InnovOak’s Guidance Around Gaming and Social Media
As this guide is updated, there is more and more alarming research regarding the idea that our current students are having their thinking and brains rewired because of the prevalence of social media and the use of electronics. Most policies focus on the use of electronics in a broad sense, but the newest research is focused on Gaming and Social media
The Great Rewiring” is a new term and has affected all of our children, but research consistently shows that social media harms girls more than boys. On average, girls spend more time on social media platforms than boys and prefer visually oriented platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which are much worse for social comparison than text-based platforms like Reddit.
To understand why girls and boys have been impacted differently, we need to look at some fundamental psychological differences between them (on average). Although girls and boys are motivated by agency (the desire to stand out and compete) and communion (the desire to develop a sense of belonging to a group) from an early age, there emerges a gender difference: Boys choose more agency activities, and girls choose more communion activities. This helps us understand why girls moved their social lives more substantially onto social media platforms while boys moved more substantially toward online video games. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, while online video games appeal to the desire for agency.
In both cases, as teen boys and girls moved their social lives onto these new online platforms, their rates of loneliness, uselessness, and meaninglessness surged upwards. These platforms sell connection and agency but ultimately provide little of it.
Some Resources for Families
The Great Rewiring (March 2024)
We expect these discussions to continue to happen and we encourage parents to make family decisions based on their thoughts and beliefs. InnovOak School will move towards adopting these four goals into our school culture.
Recommendations to Parents Who Ask
No smartphones before high school. (Flip phones are fine.)
No social media until age 16.
School should ban phones during the entire school day. (we do not allow students access to phones during the day under Grade 10 and will move this forward to Grade 11 next year
We need to give our kids more independence, freedom, and responsibility to play or hang out with one another on their own in the real world, just as most of us did when we were their age.
If your kids are in Junior or Middle school, you can get ahead of this now by setting good habits and coordinating with other parents to agree on the age limits around the phone and social media use. The school supports this during the school day, and many of our parents do raise this as a desire when considering application to InnovOak
If you’ve already given your kids smartphones and social media, don’t despair. There’s still a lot you can do. InnovOak School will help support families decisions to structure around their screen time usage. Families can set rules about phones in bedrooms and gaming machines in the bedroom at night or using devices during meals. The school does require students to have after school routines for homework and parents are welcome to incorporate these requirements into a nightly routine that helps each parent make the best choice for their families and kids.
InnovOak School is willing to completely ban phones and any gaming devices from school if parents feel that this next step is something that would be parent supported.