Why Kate Winslet Won’t Let Her Kids Use Social Media
Kate Winslet (Photo: Getty Images)
For better or worse, celebrities are often held up as models of how to feel and behave. But they’re also human beings, who have the additional challenge of being under the spotlight with money, fame, and power that can enable bad behavior. As a psychiatrist and doctor who treats people struggling with the consequences of following celeb behavior, I’m weighing in on what is worth emulating and what will set you on a path to misery in my Role Model, No Model column for Yahoo Health.
Kate Winslet knows what she’s doing in the parenting department: She is vastly limiting her children’s exposure and participation in social media. (Winslet has a teenager, a pre-teen, and a baby.)
Data shows that people who spend more time on Facebook and other social media sites are more likely to struggle with depression and low self-esteem. This is especially the case for kids who see what friends are posting and wonder why they aren’t having the same story-book life of 24/7 fun and acceptance with no downside. No amount of telling kids that social media paints a skewed picture can counter what they are seeing with their own eyes.
In addition, kids have a very difficult time not succumbing to the peer pressure induced by social media, such as encouragement to post pictures of themselves behaving badly or scantily clad. Developmentally, children’s brains are less able to ponder the consequences of their actions, but more primed to seek risk-taking experiences than adults — making them ripe to be drawn to these behaviors. Participation in social media expands the peer pressure to behave in certain ways. By vastly limiting her children’s social media time, Ms. Winslet is smartly reducing their exposure to negative peer pressure, desensitization to bad behavior, and anxiety induced by feeling left out.
Related: The Accidental Eating Disorder That’s Powered by Social Media: Orthorexia
By making this choice, Kate Winslet is a wonderful role model for mothering. But she goes even further, intent on maximizing human, one-to-one face time with her children. Humans have a basic need to bond and they learn their ability to read others through body language and facial expression from having in-person time with their parents, friends, siblings and more. In fact, the recent Tylenol #HowWeFamily survey confirmed that families’ No. 1 choice for bonding is through face-to-face time. Kids grow into adults with social intelligence and the ability to have intimate, healthy relationships with others using the template laid out for them in childhood by their parents and their peers.
Sadly, this upcoming generation risks losing out on important social interaction and personal development when the majority of their human interaction involves seeing the tops of their friends’ heads as they sit in a collective group on their individual phones. Family dinners, where the family talks and shares, have been shown to benefit children’s vocabulary, academic performance, and standardized test scores while decreasing teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol use and suicide rates. Kids trapped on social media lose those benefits when they are not participating.
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