Social media depressed him. Lifeguarding saved him.

If you’re part of Piha Surf Lifesaving Club on Auckland’s West Coast, you probably know Illinois Cooney. The 17-year-old is involved in everything.

He turned up to almost every volunteer patrol day last summer.

On Sunday mornings, he helps run Junior Surf, the programme for kids commonly known as nippers.

As soon as he turned 16, he got his inflatable rescue boat (IRB) license.

He is organising the club’s pre-season party.

The other week, he confidently critiqued my CPR at the club’s yearly pre-season exam for returning lifeguards.

Illinois is chipper-as, always ready to help, and has every indication of being a natural leader.

But he wasn’t always this way. Three years ago, he was just another New Zealand kid with problematic social media and phone use, spending eight hours-plus a day online, watching YouTube and gaming. He was shy, introverted, and unmotivated, he says.

“I was just feeling sad... I was just feeling down in the dumps.”

Illinois' time online spiraled when he was 11 years old in 2020, and New Zealand went into its first Covid lockdown. Schools closed. Learning went online. Friends were isolated. Many parents had to continue working, so supervision was lax. Screens and the internet were an easy grab that, at the time, seemed harmless and helpful.

“There was lots of time in the bedroom. Lots of just sitting on his screens, on his computer,” says Illinois' mum, Mandy Goldie.

“Not much motivation to go out and really do anything ... we were worried for a little while about him.”

I chatted to Goldie on the club’s deck on a recent Sunday. In the distance, we could overhear Illinois wrangling the junior surf kids using a megaphone.

“We have tried to be as tight as we can on the screens, like we're not just a ‘Let our kids run loose on the screens' type of family, but even that's such a struggle.

“And during Covid, when you're trying to work and you're trying to do stuff, they just sneak off into their rooms and then one hour or two hours later, you're like, where the hell are they? And they're in there, on their screens.”

Illinois’ pathway into problematic screen and social media use isn’t remarkable. One overseas study suggests that screen time for young people increased 52 percent during Covid. However, emerging evidence indicates that this increase is the new normal despite being years removed from Covid restrictions, says University of Auckland’s Dr Samantha Marsh, who studies social media use. She is the academic advisor to B416, a digital harm prevention organisation advocating for government-mandated social media restrictions for under-16-year-olds.

While social media can have some benefits, there is growing evidence of its contribution to skyrocketing levels of depression and anxiety in young people. While much of the data connecting poor mental health comes from overseas, Marsh believes it is applicable here.

She recently conducted a survey of 500 New Zealand parents with kids aged 10 to 17. About 20 percent of children met the criteria for problematic social media use. Marsh defines problematic use as something that negatively impacts someone’s wellbeing, rather than hours-a-day spent online (social media addiction is not a formal diagnosis).

Those impacts might be "changes in your mood, that over time you get a tolerance to social media so you need more and more of it, when you withdraw from it you experience negative emotions and there’s lots of family conflict and things like that," says Marsh.

Driven by new research on the harms, there is a bubbling movement amongst parents to withhold smartphones and social media from young children. But what if your child is older and already has their own smartphone and social media accounts?

“It's so much easier to delay rather than take it back..." says Holly Brooker, an online safety advocate behind the Hold the Phone campaign.

Illinois did half a year of nippers in 2019 but dropped out over Covid. His parents forced him to return to it at the end of 2022. After a year, he passed his lifeguarding exam in April 2023.

Part of patrolling, I like to say, is using real-life toys. The walkie-talkies are real. The boats, jet skis, and all-terrain vehicles are real. The Westpac rescue helicopters are real. The stakes are also very real. And that’s what flicked a switch for Illinois when he did his first volunteer patrol as a lifeguard in October 2023.​

“People's lives are on the line. If I'm unfit, it's not a good outcome for them, is it?”

​The more lifeguarding Illinois did, the less time he spent on his phone and online. He met friends through the club and surf competitions who are equally into real-life experiences. He looked up to the older lifeguards.

​Last Sunday, I went out in the IRB with Illinois driving. The swell was one to two metres and breaking heavily on the outer bank. The waves doubled up, forming walls of whitewater at 15-second intervals. It’s no place for a fragile smartphone or a quick check of your DMs.

​Getting kids outdoors and in nature - known as greentime - can reduce anxiety that might come immediately after quitting or reducing social media use, says Marsh. Parents and teenagers looking to limit social media and phone time - or remove it entirely - should also plan in advance what will fill that time vacuum, she added.

​“Smartphones were giving something to our kids. They were entertaining them, they were giving them all the social connection, not good social connection, more social networking than relationships, but still, you need to give stuff back into the child's life.”

​Helping a teen quit social media is a whole-family mission with parents leading by example, says Tony Laulu, a social media harm educator.

​“It’s a huge adjustment as a family unit to be able to really curb that stuff because it has to start from the top.”

​Parents also need to set the rules - time limits, no screens in bedrooms, etc - and enforce them because it is rare that young people will be able to do that on their own, says Laulu.

​Goldie, Illinois’ mum, suggested parents cycle through as many sports or activities as needed until a young person finds something that surpasses their interest in their phone.

​“Try fencing, try everything until you find something that they love to do.”

​Illinois still uses social media sometimes, but he has found a way to moderate himself.

​“You've just got to balance it out with other things.”