The content with the most negative influence on young people’s mental health is not necessarily the most shocking or violent, but sometimes the content that seems the most harmless, even the most well-meaning. This is what a recently published study by the Fondation April shows1. For example, advice on the importance of exercise, diet, skincare, or even personal development. This content spreads norms of success or beauty that are often unattainable, notably muscularity for men and thinness for women. These models are all the more toxic because they involve not only a set of behaviours on social networks, such as retouching selfies or likes. They also work as a form of self-validation. They also invite people to experience the body as an object constantly subject to the judgement of others, and feed a feeling of not measuring up to idealised norms. This permanent pressure affects teenage girls in particular.
These messages have a particularly strong impact on teenagers because of the particular way their brains work, which develops in two stages. First, at puberty, around age 10-12, the lower and rear regions of their brain mature rapidly. This produces an increase in the activity of dopamine-consuming neural circuits that are sensitive to immediate reward, and socio-emotional hypersensitivity. Only in a second stage does the prefrontal cortex reach maturity, allowing control of emotions and impulses: its structuring is not complete until age 25. Teenagers therefore go through a few years in which they lack self-confidence while overestimating the positive effects of new experiences and underestimating the risks.
This makes them particularly receptive to repeated exposure to images of bodies, lifestyles or routines presented as models. All the more so as there is a cognitive bias called “repetition bias”: the more something is repeated to us, the more we tend to believe it is true. Yet these messages are not only repeated explicitly, but also constantly present in a diffuse and indirect way, notably when they feed bullying practices. Bullying, incidentally, affects teenagers more often than adults because their desire for “extimacy” (making the intimate public) shows itself with far more force at their age: teenagers wish to break free of family ties, and to do so they invest in their peer group and expect support and recognition from it.
Yet young people are capable of stepping back. So much so that the European Commission advocates a peer education model: “Peer education is an alternative or complement to traditional health education strategies. This approach is based on the fact that at certain stages of life, notably among teenagers, the impact is greater than other influences.” It allows young people to become familiar with social norms / what can or cannot be said to others, what can or cannot be shown of one’s body, what one accepts to exchange online before, during or instead of a physical meeting. So it is not the internet that is at fault, but its invasion by commercial models.
So, should we give up banning in order to devote ourselves solely to education? Let us remember that 3-6-9-12 has never been against bans! The proof is that the 3-6-9-12 milestones have been based since 2008 on FOUR BANS: no TV before age 3, no personal digital device (games console or tablet) before age 6, no internet before age 9 and accompanied internet between ages 9 and 12 inclusive, no unaccompanied internet before age 12 inclusive, which means no smartphone before age 13.
But these bans make no sense without education, and an education that did not take these age ranges into account would be absurd. Some would have us believe that it is enough to ban, censor or restrict in order to protect, and they are wrong. Between banning and educating, there is no need to choose. Both are indispensable: it is all a question of age, as the 3-6-9-12 milestones remind us.
