5 strategies for families to ensure children are safe online, according to a new White House report

(CNN) — When it comes to the online safety of their children, parents could build a family media plan to set expectations, maintain open conversations with their kids about their social media use, choose content that’s developmentally appropriate for their child, set good examples and balance time with and without devices by creating “screen-free” times.

Those are just some of the latest strategies put forth in a first-of-its-kind report released Monday by the White House’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety.

In the United States, it’s estimated that about 95% of teenagers and 40% of children between the ages of 8 and 12 use some form of social media, according to the report.

“The nice thing about the family media plan is it helps families have conversations to outline what their expectations are, what their plans are with respect to media within the household and even beyond,” said Task Force Co-Chair Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, assistant secretary for mental health and substance use in the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

In collaboration with the release of the new report, the task force also announced plans to launch new webpages online with resources, including age-based handouts for parents that pediatricians can distribute at well-check visits.

“Children are often regulating and learning how to regulate emotions, and so it is important that media not be used as a replacement for looking at or processing important emotions,” Delphin-Rittmon said. “This report outlines a range of suggested guidelines, and there’ll be a series of ongoing resources as well.”

The report, spanning more than 100 pages, offers recommendations for the tech industry, guidance for clinicians and best practices for parents and caregivers – including “conversation starters for families of tweens and teens” – to improve the health and safety of children’s experiences online.

Some of the conversation starters that are outlined in the new report include: “I’d like us to talk about our family’s approach for setting some boundaries around technology and media use. I was thinking that this is something we could work on together as I’d like to include your input in these decisions.”

Another conversation starter is: “One aspect of social media use that is really important is protecting our privacy. Have you looked at the privacy settings on all your accounts? How are things going with those settings?” Or, “I sometimes have a hard time not checking my phone or feeling the need to respond to texts or emails. I’m working on how to be better about my own boundaries. Let’s help each other find a good balance.”

The report also provides a summary of the risks and benefits of social media use among young people and suggests future research into that space.

“President Biden has made addressing the youth mental health crisis a top priority. That’s why we are taking steps to ensure the safety and well-being of young people when they use social media and online platforms,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a news release Monday. “The Biden-Harris Administration has whole-of-government approach to protect the mental health, safety, and privacy of youth online, but it will take more than government alone to achieve results.”

‘We can do better to help young people’

The Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force, under HHS, was developed last year under the Biden-Harris administration to protect and advance the health, safety and privacy of children online. The White House tasked the group with developing recommendations and reviewing the status of industry efforts to promote the health and safety of children.

The new report recommends that the tech industry do more to keep children and teens safe online, such as by making privacy protections for minors the default on social media platforms, limiting “likes” and using data-driven methods to detect and prevent cyberbullying, among other actions.

“One of our key findings was that many of the problems that young people face online are because of how technology companies design their products, and the task force report calls on industry to make design choices that will prioritize kids’ wellbeing,” said Task Force Co-Chair Alan Davidson, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information and leader of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Some of those design choices include “designing age-appropriate experiences for young people. There’s a big difference between a young child and an older teenager. We need to think about the applications themselves, as there’s a big difference between an education app and a gaming app, and how it approaches engagement,” Davidson said.

“We called on industry to do better around privacy protections for young people, particularly the defaults they set,” he said. “We called on online services to improve systems that address bias and discrimination that young people face.”

Delphin-Rittmon added that, in focus groups hosted by the task force, young people have shared with her that they would like to see more protections as well.

The task force’s report did not speak to any specific pieces of legislation, but President Biden has called for Congress to enact legislative protections when it comes to children’s online safety.

So far, lawmakers have unveiled two bills to potentially address children’s safety online: the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media platforms to restrict access to minors’ personal data by default, and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which would set a minimum age of 13 for using social media platforms.

“The bottom line is, we do think legislation is important, but there are things that industry can do today – that it should be doing – to better protect young people,” Davidson said.

As a parent, these conversations around online safety are personal for him.

“Like every parent and caregiver out there, or anybody who speaks to a family member about this, we’ve definitely had challenging conversations with our children about their use of devices and their use of social media,” Davidson said.

“It is possible that I’ve been told that I’m the meanest parent in the world,” he said. “It just speaks to the challenges that caregivers have today. We know that children and young people want to use these devices. They need to have them to be able to be part of their social experiences in many cases, and we can do better to help young people thrive online.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced Monday that it supports the task force’s new report and commends the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Department of Commerce for addressing the impact of social media on the mental health of young people.

“To help make the report’s recommendations accessible and actionable, we’ve published new resources for families and those who work with them, including conversation starters and activities to help parents and caregivers know what to say and how to begin building foundational skills,” Dr. Megan Moreno, co-medical director of the SAMHSA-funded AAP Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, said in a news release Monday. “We are pleased to be a strong partner in this work.”

Surgeon General warns about social media

US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who is a member of the task force, has been outspoken about these social media-related concerns.

Social media poses such a threat to children that it should have a warning label attached to it, according to Murthy. In June, he demanded that Congress put a warning label on social media apps, as it does with tobacco and alcohol products.

Similar labels on tobacco, first instituted in 1965, led to a steady decline in cigarette smoking in the United States through the past several decades.

“The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor,” Murthy wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times in June.

“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” he wrote. “A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”

Murthy has warned about social media’s harm to children’s welfare for years.

In May 2023, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that said there’s not enough evidence to determine whether social media is safe enough for children and adolescents’ mental health, saying social media use presents “a profound risk of harm” for kids. He suggested parents restrict their kids’ social media use, saying 13 is too young to join social apps.

But such advisories are designed to call attention to urgent public health – they don’t require action. His declaration in June of an emergency and his appeal to Congress represent his most urgent call to action on the issue so far.

Congress has long chastised social media companies, claiming they pose harm to children. CEOs of tech companies have been grilled routinely on Capitol Hill, most notably Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who publicly apologized to families whose children killed themselves because of online bullying and harassment. But Congress has taken little action to curb children’s social media usage.

Meanwhile, several states have worked to pass legislation to increase the age at which children can begin to use social apps or some of their more time-sucking features, such as algorithms that push people to engage with more content within the app. The bills have been largely bipartisan.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March signed a bill that would prohibit children under 14 from obtaining their own social media accounts, and children under 16 would need parental consent to have accounts. New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would sign legislation passed by the state legislature that would ban social media from using algorithms in children’s feeds, and the bill would also prevent tech companies from sharing information of children under 18.

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