From Instagram gurus to TikTok tips, turning to online communities is an understandable trend among parents of young children – with new research revealing a third (33%) now scrolling social media for support.

However, the vast majority (68%) are battling with conflicting advice that they struggle to trust, causing 7 in 10 (69%) to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information available. Contributing to this confusion are viral posts that push unverified ‘miracle’ fixes or hacks, with short-form videos from sources offering no evidence to back their claims often doing more harm than good.

As part of its Plan for Change, the government is driving national renewal by tackling inequality and unlocking opportunity across the country.

Following the rollout of 30 hours government-funded childcare last month, over half a million children are now benefitting from the expertise of this country’s early years professionals, and now, the new Best Start in Life campaign will build on this progress by bringing together trusted NHS and government-backed guidance to help parents with everything from feeding time and sleeping to speech and language, child development, and finding local childcare and family support.

This comes alongside investment to ensure every family can access in-person support too, as 65 previously unfunded local areas from Devon to Stockton-on-Tees have this week received their share of a £12 million development grant to begin building their Best Start Family Hub offer – ahead of rollout beginning next year.

Professor Stephen Scott, Professor Emeritus at King’s College London, part of the King’s Maudsley Partnership said:

“A new evidence review conducted and published by King’s College London, part of the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People, has found that analysis from shows that many parents are negatively impacted by the breadth of information available and the weak credibility of some sources can affect their confidence and even prevent them from making key parenting decisions.

“To help tackle the consequences of ‘information overwhelm’, it’s important for parents to have easily accessible, trusted resources to help cut through online noise and misinformation.”

As part of its Plan for Change commitment to get tens of thousands more children school ready each year, the government has vowed to join-up and roll out vital services.

That includes thousands of school-based nurseries, Best Start Family Hubs in every local area, free breakfast clubs in every school and backing for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme for another three years.

The £12 million Best Start Family Hubs development grant distributed this week builds on existing efforts to break down barriers, supporting areas to identify an appropriate site to reach disadvantaged families and prepare to deliver evidence-based programmes and support.

The grant comes on top of an over £500 million investment to create up to 1,000 hubs across the country, rolling out from April 2026.

Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said, “In between sleepless nights, potty training and weaning their children, it’s no wonder so many knackered parents feel they need to turn to unverified social media posts for advice about their child’s health and development.

“But it’s vital they get reliable information – and that’s why this Best Start in Life campaign is so important, and the health benefits are so clear. When parents get the right advice on things like nutrition, sleep and development, children arrive at school ready to learn, with stronger immune systems and better mental health that can last a lifetime.”

Hazards of Online Advice for Parents of Young Children: A Scoping Review is available to read here.

A copy of the attitudinal survey of parents and expectant parents, commissioned by the Department of Health & Social Care and Department for Education, can be found here.

This press release can also be found on KCL website.

The “Teens, Screens & Social Media” webinar, held on Thursday 18 September, brought together clinicians, researchers and educators to critically examine both the opportunities and challenges posed by digital technologies in the lives of children and young people.  

In November 2024, the Australian Government passed a new law which introduces a mandatory minimum age of 16 for accounts on certain social media platforms. These regulations will come into place by December 2025 and will ensure platforms take reasonable steps to verify users’ ages. 

During the webinar, experts from the UK and Australia discussed this timely and globally relevant topic through a series of talks and panel discussion which examined how social media use intersects with mental health and wellbeing.  

Professor Philip Shaw, Director of the King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children and Young People and Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London opened the webinar.

Learning from Australia: digital technology and mental health 

Dr Danielle Einstein, Clinical Psychologist and Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, discussed the relationship between social media use and the mental health of children and young people. She highlighted the growing concern around the psychological impact of online engagement, noting in one study that 58 per cent of students reported their self-esteem is influenced by the number of likes, comments and shares they receive.

Dr Einstein emphasised that the instant reassurance provided by social media may be undermining young people’s ability to tolerate uncertainty and develop healthy coping mechanisms. She concluded by stressing the importance of “device discipline”, encouraging families, schools and social media companies to reflect on how addictive design features and constant connectivity can decrease resilience.

More information can be read in Dr Einstein’s substack https://theeinsteinreport.substack.com/. 

Are smartphones addictive?  

Dr Nicola Kalk, Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the IoPPN and Consultant Addiction Psychiatrist at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, discussed problematic smartphone use is not simply about screentime. Drawing on previous research from over 40,000 young people, primarily in Southeast Asia, 23 per cent reported smartphone use patterns consistent with behavioural addiction, which were associated with stress, anxiety, depression and poor sleep.

Building on this, Dr Kalk shared findings from more recent UK-based research, which found problematic smartphone use is not culturally bound. She highlighted a study in the United States, involving over 4,000 students, which identified persistent and increasing patterns of addictive smartphone use—both of which were associated with suicidal ideation and behaviour.

She ended with a thought-provoking question “is it the phone itself that’s addictive, or the content it delivers?”.

Panel discussion 

The webinar concluded with a panel discussion chaired by Professor Ben Carter, Professor of Medical Statistics at the IoPPN.

