The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens

Smartphones and social media are melting our children’s brains and making them depressed, or so goes the story we are being told. The headlines are constant; it’s enough to make any parent want to shut off every smart device in their home. Fortunately for my kids, who enjoy a good “cat attacks dog” video on TikTok, I go to work each day and see what adolescents are really up to on their devices. And it turns out that the story behind teen social-media use is much different from what most adults think.

I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

This is why other researchers and I are not buying the stories being told about adolescents and social media. The most recent wave of fear was unleashed by Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, an excerpt of which appeared in this magazine. Haidt claims that a “phone-based childhood” in the 2010s rewired our children’s brains and caused an epidemic of mental illness, especially among young girls; he’s written about this theme for years.    

Of course, Haidt is not alone in asserting that these apps cause such problems. Social media has been compared to heroin use in terms of its impact and has been blamed for things such as declining test scores and young people having less sex.

These stories possess an intuitive appeal—social media is relatively new and makes for an easy scapegoat. But adolescence has always been a time of concern: It is the peak age for the onset of a number of serious mental disorders, and there are many alarming statistics about adolescents’ mental health right now. Caregivers are frightened, and people are just trying to do the right thing for young people. No one wants their children exploited online, or to be fed misinformation or sexually explicit and violent content. Pointing a finger squarely at smartphones and social media offers people common and unlikable enemies. But we simply do not know that these are the right targets.  

The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents—including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time—suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.

Shockingly few experimental studies have specifically tried to test whether reducing social-media use improves mental health. In contrast with the correlational studies above, experimental studies randomize people’s social-media exposure. If done well, they can directly address cause-and-effect questions. I get excited every time one of these studies comes out, hoping I’ll learn something new about social media’s potential impact. But I have also learned to ask a few basic questions of this research before I start to draw conclusions. They’re worth keeping in mind whenever you see a story reporting on these findings:

1. Does the study include young adolescents? Most of these studies do not. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University recently analyzed 27 experimental studies on the effects of social media on mental health conducted since 2013; surprisingly, this was all of the experimental work that could be identified to date. The majority were conducted with adults or college students; only two had participants with an average age of 18, and one small study included adolescents with an average age of 16. None included girls ages 10 to 14—a group that has been at the center of recent debates on this topic. If we are going to make causal claims about social media’s effect on adolescent girls’ mental health, then we need well-designed experimental studies that actually include them.
2. Does the study focus on the social-media platforms that young people use today? If not, can we assume that the study’s findings are relevant to the spaces where adolescents spend their time? These studies have tended to observe college students or middle-aged volunteers, many of whom were asked to give up Facebook specifically, and then asked how they felt a few weeks later. (These days, teenagers tend to be on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.)
3. What is the outcome that was measured? The conversation right now is about serious mental-health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, as well as suicide. Most studies do not come close to using clinically meaningful measures of these outcomes.

A major problem is that participants are not blind to their condition, and are responding against a backdrop of messaging that social media is bad for them and that taking a break is good. Surprisingly, even given these issues, Ferguson reports that the evidence for causal effects across these experimental studies was statistically no different from zero. In other words, even this research, which was arguably primed to find a maximal link between social media and poor effects on mental health, does not reliably do so.

[Listen: The problem with comparing social media to Big Tobacco]

These results do not negate the very real fears that people—including the young people that we study—have about social media, nor do they negate the reality that many young people struggle with mental-health problems. Taking a safety-first approach to kids and social media is perfectly reasonable. I certainly believe that Big Tech companies can and should be doing a lot more to design platforms with the needs and best interests of adolescents in mind; I co-authored a report last year saying as much. The surgeon general’s office has also weighed in along these lines. Last May, it released an advisory, “Social Media and Youth Mental Health,” acknowledging that more research is needed in this area, but because “we cannot conclude social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” we should mitigate risks by requiring tech companies to emphasize health and safety, supporting digital literacy, developing Family Media Plans, and prioritizing research on social media’s potential impact. These are reasonable interventions designed to help people without causing undue alarm.

But the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.

Offline risk—at the community, family, and child levels—continues to be the best predictor of whether children are exposed to negative content and experiences online. Children growing up in families with the fewest resources offline are also less likely to be actively supported by adults as they learn to navigate the online world. If we react to these problems based on fear alone, rather than considering what adolescents actually need, we may only widen this opportunity gap.    

We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.

All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.