that one in five young people is using their smartphones for over six hours a day, a longer time period than the time they spend in lessons (University of York, 2024).

'Swiped': what happened when a school took the phones away

In late 2024, Channel 4 aired the landmark two-part documentary mentioned above, Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones. Produced in partnership with the University of York’s Sleep Laboratory, the experiment followed Year 8 pupils at The Stanway School in Colchester as they surrendered their smartphones for 21 consecutive days (Channel 4, 2024).

The results were striking. Researchers Professor Lisa Henderson and Dr Emma Sullivan used cognitive tests measuring attention, reaction times and memory, alongside EEG brain monitoring and questionnaires covering sleep, anxiety, depression, mood, stress and social connectedness. The findings highlighted measurable improvements in multiple areas of well-being when smartphones were removed (University of York, 2024).

Dr Chatterjee was unequivocal: “There is no question at all, we are giving children smartphones far too young. As a doctor, I have seen time and time again that teenagers and adolescents have their mental health problems get significantly better when they cut out the smartphone” (Chatterjee, cited in Channel 4, 2024).

What is this doing to the young, developing brain?

This is not simply a question of screen time or bad content. It is, at its core, a neuroscience and neurobiology question. And the answers are deeply important for every parent to understand.

The dopamine trap

The adolescent brain is biologically wired to seek reward, peer approval and social connection. Social media platforms are engineered, by psychological design, to exploit precisely these neurological vulnerabilities. Each notification, like and comment, triggers a release of dopamine via the mesolimbic pathway, specifically through the nucleus accumbens, which are regions of the brain that have the very same reward circuitry implicated in substance addiction (Solaja et al., 2025; PMC).

This is not metaphorical. Neuroimaging research confirms that habitual social media checking is associated with functional changes in the developing brain, particularly in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, brain regions responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control and risk assessment (Maza et al., 2023; Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). The adolescent prefrontal cortex does not fully mature until the mid twenties to thirties, leaving young people uniquely and biologically ill-equipped to moderate their own usage (NCBI, 2023).

Sleep, cortisol and the stress response

The consequences extend well beyond the digital world. Blue light emitted by screens suppresses melatonin, disrupting sleep architecture at a critical period of physical and neurological development. Sleep disruption in adolescence is not merely inconvenient; it dysregulates the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, elevating cortisol and triggering a chronic stress response that has downstream effects on mood, immunity, memory consolidation and emotional resilience (Solaja et al., 2025).

It is worth noting that excessive time spent indoors, away from natural daylight, has also been linked to dysregulation of serotonin and dopamine neural circuitry, rising rates of childhood myopia, low vitamin D levels and increased childhood obesity, a cluster of physical and neurological consequences frequently overlooked in conversations about screen time (Oasis Mental Wellness, 2024).

TikTok: what parents need to know

Of all the platforms currently dominating young people’s lives, TikTok demands particular attention. Its algorithm is one of the most sophisticated behavioural prediction systems ever deployed to a mass audience, including children. It does not simply respond to what users search for. It learns, with extraordinary speed and precision, what emotional states keep a user scrolling, and so it feeds content accordingly and individually.

As someone who works professionally in digital marketing (in addition to being a therapist) and who understands how algorithmic psychological profiling operates, I can tell you that what we are dealing with here is not passive entertainment. These systems are actively building psychologically programmed models of your child from the first swipe, and optimising content delivery to maximise engagement time, not considering your child’s mental health and well-being.

The misinformation crisis

The mental health content landscape on TikTok is particularly dangerous. A study by healthcare platform PlushCare (2022), in which 500 videos using the hashtags #mentalhealthtips and #mentalhealthadvice were analysed by medically trained professionals, found that 83.7% of mental health advice on TikTok is misleading, and 14.2% of videos contained content that could be actively damaging, for example, recommending medications without professional consultation (PlushCare, 2022).

Perhaps the most alarming is that only 9% of TikTok creators sharing mental health content held any relevant professional qualification, and 99% of videos included no disclaimer indicating that the creator was unqualified (PlushCare, 2022). When examined condition by condition, the picture worsens as 100% of ADHD content was found to contain misleading information; 94.1% of bipolar disorder content was classified as misleading; and 90.3% of depression content similarly fell short of accuracy (PlushCare, 2022).

The collective reach of this misinformation is staggering. The 500 videos analysed had accumulated over 25 million views, with creators collectively holding over 43 million followers (PlushCare, 2022). Your child may be receiving their primary mental health ‘education’ from an anonymous account with no clinical training, no regulatory oversight and no accountability.

This matters enormously in therapy. I frequently work with parents of young children who have arrived in therapy having already absorbed a vocabulary of self-diagnosis from social media, convinced they have conditions they may not have, using clinical language stripped of clinical context, and in some cases, resistant to professional support because a TikTok video told them something different.

The sociological picture, admitting a generation under pressure

It would be reductive to frame this solely as a technological problem. The sociological context matters profoundly. We are living through a period of significant collective anxiety, post-pandemic, economically uncertain, and politically fractured. Young people are absorbing all of this, often through the same device that also exposes them to cyberbullying, appearance-based social comparison, fear of missing out (FOMO) and algorithmically amplified content that, if they have searched for anything related to low mood, will begin feeding them progressively more of the same.

