Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers has put a hard data counterweight in front of the campaign to kick teenagers off social media. In a new TED talk, Odgers argues that bans aimed at minors would not solve youth mental health problems and could cut teenagers off from places where they find friends, culture and help.
Odgers, who studies adolescent mental health, does not argue that platforms are fine. Her point is narrower and more annoying for the ban crowd: the evidence she cites does not show social media as the main driver of teen distress, and removing teenagers from online communities may make the job of helping them harder.
In the talk, Odgers says several indicators often used to judge teenagers have improved over the past two decades. She says teen violence, alcohol use and teen pregnancy have fallen to historic lows, while high school graduation rates show the current cohort as the most educated generation so far. That does not erase the rise in anxiety and sadness among some young people, but it complicates the tidy story that phones broke adolescence.
Odgers points instead to adult distress as a major factor. She says youth suicide risk has risen since 2008, while adult suicide in the United States has been climbing sharply since 1999. She also cites a graph showing that drug-overdose deaths among parents more than doubled between 2011 and 2021. Her blunt conclusion in the talk: adults were struggling, and parents were dying.
The mechanism matters. According to Odgers, caregiver mental health is one of the strongest predictors of child mental health. If parents and other adults are in crisis, blaming teen screen use is a convenient policy shortcut, not an explanation with much load-bearing capacity.
Odgers also says the gender data does not support a clean causal story. She says the evidence shows no significant impact for young boys. For young girls, she says the relationship runs in the other direction: girls already dealing with mental health problems and lacking support tend to spend more time online.
That distinction is the part lawmakers and pundits tend to flatten. A correlation between distress and internet use does not tell you which caused which. If vulnerable teens use online spaces to find community or escape offline harm, a ban removes a coping route while leaving the original problem in place. Great job, adults, the firewall is made of vibes.
Odgers says teenagers have already lost many public places where they can gather. In the United States, she notes, firearms are the leading killer of children. Her argument is that adults have made both offline and online spaces unsafe, then propose excluding teenagers from the online ones as a fix.
In a Bluesky post sharing the talk, Odgers wrote that “scary stories about teens sell” but that decades of data tell a different story. “This isn’t an anxious generation,” she wrote. “It’s a resilient one.”
Odgers says the better answer is not platform boosterism. She calls for real supports for children and suggests taxing some technology companies to help fund them. That is a policy fight worth having. Age gates that shove teens into less regulated corners of the internet are a much lazier patch.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
