Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jul 22, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 24, 2024 - Sep 18, 2024
Date Accepted: Sep 19, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Social Media Use in Adolescents: Bans, Benefits, and Emotion Regulation Behaviors
ABSTRACT
Social media is an integral part of adolescent’s daily lives, but the significant time adolescents invest in social media has raised concern about the effect on their mental health. Bans on social media use are quickly emerging as an attempt to regulate social media use, however evidence supporting their effectiveness is limited, and adolescents experience several benefits from social media. Rather than enforcing bans, emotion regulation should be leveraged to help adolescents navigate the online social environment. This viewpoint paper proposes a nuanced approach towards regulating adolescent social media use by 1) discontinuing the use of ineffective bans, 2) recognizing the benefits social media use can have, and 3) fostering emotion regulation skills in adolescents to encourage the development of self-regulation.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.