Stop panicking over teens and social media

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I recently saw a poster in my local café that made me want to throw my coffee at the wall. From a grassroots parenting organization that seeks to keep smartphones out of the hands of anyone under 14, it argued against allowing “our children to access something all the evidence tells us is damaging." I have been researching mental health for years, and this statement is just not true.

Promoting this falsehood terrifies parents and leads to drastic solutions that won’t work, such as Australia’s new social media ban for those under 16. Hundreds of researchers around the world, many of them concerned parents themselves, are working to understand the impact that social media is having on young people. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, validated what so many parents fear with his popular recent book, “The Anxious Generation," which largely blames smartphones—and the attendant decline in unsupervised in-person play—for the rise in adolescent anxiety and depression.

Yet many other academics argue that the studies and results that Haidt presents are not strong enough to support his conclusions, that there are other possible explanations for the rise in depression and anxiety among teens. In fact, most researchers in this area have reached a counterintuitive consensus: the relationship between social-media use and young people’s mental health is weak, on average, and sometimes nonexistent. This reality has struggled to penetrate the conventional wisdom because it flies in the face of what feels obviously true.