Addictive online tendencies that parents see in their young sons are prevalent because those kids don’t have the tools to identify risky spaces, nor do they know how to find healthy alternatives.
And while legislation can address the online escapism so many teenagers and young men fall into — doomscrolling on social media or spending hours playing video games, to name a couple — real change will occur when the focus shifts to creating fulfilling opportunities to pursue, researchers and experts told the California Assembly’s newly formed Select Committee on Developing Pathways to Purpose for Young Men.
“Young men and boys in California are really struggling, and the data is telling us that they need our help in finding direction and purpose,” said Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, D-Anaheim.
Related: California lawmaker launches effort to strengthen suicide prevention for young men
“It is very unlikely that we will ever be able to provide a counter that is as consuming and addicting and attractive than what we are seeing today in the social space, but really focusing on developing alternatives to ensure folks at least have that option will make a big difference in being able to support our young individuals, especially our young boys,” he said.
Valencia, who chairs the committee, has made addressing the mental health issues this demographic deals with a priority. A bill he authored, which directs the state’s Office of Suicide Prevention to add young men and boys to its priority population list, was passed by the Senate last week and is on its way to the governor’s desk.
The committee’s inaugural hearing, held in Sacramento on Wednesday, Aug. 12, was largely informational and focused on the digital environments that occupy so much of a young person’s development, as well as how policymakers can create guardrails to design better digital systems for young men.
Ultimately, changes are happening rapidly at all levels of society, but especially for children, in terms of how they build relationships, the hobbies and interests they pick up, how they learn and how they mature into adults, said Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist who specializes in technology addiction in young people.
But those changes, whether they be societal or technological, aren’t what’s scariest to him: It’s that parents don’t have the skills to adequately guide their children because the world kids grow up in today is unlike anything their parents are familiar with.
“If you are a parent today, the world that you have to parent in is fundamentally different than any world that has previously existed. And that is because we have highly addictive apps, phones that are infecting and invading every corner of our lives,” said Kanojia, who is also a well-known content creator known as “Dr. K” online.
The necessary change isn’t to get these young men and boys who are struggling with video game, gambling or porn addictions to identify that they need help, Kanojia said, because they know they already do. What needs to change is the way these problems are approached by themselves, their families and leaders in their communities, he said.
“Mental health is more than the treatment of mental illness,” Kanojia said. “If we look at physical health, we all have an implicit understanding that playing sports, being outside, eating healthy — this is how we maintain a healthy body. But if I were to ask someone, how do you maintain a healthy mind? That understanding is not nearly where it is for physical health.”
The ways boys are educated on the dangers of addictive online spaces, such as porn or online gambling, need to be at the forefront of health education, said Kanojia.
“Most addictive behavior is more about the removal of pain than it is about the giving of pleasure,” he said. “If we teach children how to regulate their emotions, their vulnerability to gambling and pornography will drop.”
But the discussion around shields and safety also raises the question of liability, and just how responsible social media platforms are for extreme outcomes in a young person’s life, such as suicide, said Mikey Hothi, California director for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization focused on kids’ safety and well-being in the digital age.
Hothi’s group is pushing a bill in the statehouse this year that, if enacted, would hold large social media companies liable for damages if their platform causes physical or mental injury to a minor by allowing families to sue for damages caused by their platform.
“You go to Toys-R-Us, and you have a toy that’s a choking hazard; if a single kid is harmed, that’s obviously a liability for the manufacturer,” Hothi said.
“That’s not necessarily the case for social media platforms, and now we’re seeing courts view this through a slightly different lens, where you’re seeing these juries side with survivor parents in these cases,” Hothi said.
“The way to really change the behavior of these platforms is to hit them where it hurts, and that’s their bottom line.”
This is at the core of a new lawsuit that 29 states have brought against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which accuse the tech giant of contributing to the mental health crisis by deliberately designing features in its social media platforms to addict children for as long as possible so their personal information can be collected. Opening arguments began this week in Oakland.
On a related front, California lawmakers have tried to find ways to address online porn addiction in young people through age-gating and age signaling legislation.
A bill that is set to take effect in January will require cell phones and mobile devices to share the general age range of the user who set up the device with websites or apps that contain mature content, in an attempt to shield younger users without requiring these sites to demand government-issued IDs for access.
And while laws like those can help create that shield, said David Sasaki, director of the American Institute for Boys and Men, the first major step in actually addressing the issue of online porn is discussing it openly and honestly. The next step, he said, is supporting those researching this area to find evidence-based solutions.
“There’s a lot of research infrastructure for social media, for artificial intelligence, for gaming, and funders just don’t want to touch the issue of pornography,” he said. “People would rather just not talk about it, and the space is fairly polarized. I would say there’s both cause for concern when it comes to pornography and a lot of moral panic about it.”
The committee’s first hearing was just one step forward in a “very wide-ranging, systemic” conversation, Valencia said, and follow-up discussions will focus on policy that the committee can work to pass collectively.