The Woman With a Plan to Fight Screen Addiction

By Leslie Price

Julie Scelfo — a parent and journalist who’s written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others — began to feel concerned about how digital media was affecting kids after reporting on youth mental health. What she was hearing about in her work, and in her conversations with parents, was simply too devastating. Inspired by the success of other parent-led advocacy groups, she founded Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) with the goal of bringing caretakers together to force change. I spoke with Scelfo about moving into activism, what she wants parents to know about their kids’ social media feeds, and more.

You’re a journalist who has written about technology and its impact on children and families. What caused you to move into activism and create Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA)?

A few years ago, I did a story for the New York Times about the role of social media in a set of suicides that happened that were pretty high profile on the University of Pennsylvania campus. I don’t know if you remember the Madison Hollering case. 

The whole campus was asking, How could this happen? I began to unpack how using social media affects a person’s sense of self and their place in the world. Soon after that, I noticed in the data that suicide rates were increasing not only among adolescents, but also in tweens. I hoped it would just be a statistical glitch. But after a second year, it persisted.

I reported a story that ended up running in the Huffington Post about growing rates of tween suicide. To have nine and 10-year-old prepubescent kids so despairing is just unfathomable. As a parent, I could not see this continue and not take action. It led me first to convene something that I called Get Media Savvy, which was sort of a working group of people who understand the intersection of media and human experience. From that, we created Mothers Against Media Addiction. It’s a grassroots movement of parents fighting back against media addiction and creating a world where real-life experiences and interactions remain at the heart of a healthy childhood.

Your platform has three pillars: giving parents the tools needed to protect their kids, getting smartphones out of schools so kids can learn, and demanding that platforms have safeguards like other consumer products. What are the specifics?

Education goes hand in hand with [these]. I think most parents are not aware of what their children are seeing. Platforms are training the brain to have a low attention span, and are exposing kids to all types of inappropriate content. If you asked a parent – Do you think it’s appropriate for your nine-year-old to watch a car accident or see footage of an execution? – no parent would think that’s okay. But because social media platforms are completely unregulated, that type of content can be shown to them and often is shown to them. Parents need an understanding of how these platforms work, and how devices take our attention away from other things. 

One of the reasons we want phones out of schools is because, as device use has increased, [there has been a] massive displacement of interpersonal interaction. If a kid’s on a screen 10-plus hours a day, they’re going to get good at swiping every time they’re bored, always looking for something new to entertain them. They’re not practicing the slow nature of human interaction: looking someone in the eye, being patient, being polite. Social media rewards being snarky and rude. Also, getting phones out of schools preserves a solid seven hours a day when kids are not seeking and experiencing a phone-based set of neurobiological experiences.

You can take away a teenager’s phone during class, but they know they’re going to get it back at the end of the period. You better believe they’re going to spend the class not thinking about math or reading, but about how long until they can check their messages. We’ve seen reading and math scores nationwide decline to the lowest levels they’ve been at since we started measuring. And then safeguards are really about making our legislators bring regulations up to date. There have been no laws passed to safeguard social media for children since 1998. There are no laws preventing companies from sending your child whatever content will make them the most addicted. Sadly, I’ve met too many parents who have lost their children to online harm.

I read that you modeled your efforts after Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. What did they do that you found successful?

They not only got laws passed to outlaw behavior that harmed people, but they also changed our culture and the way that we think about drunk driving, right? It’s not cool to put people at risk. We want people to understand that unregulated social media results in harm to our children. And so through the MAMA Movement, parents are coming together to champion practices and policies that prioritize kids’ safety and well-being over big tech.

How do you navigate the criticism that’s lobbed at the regulation of technology? Specifically, that regulating social media will harm queer kids because they won’t be able to access community, especially in places where they are cut off or their parents aren’t supportive? 

First of all, we need to keep all kids safe. Often tech companies are dumping obscene amounts of money into shutting down efforts to constrain [them] by hijacking [these sorts of] messages. Anyone who’s studied the data knows that LGBTQ+ kids and children from marginalized backgrounds are at greater risk of online harm. They are more often profiled, exposed to hate speech, or trafficked. Those kids deserve to be protected even more. In my partnerships and relationships with LGBTQ+ groups, I understand that we need to make sure kids can access information and find community. But they were doing that online before social media. I would rather my trans child be part of a chat group administered by GLAAD or PFLAG than by a social media company that cares only about profit.

Are there specific recommendations about age, or is that too hard to parse?

Right now, we are inspired by the Surgeon General’s (Vivek H. Murthy) viewpoint that he will not even consider giving his daughters a smartphone before high school. And we share Jonathan Haidt’s idea that there should be no social media before 16. We know from people inside of tech companies that some of them think the age should be 18. 

I just heard from a 15-year-old boy who has seen videos of dead bodies, car crashes, and even an execution because a child he knows thinks these videos are funny and shares them. The trauma that any human being at any age experiences from seeing content like that is very hard to measure in a study. If you went to the toy store to buy your child a toy and there was a sign on it that said, there’s a one in three chance that this toy is going to cause your child suicidal depression, or a one in 10 chance they’re going to develop an eating disorder, who would buy that for your kid?

We don’t have that data available because there is no study that you can ethically create that would allow you to tease out the exact amount of social media that causes suicidality. I wrote a piece for The Hill called “These ‘Toys’ Are Killing Our Kids.” This isn’t a medicine, this is a toy. It’s a consumer product. We really need to adjust our understanding.

What is the best-case scenario here?

In the next two years, I would like to see every school in America adopt an “away for the day” policy. I would like to see parents nationwide quit buying smartphones for their middle-grade children. Children have to get through puberty before they even consider giving them a smartphone. And I would like to see our lawmakers step up and pass basic legislation protecting American’s privacy rights, and hold tech companies accountable for amplifying harmful content to minors.

If you have a child and everyone else in their social circle has a phone, what advice would you give that parent?

I made my children wait until they were 12, and if I knew then what I know now, I absolutely would’ve waited [longer]. Dr. Becky, who I think is wonderful, talks about the importance of parents setting boundaries for their children. If your child refuses to buckle up, we don’t go ahead and drive. We insist that they wear the restraints because we know that’s what’s best for them.

One of your goals for 2024 is to open chapters in 10 states. How can people participate?

Anyone interested in joining our movement should visit joinmama.org. Despite our name, we’re not just for mothers, we are for fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even people who don’t have children, but care about them, like pediatricians, educators, and librarians. We’re a very inclusive group. Once you sign up, there’s a form you can fill out to express the way in which you’d like to be involved. Chapter leaders get some training and agree to host quarterly in-person meetings so that parents can be in one another’s company and learn information that we think will help them make up their own minds. And we provide them with tools to take action together to encourage schools to put phones away for the day and call on leaders to implement safeguards.

Do you feel like this is a bipartisan issue? Because it seems like there is interest on both sides of the spectrum, but in terms of how to solve the problem, very different strategies are proposed.

We are a nonpartisan organization. We believe everybody should care about keeping this country’s children safe and ensuring that every child has the tools they need to grow up equipped to be healthy emotionally, socially, and academically. Politically speaking, we have seen that it’s a bipartisan issue. The Kids Online Safety Act or KOSA has 67 co-sponsors and they’re tri-partisan. 

I’m not really interested in partisan bickering. What I’m interested in is putting kids first and getting laws passed that protect our kids ahead of profits for tech companies. Thankfully, more and more legislators of every political persuasion are waking up to the urgency [of this moment] because we cannot have our children in crisis. The American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national state of emergency for youth mental health pre-Covid. It’s not okay. We need to put our kids’ well-being first.