Children increasingly turn to TikTok and influencers rather than family for answers, study finds

Children and teenagers are asking TikTok, YouTube and other social networks the questions they once took to an older brother, a cousin or a friend, and the shift is now measurable. A study from the University of Oviedo asked pupils aged 10 to 13 who they followed online and found that influencers came first, ahead of friends, classmates and family members.

The research, titled Use of social media in preadolescence: gender differences (Uso de redes sociales en la preadolescencia: diferencias de género), was published in 2023 in the scientific journal Psychology, Society & Education. It offers figures for a change that psychologists and child psychiatrists say matters for children's mental health, because the answers young people receive increasingly come from an algorithm rather than from someone who knows them.

The study's authors frame the phenomenon in stark terms. Social networks, they write, have become a context of great influence on the socialisation, learning and personality formation of children and young people. What follows from that framing is the question now exercising clinicians: what changes when a platform takes over a role that used to belong to trusted people in a child's life?

Identifying with strangers

Ana Sierra, a psychologist and sexologist, says that looking for role models outside the family is a normal part of growing up. Young people need to distinguish themselves from their parents, test what they have learned at home and feel part of a group. What has changed is where many of those answers are found.

In her view, TikTok now occupies the place once held by an older sibling or a circle of friends, because it offers answers that are immediate, anonymous and delivered in the child's own language. It also lets a young person find someone who appears to be living through exactly the same experience. The risk, she explains, is mistaking that sense of identification for reliable information. A sibling knows the teenager and the context they live in, she points out, whereas the algorithm only learns which content manages to hold their attention.

That distinction between capturing attention and genuinely knowing the person on the other side of the screen is central for Lucía Torres, a child psychiatrist, psychotherapist and medical director of Tranquilamente. She reflects that the sentences which have shaped most people's lives tend to come from those who held an important place in it. What mattered, she argues, was not only what was said but who said it and from where.

Torres acknowledges that platforms can be a gateway to valuable information and can even help an adolescent put words to what they are going through. Her concern begins when they stop being one source among others and start occupying an emotional, explanatory or identity-forming role that pushes out human relationships. An algorithm can select content, she says, but it cannot form a bond.

The content that worries clinicians most

Not everything children find carries the same weight, and Sierra identifies the material that concerns her. She points to videos that turn one person's experience into a universal truth, or that offer quick solutions without any evaluation or context. Among the content that troubles her most are videos about food and body image which, under the appearance of healthy living, can encourage dietary restriction and comparison with other bodies. She also lists misogynistic and sexual violence, and attacks on feminism and diversity.

Her wider worry is the way recommendation systems work. The algorithm, she says, can trap an adolescent inside a single subject until they come to believe that what they see constantly is normal or typical. Popularity and rigour, she summarises, are not the same thing.

Mental health content is a particular case. Sierra observes that terms such as trauma and narcissism are used far too loosely online, in a way that can lead young people towards self-diagnosis.

Torres sees two sides to the spread of this material. On one hand, she considers it positive that anxiety, depression, ADHD and eating disorders are discussed more openly, because that reduces stigma, makes suffering easier to recognise, and can prompt some adolescents to ask for help sooner. On the other, she underlines that knowing a list of symptoms is not the same as knowing psychiatry. Difficulty concentrating does not necessarily mean ADHD, and feeling sad does not mean a person has depression. TikTok, in her view, can supply information about mental health, but it can hardly supply the depth of understanding that a person requires.

She identifies another risk: interpreting ordinary experiences as symptoms of a disorder. Sadness, exam nerves, insecurity, frustration, jealousy, shame or fear of failure can all be unpleasant, but none is necessarily an illness. And she points to a less obvious consequence, that a diagnosis can come to shape a young person's behaviour. An adolescent, she says, may face a situation thinking they could manage it, but that their disorder prevents them. They stop exposing themselves to challenge, stop making mistakes, stop feeling frustration and, with that, stop growing.

Relationships and sex form another area of concern. Sierra notes that some content shows a sexuality closer to a performance than to a real encounter. In romantic content, she says, jealousy is confused with love, control with interest, and intensity with intimacy. Tips on seduction and sexual practices circulate widely, and in her view should not function as sex education. Her answer is to encourage critical thinking, and conversations about boundaries, respect, consent and diversity.

What parents should look for

Both clinicians steer parents away from counting screen hours. Torres advises watching what is happening outside the screen instead. The warning sign, in her account, appears when the digital world begins to displace other parts of a child's life: family communication drops, activities the child once enjoyed are abandoned, they withdraw, sleep worse or show sudden changes in behaviour. She also finds it worrying when a child's way of talking becomes increasingly conditioned by what they consume online, or when they start defining themselves through diagnostic labels and reading nearly every emotion through them.

Sierra offers reassurance on one point: a child looking for answers outside the home does not mean the parents have stopped being a reference. Their role has changed. They can no longer control all the information their children receive, nor be their sole authority, but they can remain the safe place a child returns to in order to think it through.

Her practical advice is to listen without interrogating or moralising, and to resist making the first reaction to a troubling video the removal of the phone. At times, she adds, it is perfectly valid to admit there is no answer and suggest looking for one together.

Torres, for her part, thinks the debate should not be framed as a question of TikTok or no TikTok. The real question, she argues, is what place these networks end up occupying in young people's lives.

Anyone affected by the issues in this article can contact Samaritans free on 116 123 or at samaritans.org.

Families who want to know more can read about who can claim, how a social media harm claim works, the court cases we report, the case against the platforms, the latest developments, checking whether you are eligible to claim, guidance for young people and the full case files.