A 14-year-old quit Instagram for a month and discovered something surprising

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Parker, Colo.: The night before Addisyn Mace started the detox, she tucked herself into a bedroom nook and allowed herself one last binge. She was 14,...

Addisyn and Laura Burke watch as Scarlett deletes social media apps from her phone.

Parker, Colo.: The night before Addisyn Mace started the detox, she tucked herself into a bedroom nook and allowed herself one last binge. She was 14, a month into her freshman year of high school, the kind of kid who went to church every Sunday and never failed a test, but she wasn’t thinking about God or school as she unlocked her phone.

She opened Instagram. Online, a woman curled her hair. Boys yelled. Boys played basketball. A dachshund ate a cucumber. A man in a car ate takeout. A woman in a car shared her opinions.

Addisyn lingered on each video for three seconds or less. She thumbed past a makeup tutorial and a trailer for the movie version of her favorite book. She ignored the sweet calico begging at her feet as she zipped by one cat video then another. In the kitchen, her great-grandmother was baking cinnamon rolls, and, online, Addisyn watched a stranger create the same treat.

She had begged for the right to watch these clips. She had asked when she was 12, then again for her 13th birthday, to download Instagram so she could see what other girls saw as they stared at their phones during hangouts. Addisyn’s mother, Shera, had used social media for nearly two decades, but she’d grown increasingly skeptical of the apps’ influence. She made Addisyn wait until she turned 14 to join.

Addisyn knew why her mother thought social media was bad for her. Every school lecture on bullying warned kids to stay off Snapchat. And just a few weeks earlier, Addisyn had read that Meta agreed to pay Colorado and other states and territories $18 billion after a coalition of attorneys general sued the social networking company for damage they said Instagram and Facebook have done to young people.

Addisyn had been on for just five months, but already she could feel that Instagram had reshaped her days and, most likely, her brain. She used to come home from school and read or practice guitar.

Shera was…

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