Research from the Royal Society for Public Health (2017), the widely cited #StatusOfMind report identified Instagram as the social media platform most harmful to young people’s mental health, particularly around body image, anxiety, depression and loneliness. This research predates the widespread adoption of TikTok. The landscape has since deepened considerably.

A 2023 longitudinal study of UK adolescents by Plackett, Sheringham and Dykxhoorn, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, found a consistent relationship between social media use and depression and anxiety across multiple time points, even after controlling for prior mental health status (Plackett et al., 2023). Adolescents ages 10 to 19, undergoing a sensitive period of brain development in which identities and self-worth are forming, are particularly susceptible to the social reward and punishment mechanisms embedded in these platforms (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023).

The parental experience is challenging, and you are not failing

One of the most important things I want to say to you, as a parent reading this, is that the fact that your child is struggling does not mean you have failed. We are all, including yourselves as parents, included in navigating a technology landscape that has been deliberately engineered to be compelling, and that has moved far faster than any regulatory framework, parenting manual, or professional training has been able to keep up with.

Many parents do not fully grasp the risks because they have not seen them firsthand. This is not neglect. This is the quiet normalisation of something that is, in reality, entirely new, and we are all only beginning to understand its implications.

If you are worried about your child, trust that instinct. Parental emotional attunement, the capacity to sense that something is off before you can fully articulate why, is one of the most powerful protective factors a child has. Your concern is not an overreaction. It is a valid response.

How therapy can help

Therapy can help and support you through a safe therapeutic relationship, empowering your capacity for growth and healing. Person-centred therapy does not diagnose or pathologise. It listens. It creates the conditions in which you can begin to understand your own experience.

For parents of young people affected by problematic social media use, therapy can offer a space to:

• Process the emotional impact of cyberbullying, social comparison or exposure to harmful content.
• Understand the relationship between their phone use and their mood, sleep and sense of self.
• Rebuild a felt sense of identity that exists independently of likes, followers, or online validation.
• Develop emotional regulation strategies that are grounded in neuroscience and genuinely effective.

For parents, therapy or family therapy can provide a space to process your own anxiety, to strengthen communication with your child and to find ways to set boundaries around technology that feel manageable rather than combative.

You do not need to wait for a crisis. Early support is one of the most protective things you can offer your child and yourself.

Practical steps you can take today

Alongside therapeutic support, Dr Chatterjee’s guidance from the documentary resonates with what the research consistently shows (Channel 4, 2024; Office of the Surgeon General, 2023):

• Screen-free mealtimes, where you reclaim the dinner table as a space for human connection.
• No devices in bedrooms at night. Emphasising sleep is not a luxury; it is a neurological necessity.
• Delay smartphone ownership (or limit time usage). The American Academy of Paediatrics recommends waiting until age 14–16 years, where possible.
• Talk openly and not with shame or blame, but with curiosity. "What do you like about it?" is often a better opener than "You’re on that too much."
• Modelling the behaviour is important too, as your own relationship with your phone communicates more to your child than any rule.

We are living through something genuinely new. The technology in children’s hands has moved faster than our collective wisdom about how to manage it. But the fundamentals of what young people need have not changed from before smartphones were available: safety, connection, emotional attunement and adults who take their inner world seriously.

If something in this article has resonated with you, reach out. You do not have to navigate this alone, and therapy may be the strength of support where we can work this through together.

References

American Academy of Pediatrics (2023). Family Media Use Plan. American Academy of Pediatrics. Available at: https://www.aap.org

Chatterjee, R. (2024). Cited in: Channel 4, Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones. BOLDPRINT Studios. Available at: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/swiped-the-school-that-banned-smartphones

Channel 4 (2024). Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones. Two-part documentary. BOLDPRINT Studios in association with the University of York. Broadcast December 2024.

Maza, M.T., Fox, K.A., Kwon, S.J., Flannery, J.E., Lindquist, K.A., Prinstein, M.J. and Telzer, E.H. (2023). ‘Association of habitual checking behaviours on social media with longitudinal functional brain development’, JAMA Pediatrics, 177(2), pp. 160–167.

NHS Digital (2020). Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2020: Wave 1 Follow Up to the 2017 Survey. NHS Digital. Available at: https://digital.nhs.uk

Office of the Surgeon General (2023). Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. Washington DC: US Department of Health and Human Services.

Plackett, R., Sheringham, J. and Dykxhoorn, J. (2023). ‘The longitudinal impact of social media use on UK adolescents’ mental health: longitudinal observational study’, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 25, e43213.

PlushCare (2022). How accurate is mental health advice on TikTok? PlushCare. Available at: https://plushcare.com/blog/tiktok-mental-health

Royal Society for Public Health (2017). #StatusOfMind: Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing. London: RSPH. Available at: https://www.rsph.org.uk

Solaja, O. et al. (2025). ‘The impact of social media and technology on child and adolescent mental health’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. PMC. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12165459/

University of York (2024). Researchers test impact of school smartphone ban in new Channel 4 documentary. University of York News. Available at: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2024/research/school-smartphone-ban-channel-4/

Vogels, E.A., Gelles-Watnick, R. and Massarat, N. (2022). Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org

Willis, E. (2024). Cited in: Channel 4, Swiped: The School That Banned Smartphones. BOLDPRINT Studios.