Divorce Makes Kids More Vulnerable to Getting Hurt Online

T he “good divorce” is back.

In the last two years, the mainstream media have published article after article — from the Atlantic (“How I Demolished My Life: A Home Improvement Story”) to the New York Times (“Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love”) — celebrating divorce in particular and family diversity in general. Echoing the ’70s view that “children were resilient in the face of divorce . . . and that children would be happier if their parents were able to leave unhappy marriages,” the new apostles for family diversity tell us that family instability is no big deal in 21st-century America. In her aforementioned piece for the Times, for instance, Lara Bazelon assured us that divorce can “be liberating, pointing the way toward a different life that leaves everyone better off, including the children.”

There is only one problem with the new conventional wisdom on the liberatory power of divorce and family diversity for the kids. It’s completely wrong. The social science on family and children tells us that children are markedly more likely to suffer emotional, social, and financial distress if raised apart from their own married parents. In fact, a new study released this week reveals one more arena where family breakdown is taking a toll on children: the virtual world.

The study, Teens and Tech: What Difference Does Family Structure Make?, headed up by psychologist Jean Twenge and co-authored by one of us (Wilcox), indicates that adolescents from non-intact homes are markedly more likely to spend time on screens — from social media to gaming to texting. In fact, teens ages 11–18 from non-intact families spend almost two hours more on digital media than do their peers from intact, married families.

This is important because excessive screen time stimulates stress (cortisol) and limits sleep (melatonin), two of the reasons increased tech use appears to be implicated in the burgeoning mental-health crisis unfolding among adolescents and young adults today. Indeed, this new study from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the Wheatley Institute shows that high technology use among adolescents is associated with markedly higher risks of depression, loneliness, and sleep deprivation.

What’s more: Teens from unstable homes not only go down the electronic rabbit hole more often than their peers, but they are less capable of dealing with the emotional fallout from doing so. Without both parents in the home, the negative effects of heavy tech use on mental outcomes are amplified for such teens.

Take depression, for instance. Depression is highest among boys and girls who devote more than eight hours a day to their screens and hail from broken families. Thirty-one percent of such teens are depressed, compared to just 13 percent of their peers who spend less than eight hours a day on screens.

Sleep deprivation shows a similar trend. Teens are most likely to report they are sleep-deprived if they come from non-intact families and are heavy tech users. Thirty-five percent of such children say they are sleep-deprived. By contrast, only 20 percent of their peers who are lighter tech users and come from intact families report being sleep-deprived.

The bottom line is that both family instability and excessive screen time appear to be risk factors for emotional problems among today’s teens, according to this new report.

We do not point out these statistics to shame single mothers or parents in other family forms. Plenty of parents, including single mothers, are doing the best they can.

But this new research does give us one more reason to reject the new conventional wisdom that aims to revive the ’70s idea that stable marriage is unimportant for our kids. Children who have the privilege of being raised by their own two married parents clearly do better in navigating not just the real world, but also today’s online world. Our cultural elite — journalists, academics, and other professionals — should tell the truth about family stability and child well-being to help parents make the best decisions they can about forming and sustaining their families.

But there is also good news for parents of all sorts of families in this new study. Teens in families of all types did markedly better on outcomes ranging from depression to sleep deprivation if they kept their time on digital media to less than eight hours per day. This means that parents and teens need to work together to set healthy boundaries around technology use. Some practical suggestions for families include the following:

1. No phones past bedtime. Have a place outside the bedroom where your teen can store the smartphone overnight to ensure better sleep habits by eliminating the temptation to stay up late on the phone.
2. Postpone social media for as long as possible, preferably to age 16 or older. Social media seems to pose the greatest threat to the emotional well-being of adolescents, given the ways in which it engenders feelings of physical and social inferiority, fuels social rivalry, and exposes teens to highly sexualized imagery. Accordingly, parents should postpone exposure to social media for as long as possible.
3. Delay giving your child a smartphone for as long as possible. Some parents may opt to take a more protective approach by removing smartphones from the equation altogether. We encourage parents to give young teens simple phones (like the “Gab” phone) that allow children to talk and text but leave smartphones for later in adolescence.
4. Set time limits. Parents and teens should work together to set time limits and to intentionally plan positive in-real-life activities associated with “freeplay,” including face-to-face interaction, exercise, and time outdoors, all of which are associated with markedly better outcomes for teens than screen time.
5. Don’t be a Tech Hypocrite. Finally, parents must be consistent. The IFS survey of children found that a startling 15 percent of children say that their parents used their devices “almost constantly.” Children are smart. If they see their parents hyper-fixated on their phones, even as they enact strict limits for their children, such hypocrisy will undoubtedly be met with resistance. When it comes to tech, parents need to practice what they preach.

Taking steps like these can reduce the odds that our teens end up anxious, depressed, or worse. And, contrary to recent efforts to deny or downplay the importance of stable marriage, it looks like protecting your child from getting lost online is especially important if your child has not had the privilege of being raised in a stable family.

Brad Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Riley Peterson is a senior studying religion and sociology at Baylor University.