Around 4 out of 5 teenagers use social media every day, with one in 10 at risk of developing "problematic use": the platforms cause anxiety about accessing, a desire to spend more and more time online, abstinence when offline, failure to control weather.
But they also cause conditions in which other activities are neglected, tensions with parents and others.
It is the Report on digital technologies, the use and potential problems of tools within the adolescent population, published by the ISS as part of the international multicenter study HBSC (Health Behavior in School-aged Children) carried out in collaboration with the The Regional Office for Europe of the World Health Organization (WHO) is designed to delve deeper into the health status of young people and their educational and social context.
The HBSC Italia 2022 Surveillance (Health Behavior in School-aged Children) involved 89,321 boys and girls between 11 and 17 years of age from all over Italy.
From the Report dedicated to digital and social technologies it emerges that
the inability to control the time spent on social media
and, above all, the use of these tools to escape from negative feelings are the symptoms most recognized by boys and girls in all age groups .
And girls are at greatest risk for problematic social media use across all age groups.
The gap between the two sexes widens particularly in 13-year-olds, 15-year-olds and 17-year-olds, where females who show problematic use of social media are double those of males.
Furthermore, for children
the problematic use of social media seems to have its peak at the age of 11
, and then progressively decreases up to the age of 17, the category with the lowest prevalence.
Girls, on the other hand, show an increase between the ages of 11 and 13, and then show lower levels of problems.
As for the stratification of adolescents at risk with respect to the socio-economic status of the family unit to which they belong, the data highlight how the prevalence of this phenomenon is quite constant along all socio-economic groups, with a slight increase for young people who report a lower level of economic well-being across all ages (most marked increase for 13-year-olds).
Males are more exposed to risky behaviors associated with video games
.
About four in five boys report daily or weekly use, compared to a small share of girls (about two in five girls).
For both sexes, we note how the frequency of gaming decreases as age increases, although in different ways.
In the male population, the percentage of boys who say they play at least once a week is slightly decreasing (from 41.2% of 11 year olds to 37.5% of 17 year olds), while the percentage of daily players is drastically decreasing (from 46.1 % at 11 years old to 26.3% at 17 years old) and those who say they play less than once a week increase (from 12.7% of 11 year olds to 36.2% of 17 year olds).
Girls, on the other hand, show greater involvement in the phenomenon at 11 years of age (only 38.3% of them say they play less than once a week), while from 13 years of age the percentages of those who play little increase significantly (at 17 years of age the 73.9% say they play less than once a week).
The most shared reason for problematic behavior is “using video games to escape negative feelings” and 1 in 5 kids also say they “feel, often or very often, “absorbed by video games.”
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