Paul Szmal: FLX Morning continues. It is 816. I don't know if we're ready for wet snowflakes just yet. I'm just saying. But Kevin says it's possible over the higher elevations overnight. It's chilly temperature at 46 under cloudy skies. Let's welcome in our guest at this time. She is a clinical therapist from Family Counseling Services of the Finger Lakes. Jennifer Cox is here. Jennifer, good morning. How are you this morning?
Jennifer Cox: Good morning. I'm thrilled to be here.
Paul Szmal: Wonderful. And we want to talk today about youth digital literacy. That term probably needs a little bit of a definition. What exactly is youth digital literacy?
Jennifer Cox: This is something I'm very passionate about as a youth therapist. Digital literacy is the set of skills that we use online in order to make safe informed decisions. And youth, of course, is when we're referencing what types of skills are appropriate to teach versus supervise for your kids and your teenagers. So these skills cover a wide range of topics. They include things like making sure you're not being scammed, identifying misinformation, and keeping your personal information safe.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, let's break these down a little bit, piece by piece. One of the big things I think that parents and or grandparents worry about when their kids are around is keeping an eye on what they're doing online and how to do that, because it can get really confusing sometimes. There are certain tools that are out there that are advertised and other people recommend different types of things. What would you recommend in that department?
Jennifer Cox: So I might be considered strict, or at least I think when my kid grows up, she's going to think that I'm a strict mother. But I really think the best thing you can do for supervising, especially your younger kids, 13 and under, is make sure anytime they are using a device that can access the internet, that they are at least within your hearing range, if not your line of sight. Your youth under the age of 13 really should not be using the internet in places where you can't see or hear what is happening, because even if they are doing their best to follow your expectations, there are constantly algorithm recommendations or pop-ups that could happen unexpectedly that you want to be there to help them navigate, because they don't have these skills yet to navigate them by themselves.
I don't really recommend relying on super not to like parent supervision software, because A, it requires a monthly subscription, and I don't think a lot of us have that money right now. And B, kids are pretty clever, and if they're going to try and find a way around it, either they're going to find a way around it, or a kid in the neighborhood is going to teach them a way around it. Especially under the age of 13, they really should be using their technology devices in a communal space, like the living room, somewhere where you can keep an eye or an ear on things.
Paul Szmal: I would think one of the biggest concerns that parents have, in addition to just general internet use, would be social media monitoring.
Jennifer Cox: Absolutely, yes, social media is huge. We've found, and I don't think this is going to be a shock to anyone, increased use of social media is connected with increased depressive symptoms, increased anxiety, and girls in particular have 17% higher what we call digital stress. Increased use of social media leads to kids feeling like they're going to be left out, fear of being uncool, constantly monitoring the trends, constantly being bombarded with attacks to their self-esteem.
Honestly, my best recommendations for social media, A, if your child is under the age of 13, I do not think they should be on social media at all. I do not think they're ready to handle all of that bombardment to their sense of self. I do not think they're in a place where they can protect themselves from social, like, cyber bullying. And it goes against the website's terms of service. They're already being mined for data as soon as they're on a social media site. Do you really want their information to be collected by the advertising companies already?
And then once you do decide that your youth is old enough to handle social media, I recommend talking with your youth, sitting down, and putting time limits on things. You can go into the app settings, or you can go into your phone settings, and you can set a timer on all of these social media apps. You get to choose the time, but once that time is up, they can no longer turn the app on for the rest of the day.
Paul Szmal: Now, I wasn't aware that there was such a thing, but that sounds like a very important tool to be able to use. I think everyone should use it of every age, to be honest. I've even put it on my social media. It's a great way to prevent yourself from doom scrolling, great way to make sure you're not sinking a lot of time into those really easily addictive and distracting apps.
We're talking with Jennifer Cox, who is a clinical therapist from Family Counseling Service of the Finger Lakes. We're talking about ways to help your kids and your grandkids be able to use the internet effectively, and most importantly, safely, and that leads to something that we deal with as adults, but kids have to deal with it too, and those are the continual spate of internet scams that are around.
Jennifer Cox: Oh, absolutely. We often talk about internet scams when we're worried about our older citizens being scammed, but the attempt to get your money starts from a young age. The most common form that youth are going to be exposed to is actually going to be in their video games, and for the sake of this discussion, I'm counting smartphone app games, those mobile games that you can play for free that you download on your device, but just because you can play for free doesn't mean it isn't trying to make money. They obviously have to pay their game developers, so in video games, there are what are called micro transactions, where even if the game was free to play, it'll tempt you to buy things to make the game more fun or to give you like a customizable avatar, or sometimes gotcha games is for a type of game where there reaches a point where you can't play at all without eventually paying for something, so when youth get really invested in these video games, they get tempted to pay money in order to be able to get more out of the games, and for the record, Roblox is filled with these.
