Enosha Jackson watches content on tablets with her two sons Ameer Jackson, 12, left, and Elijah Jackson, 8, at their home in North Las Vegas Monday, April 11, 2022.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Elijah Jackson, like most children restricted to indoor activities early in the coronavirus pandemic, passed time by staying busy on his electronics. He played Fortnite and watched and made videos on the social media app TikTok.
What, exactly, does he watch online?
“Memes, just like this!” the North Las Vegas 8-year-old playfully said, showing his mom, Enosha Jackson, a funny video on his iPad, where he and his brother are allowed to use TikTok or YouTube. “Mom, it’s Fortnite. And it’s a meme.”
But two years after the onset of the pandemic, Enosha Jackson worries about the habits Elijah and his brother, Ameer, 12, picked up and worries about the amount of time they spend on their digital devices.
Enosha Jackson, transitioned to working at home two years ago, meaning the family of three saw a significant increase in their screen time usage. Throughout the pandemic, Jackson’s sons used their screens for about three to four hours daily, Enosha Jackson estimated. Now, they use less than two hours, she said, the result of returning to out-of-the house activities like youth sports — days on which her sons rarely touch their Nintendo Switch or iPads.
But on the weekends, they’re always gearing up to “hit the electronics,” she said. Monitoring that screen time became a challenge for Enosha Jackson, who is determined to not have her sons constantly enveloped in the looping videos and time-consuming games.
She is not alone in her concerns.
There was a 17% increase nationally in screen use among kids and teens from 2019 to 2021, according to a study from Common Sense Media. Researchers found this increase in media use accelerated at a faster pace over the two-year period than it had in the four years preceding the pandemic.
Sheldon Jacobs, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Las Vegas, said he heard from his clients a growing concern among parents whose kids were increasingly using social media and screens throughout the pandemic.
Jacobs said he thought this rise in screen time particularly affected low-income Las Vegas families. Those parents, he said, might not have been able to work from home during the pandemic and therefore could not monitor their children’s social media or electronic use as closely.
Kids under 13 may also see social media as a rite of passage, Jacobs said — that growing up today means engaging with friends, creating videos, playing video games and watching celebrities or content creators online.
But a hands-off approach from parents is not something Jacobs recommends, especially with how inappropriate or frightening content — like live footage from the war in Ukrainian — can spread rapidly on apps like TikTok.
“It’s one thing to be on social media as a young person,” Jacobs said. “It’s another thing to be on social media unsupervised.”
Parent-child conversations around screen time are a key piece in creating a healthy relationship with social media, Jacobs said. Most social media, like Instagram or Facebook, require users to be at least 13 years old to join. Donna Wilburn, another licensed family therapist in Las Vegas, said she agreed with Jacobs. Her clients used social media to stay connected to their peers while away from school, using video games like Minecraft or Roblox to maintain these friendships.
A consequence of this online relationship, however, is some kids struggle to find that same connection in person, Wilburn said. Interactions online are often synonymous with being unseen, she said. That is something kids cannot avoid in person.
“I still have kids, even now, who are having a hard time with the face-to-face interactions and who would rather have online socializing versus in-person socializing,” she said. “There’s an anxiety to that.”
LeeAnn Kramer, another Las Vegas mother, has five children, several of whom are over 18. She said that through the years, she watched her kids evolve as social media did too.
Kramer said she discovered her eldest daughter, now 26, had opened a Myspace account in middle school, before Kramer allowed her to have one.
Her 9-year-old does not use photo or short video-sharing apps like Instagram or TikTok, but Kramer does allow her son to use YouTube, which she said she did not consider social media. A constant plea in her home, she said, are his requests for a TikTok account, which many of his friends use.
Both Enosha Jackson and Kramer sit in the same room as their children while they use their screens. Jackson allows her sons to use TikTok on their iPads. But she also has the app on her phone, where she can see who is following them, what they are posting and what searches they are making.
Kramer said her son’s screen time increased during the pandemic for certain — and along with it came his personality changes.
“I wonder, would he be a different child if we didn’t go through all of this that we just went through? Would he still be where he is now?” she said. “Now, I feel like he always wants to talk about his games and things online. That’s, like, the first thing he wants to talk about and continue talking about. I’ll say, ‘Oh, let’s talk about something else,’ and it always goes back to that.”
Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said with his own three kids at different ages, the youngest being in high school, the issue is as personal to the state as it is to his family. In March, Ford joined a coalition of 44 other attorneys general that pushed for TikTok and Snapchat to create parental controls so parents can block harmful content on their children’s social media.
“At the end of the day, we want to be certain that we are affording parents the ability to protect (their kids) — in this instance, my minor child — from the harmful effects that social media can have,” he said. “I do take it personally because I do have children at home.”
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