When it comes to digital media and social media, fam – teens and adults are sometimes lowkey on different wavelengths.

And while it might just seem kind of cringe, it’s actually big yikes.

Because when adolescents and the adults they interact with on the daily – their teachers, school administrators, and parents – aren’t speaking the same language, the problem is much bigger than semantics.

It can lead to policy decisions that don’t actually get to the heart of an issue.

For UConn researchers looking at the issue of adolescent social media use and how it impacts mental health and wellness, one surprising and important finding recently published in the Journal of School Health was that when it comes to how we talk about social media, teens and the adults around them are often not vibing the same way.

“I have a 14-year old, and when I ask him, ‘Are you on social media?’ he’ll say, ‘No. I don’t have Snapchat or TikTok or those apps,’” says Adam McCready, an assistant professor-in-residence of higher education and student affairs at UConn’s Neag School of Education and lead author of the study.

“But the way the adults in our study are defining social media is different,” McCready explains. “There’s an inconsistency in language that I think, from an education standpoint, needs to be rectified if we want to actually address behavior.”

For this study, McCready and his team investigated how adults who are within the social spheres of adolescent students view the impact of social media use on adolescent mental health.

The study is part of a broader, multi-year effort to help support the state of Connecticut with research and data as it grapples with implementing educational policies, initiatives, and interventions around digital media use and literacy, with perhaps the most notable and talked-about issue surrounding the use of cell phones in schools.

In this phase, the researchers conducted 19 focus groups with 71 adult participants from four Connecticut school districts. The participants included parents, school administrators, teachers, and health professionals recruited from the districts’ middle and high schools, which included both urban and suburban districts as well as districts with diverse student populations.

The goal of the qualitative research was to explore how the adults defined social media, how they perceived the effects of social media use on adolescent mental health, and how they viewed the role of schools in addressing student social media health.

There were four primary findings from the study, according to McCready – including that all-important difference in definition.

“When adults are talking about social media,” McCready says, “they often use the term ubiquitously to basically cover all digital media, including gaming, texting, things that don’t necessarily always fall under the social media definition.”

The researchers found that while the participants’ opinions were largely aligned with the public narrative that social media is bad for mental health, they had a difficult time giving clear examples of what that looked like.

It can’t solely rest on schools if we actually want to change outcomes around mental health and well-being. &#8212 Adam McCready

“It was largely around addiction or sleep deprivation, those things,” says McCready. “But with deeper conversation, folks admitted that social media could have positive effects on well-being, with identity development, finding community, and the like.”

A surprising finding, McCready noted, was that the participants didn’t place the entire onus on schools to solve the issue.

“We anticipated, particularly from parents, them wanting schools to take more ownership on the topic, and at least with our participant pool, parents routinely took responsibility, that this is not solely a school issue, this is also something that needs to be addressed at home,” he says.

And finally, researchers found a need for consistency in application of policies, including amongst the adults and how they model behaviors for the students around them.

“We had teachers talking about the fact that, yes, students might not be able to use a device, but we’re using it right in front of them,” says McCready. “Policies that limit technology use, like using pouches or other restrictions – at the end of the day, that intervention wasn’t necessarily going to change student behavior or benefit student well-being. There has to be something else – educational or even community-wide interventions that include how role-modeling of behavior effects students.”

While the perspectives of the study participants provide important insights, the researchers note that they may not be representative of all institutional agents and parents of middle and high school students.

The study also did not collect data from students, just adults. Interviews with adolescent students are anticipated as part of a future phase of the study, McCready noted.

But as the researchers noted, digital and social media use among adolescents is locked in.

According to the Pew Research Center, 95% of 13-to-17-year-olds have access to a smartphone and many describe being on social media “almost constantly,” which underscores how existing and emerging technologies are, and will continue to be, integral in student lives both inside and outside of schools, making it vital that students gain knowledge and skill to become upstanding digital citizens.

And that makes teachers and administrators and parents and communities all critical partners in empowering students to become well-rounded in their use of technology and in control of their digital habits.

“I think that schools have some role in educating students on digital citizenship and agency – how to act online, how to discern real versus fake information in the world that we’re living in now, being able to understand what is AI versus what is real,” McCready says. “But there needs to be also roles for parents, families, broader communities in this education.

“It can’t solely rest on schools if we actually want to change outcomes around mental health and well-being.”

This study was supported by UConn and by the State of Connecticut Department of Education.