Teen Mental Health Is Not Primarily a Social Media Crisis

Candice Odgers rejects the dominant adult story about teenagers: that smartphones and social media have destroyed them. A developmental psychologist, Odgers says she has spent 25 years analyzing trends in teen mental health. Since 2008, she has worked with thousands of 10- to 14-year-olds, using daily phone-based information about mood, time use, companionship, school records, sleep, steps, online activity, and direct reports from young people about what upsets them and what they need.

The claim is not that teenagers are doing uniformly well. It is that the common causal story is too simple and often pointed at the wrong target. Repeated claims that teenagers are “lost,” “worse off than ever,” or damaged by phones and social media have created, in her account, a “massive gap” between what adults are told and what the evidence shows.

The gap matters because fear is easy to sell to parents. Parents are already hypervigilant: first when children are infants, then again as puberty brings rapid change and a weakening sense of adult control. In that anxious context, repetition becomes persuasion. “The more often you hear something, the more likely you are to believe that it's true,” she says.

The data she highlights is more mixed, and in some areas far more positive. Among American teens — the focus of her remarks because many of the most prominent warnings are about the United States — rates of teen violence, alcohol use, and pregnancy have fallen to historic lows. She describes the current cohort as “the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation,” as well as young people who are inventors, activists, leaders, singers, and Olympians.

At the same time, teenagers are reporting more sadness and more worry about the world they are entering. Safety at school, climate change, racism, and the future are among the concerns young people raise. In Odgers’s own studies, the most frequently reported day-to-day stressors are conflict at home and pressure to do well at school; those same stressors also predict their mental health from day to day.

Teen mental health sits inside a wider adult mental health crisis. Candice Odgers makes the link explicit: caregiver mental health is “the most important predictor of teen mental health by far.” If adults are worried about teenagers, she says, they need to invest “in real and meaningful ways” in the adults around them, because many of those adults “are simply not okay.”

That framing changes how she interprets the period since 2008, when youth suicide risk has risen. Adult suicide in the United States, she says, has also been increasing dramatically since 1999. She then points to parental overdose deaths as another major change in the same period that is often reduced to the arrival of smartphones and social media.

The displayed chart, attributed on screen to the National Vital Statistics System and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, tracks children in the United States who lost a parent to drug overdose, measured per 100,000 children, from 2011 to 2021. Odgers reads the line as showing that the rate “more than doubled” over that decade.

When people ask what else changed during the same period besides social media, her answer is blunt: “Adults were in distress and parents were dying.”

That does not make technology irrelevant. It means, in her view, that a credible account of teen distress cannot stop at teen screen use while ignoring what was happening to the adults and households around them.

In Odgers’s longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health. Candice Odgers says many other researchers find the same, concluding that social media is “one of the least influential factors in predicting teen mental health.”

The account distinguishes between groups and directions of effect. For most adolescents, including boys, she says there is no association. For girls, the pattern her studies find is that girls who are depressed later use social media more — not that social media meaningfully predicts later mental health problems.

That distinction is central to her critique of bans. Adults are quickly converging on bans for social media use by under-16s as a simple solution to the youth mental health crisis. But Odgers says there is “not one single study to date” that has tested whether shutting off social media improves young people’s mental health. In studies that do this among adults, she says the average impacts are “close to or indistinguishable from zero.” She also says a National Academies of Sciences expert panel reached a similar conclusion about the weak evidence for social media as a major driver of teen mental health problems.

Odgers anticipates the objection that this sounds like a defense of platforms. She rejects that reading. She is not claiming there are no harms online, and she is not saying Big Tech does not require “massive overhaul.” Her position is that both claims can be true: the online world needs to be cleaned up for everyone, especially children, and social media is still not the major driver of mental health problems for most adolescents.

Her criticism of bans is partly practical and partly moral. Instead of cleaning up online spaces and prosecuting people who cause online harm, she argues, adults are punishing young people by removing them from spaces where they gather with friends, participate in youth culture, and sometimes escape offline harm. Teens, she says, have already been pushed out of many public spaces. In the United States, she adds, firearms are the number one killer of children. Against that backdrop, she objects to taking away virtual gathering places because adults “broke that too.”

A social media ban may feel good to adults, but teenagers tell Candice Odgers it will not work, and she believes them. Her concern is that bans would push teens into less safe and less regulated spaces. They would also distract from the investments she thinks are more likely to help.

The first investment is in adults around children. Odgers says the ratio of counselors to students in U.S. middle schools is one to 500. Spending millions of dollars on Yondr pouches to lock up phones, she argues, will not solve that problem. She wants that money directed toward hiring teachers and counselors and paying them well. “Building a healthy human requires investment in children and the adults around them,” she says.

The second investment is in safe, welcoming spaces for all teenagers. Odgers cites her colleague Stephen Schueller’s work designing digital mental health services for rural communities and opening youth drop-in centers across California. Since young people are more likely to go online when they are anxious or depressed, the response should be to meet them there with services and support, rather than focus only on removing access.

Adults should also stop believing every frightening story about young people. Odgers calls shaming young people a favorite adult pastime, but says this generation is neither lost nor destroyed. Teenagers are resilient, in her view, because they are succeeding despite the suffering of adults around them. The formula she endorses is familiar rather than technological: set high expectations and support young people in meeting them. That combination has long worked in teaching, coaching, and parenting, and technology has not changed it.

Big Tech, she says, “does not get a pass.” The burden cannot fall only on parents and teachers. Odgers calls for more regulation, but argues that bans let companies off the hook. Instead, she proposes funding teachers, building communities and spaces for children and teens to play and learn, delivering effective digital mental health services and digital literacy programs when and where young people need them, and paying for it with “a big old tax on tech.”