Roblox is also experiencing a problem where youth are starting to be exposed to gambling. Gambling is technically against Roblox terms of service, but the developers of these quote games end quote are finding loopholes to get around those terms of service by calling them random number generator games, but you can pay real money to gamble on these games, and there's no age limit. The other thing that youth are going to find in their video games are what are called loot boxes. Loot boxes is kind of like gambling lights. You pay real money to get a prize box where you don't know what's going to be in it. Maybe it'll be a super rare item for your game avatar, or maybe it'll be five things you already had, so you're constantly tempted to get more to try and get the super rare thing.
Paul Szmal: Let's move on and talk about AI because that is now starting to affect all of our lives. How can that affect the mental health of our youth?
Jennifer Cox: Unfortunately, we are seeing some very negative consequences on mental health for youth with AI. I think most people hopefully are aware that AI is not a reliable resource for things like information finding because it is not a search engine. It is not a robot. It's basically a probability machine. It takes what words you give it and then gives you words back that it thinks are statistically more likely to show up and keep you engaged, and unfortunately, this means that when a youth starts chatting with an AI and if they start opening up about even mild mental health symptoms, in order to keep the youth engaged, the AI will reflect those symptoms back but multiply them.
Unfortunately, we've seen that teenagers that start over using AI chatbots have increased suicidal symptoms, increased paranoia. There's a term that's being talked about called AI-induced psychosis, which is not right now an official diagnosable term, but we are seeing increasing stories of people without a previous psychiatric history sometimes that end up needing inpatient hospitalization because use of AI has convinced them that the world is out to get them or that they're living in a simulation. Unfortunately, particularly for our youth who are still developing some of their own cognitive strengths, still developing their reality testing, AI will try to overwrite all of that in order to keep you engaged, and there, unfortunately, has been real loss of life.
Paul Szmal: Unfortunately, yeah, that's some scary stuff to listening to that, actually, Jennifer. We want to talk too about relationships, parasocial relationships, because if there's one thing that I hear a lot from people in my age group and above, it's those darn kids have got their noses constantly buried in their phones. They never even talk to each other.
Jennifer Cox: So parasocial relationships is when you develop a sense of intimacy or affection for someone you've never really met, and this isn't a brand new concept. You've always had people that have their favorite celebrities and their favorite movie stars, but now we live in a world where instead of having your movie star celebrities, you have influencers, people that are making content daily or weekly, that you can see all the time just on the screen of your phone, hopping onto TikTok or YouTube, and the more exposure you have to these creators, the more likely you are to start developing these friendly-like feelings towards them, even though you've never actually interacted with them face to face, and when you are a kid, especially a teenager, and you're struggling with some insecurity or things are really overwhelming or people are being mean at school, it can be really tempting to focus all of your time and energy on these parasocial connections because an influencer is never going to disappoint you personally, right? They're never going to call out your embarrassing moment. They're never going to call out your specific insecurity. They're never going to call you specifically a name, so they feel relatively safe, but the more time our youth spend focusing on these influencers rather than their real-life connections, the less opportunities they have to develop those pro-social skills so that they can have a little bit more confidence, so that they can face when bullying happens, so that they strengthen their sense of belonging in the community.
Parasocial relationships can happen to any of us at any age, so my biggest recommendation for all of us is, again, we should be limiting the amount of time we spend on social media. We should be very critical about noticing, am I becoming emotionally dependent on a certain channel or a certain influencer, and we should really find offline things to do that give us a sense of accomplishment and a sense of belonging.
Paul Szmal: I want to get this in here. We have about a minute left. The Family Counseling Service of the Finger Lakes is going to be presenting a series of trainings on the topics that we discussed. Where can people find out more information about those?
Jennifer Cox: So, we will be updating our website very soon. Our website is fcssl.org, and local organizations are welcome to come on and go to our trainings page once that is fully updated, and there you will have a whole list of the digital literacy courses that I personally wrote and I'm very excited about, and I have 16 pages of references, academic and otherwise, backing up how you can build these skills for your youth, and I'm so excited to get that started, hopefully by the end of the year.
Paul Szmal: Excellent. Thank you so much, Jennifer, and again, the website is fcfsl.org, fcfsl.org. All right, Jennifer, have a great day. Thanks for joining us.
Jennifer Cox: Thank you so much for having me. It is 828 on FLX Morning.