The panel featured experts from London and Sydney, including Dr Nicola Kalk, Dr Danielle Einstein, Professor Rina Dutta (Professor in Psychiatry and Academic Capacity Development at King’s College London and Consultant Psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) and Professor Nick Titov AM (Macquarie University, Australia and Executive Director of MindSpot).

Watch below:

The webinar coincided closely with today’s Youth Mental Health Day, which is celebrated annually on 19 September. The awareness day was founded by UK charity stem4 to improve young people’s mental wellbeing.

It was an opportunity to engage with key themes that will be explored in greater depth at a future conference at King’s College London on Thursday 26 February 2026, encouraging dialogue and collaboration across disciplines.

For more information, please contact Anisa Haque (School of Mental Health & Psychological Sciences Communications Assistant).

This blog is also available to read on the IoPPN website.

Digital inclusion 

We welcome the recognition that increasing the use of digital solutions relies both on the digital inclusion of service users and digital upskilling for staff. It is important to acknowledge that the ‘digital divide’ for service users is not only caused by unequal access to digital devices, but also factors like gender and ethnicity. This complex picture of intersecting inequalities needs to be addressed when creating and implementing integrated, equitable digital services.  

The roles and risks of AI 

We are highly interested in the use of AI-assisted diagnostics, which the plan suggests could offer 24/7 virtual support for people with mild to moderate mental health needs, and remote monitoring for those with more severe conditions to enable faster crisis response.  However, a word of caution here. It is not entirely clear how the benefits of AI-enabled diagnostics – which have shown success in areas like dermatology – will translate into mental healthcare.   The Plan mentions using digital tools like online therapies and real-time digital suicide surveillance as ways to reduce suicide rates. Unsupervised AI-assisted mental health therapies are associated with a number of dangers, from failure to recognise suicidal forms of thinking to actively encouraging dangerous behaviours. Even if AI is not involved, the crisis management of acute mental health symptoms, including suicidality, is a complex clinical issue. In some cases remote tools like suicide helplines can be useful, e.g., suicide helplines, but they must be backed by robust systems that ensure people at high risk of harm are identified and referred to appropriate support. Additionally, the evidence base for suicide helplines indicates further work is required to understand what types of crisis management work, when, and for whom.  

Areas of caution 

A few areas where we would have liked to see more focus in the plan are: 

• Signposting to well curated resources. While the launch of ‘a new AI-powered digital tool to provide more personalised health advice’ sounds promising, service users deserve expert-written, evidence-based resources. We have signposted mental health resources to families waiting to be seen by CAMHS through the ‘Virtual Waiting Room’ on myHealthE. AI-driven technology may be able to collate useful information for service users, but this does not replace effective curation of, and signposting to, resources designed by experts. Service users also deserve the opportunity to discuss this health information with clinicians to interpret what it means for them. In the age of widespread access to unmoderated information about mental health, especially through social media, access to health information which is evidence-based, accessible, and culturally-sensitive is essential.  
• Using outcome measures to personalise treatment. The focus on collecting outcome measures in the Plan was primarily about making this data public to allow patients to decide which services they want to receive care from. However, the primary purpose of these outcome measures in mental healthcare is to support individual clinical care: they give service users and clinicians more data to use when making clinical decisions. Without proper context and management, the Government proposing to use data in this unintended way risks it being misinterpreted; think of Goodhart’s law: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. We need to consider the best way of providing patients and clinicians with the data they need in a way that values their choice and decision-making while not introducing these risks.
• Children’s mental health needs. We welcome the level of focus given to children’s mental health within the Plan. However, there was little mention of how the mental health needs of children and young people differ from that of adults, and how this should be reflected in differences in service models and patient care.
• Supporting caregivers. Parents and caregivers are key participants in their child’s journey through CAMHS. There was not enough acknowledgement of caregivers’ role in children’s mental healthcare. 

Overall, the plan’s focus on improving, streamlining, and expanding forms of digital and remote data collection, and using this health intelligence to improve services, is encouraging.  As researchers and clinicians with a strong interest in digital health, we’re excited by the potential of sophisticated data monitoring systems. However, we also recognise that for these tools to be effective, they must be simple, robust, and user-led. Technology should simplify service delivery, not complicate it.  At the same time, digital innovation cannot be a substitute for addressing long-standing challenges in mental healthcare. Reducing treatment wait times and delivering long-promised service improvements—such as integrated care and expanded community-based services—remain critical. While the plan highlights a shift toward integrated community care, what this means in practice for mental health services is still unclear. Building effective partnerships across diverse clinical structures and communities with varying needs will require meaningful input from clinicians, families, and service users, alongside better data.   Improvements in data collection can translate into improved outcomes for young people and their families – but not always. We hope to be able to contribute what we have learned about the barriers and facilitators affecting the translation of health informatics into patient outcomes to the implementation of this plan: ultimately improving mental health for children, young people, and their families.  

For more information please email us at camhsdlab@kcl.ac.uk.

This blog is also posted on the CAMHS Digital Lab website. 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Shuo Zhang and Jessica Penhallow for their support in preparing these blogs.