A recent meta-analysis published in this journal included 27 studies that experimentally manipulated social media use and investigated their impact on mental health outcomes (Ferguson, 2024). The author concluded that social media effects were not statistically different from zero. However, this meta-analysis did not investigate potential moderating effects of length of social media reduction or abstinence interventions. We conducted a reanalysis to investigate the impact of social media reduction/abstinence intervention length on mental health outcomes. We used the information available on the Open Science Framework platform related to the original meta-analysis and excluded seven studies because they were not reduction/abstinence interventions. We categorized studies into those with intervention lengths of <1 versus 1 week or longer and also tested for curvilinear relationships between intervention length (weeks and days as continuous variables) and outcomes by including quadratic terms. Stratified analyses indicated that interventions of <1 week resulted in significantly worse mental health outcomes ( = -0.175), while interventions of 1 week or longer resulted in significant improvements ( = 0.156). Analyses of intervention length as continuous moderator included 19 studies and showed significant quadratic effects for number of weeks ( = .013) and number of days ( = .018). These findings suggest that social media use reduction/abstinence interventions should have a minimum length of 1 week or longer to confer mental health benefits. An ideal intervention length may be around 3 weeks, but future research is needed to confirm this.

Possible effects of parent phone use on parent-child interactions and child behavior are of concern, warranting research to understand parent phone use. In this survey study of 183 families with a young child (=2.89 years), we examined parents' phone use for texting/calling, social media use, mobile gaming, and perceptions of cutting into family time; we also examined differences between mothers and fathers and associations with parenting stress. Mothers engaged in greater social media use but less mobile gaming compared to fathers; 61% of mothers and 38% of fathers used social media 31+ minutes per day, while 23% of fathers and 16% of mothers played mobile games 31+ minutes. Mothers were also more likely to feel their social media use, but not mobile gaming, cut into family time. Greater parenting stress was associated with greater mobile gaming and perceptions of social media or mobile gaming as cutting into family time. As differences were found between mothers and fathers on phone activities, it may be beneficial to adapt interventions based on type of activity and parent gender. Moreover, as perceived interference from phone use in family interactions is more likely when parents are stressed, we call for future research to consider the context/purpose of phone use and coping strategies.