Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Monday that he will wait until his children are in high school to let them use social media.
“I’m planning on waiting until at least after high school for my kids to use social media,” Murthy said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.” “And when they are in high school, my wife and I will reevaluate, based on their maturity, what the data says about safety and whether there are safety standards in place.”
Murthy too defended to a warning label from the surgeon general on social media products “stating that social media is associated with significant harm to adolescent mental health,” in a Monday op-ed for The New York Times.
“A warning label from the surgeon general, which calls for congressional action, would regularly remind parents and teens that social media has not been proven safe,” Murthy said in the Times article.
In the CNN interview, Murthy called the warning label “part of a broader strategy to help address the harms we are seeing associated with social media for our children.”
“And last year, I issued a statement on social media and youth mental health, where I called for a series of measures that Congress can implement, to really set safety standards and require data transparency to make social media safer,” he continued. Murthy. . “Until that happens, we have to warn parents about what we see in the data, which is that social media is associated with harm to adolescent mental health.”
A study since the beginning of last year found that social media use can affect young people’s brain development, with researchers finding different social media checking habits linked to changes in young people’s brains.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
