There is a book sitting near a summit the New York Times The best thing is wrong with children today. Anxiety generation (2024)and By psychologist Jonathan Hydet, he argues that increasing the time he spends on smartphones and social media, at the expense of playing, is to re -connect the brains of children and adolescents and lead the high rates of mental illness. I jumped to the top of the best -selling books when it was released a year ago and sat there since then.
The book has strengthened a sharp concern among many Western parents about the time their children spend on smartphones and other screens. In the 2024 poll, nearly half of the teenagers of us said they were almost constantly on the Internet, compared to 24 % a decade ago (see “online constantly”), and a third social media sites like YouTube almost all the time. Psychologist Sarah Queen of Brigham Young University in Prou, Utah, says that parents are concerned about this technology because it is “new, it is different, and it is not the way it grew up.”
Although researchers agree that adolescents are struggling with mental health, there are fierce discussions about the amount of phones and social media. Some scientists say that the abundant research has been conducted so far does not show a major impact on these techniques on adolescent mental health. “Science so far does not support the wide panic around social media and mental health,” says Kandis Audigers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvin, who criticized Heda’s conclusions.
Source: Pew Research Center
Scientists admit that smartphones and social media can be harmful to some people, if the screen time replaces health activities, such as sleeping, or if the publications encourage them to harm the self, for example. But these tools can also help people communicate with support, advice, education and friends. Queen says the effect “depends on the individual himself, his history, physiology, content and context.”
Many researchers are concerned that parents and children hear the anxious message published by the wonderful Haydet book and the main media, instead of the most accurate that other scientists proposed. Meanwhile, some authorities move to ban phones from schools or restrict adolescents’ access to social media. “Parents and children are fully aware of the narration and great anxiety,” says Megan Moreno, a teenage medical doctor at Wisconsin-Madison University. Spark raises family battles on the screens – and leaves parents not sure what to do.
Anxious trends
Nobody denies that the mental health of adolescents is a great concern. Research indicates that over the past two decades, the rates of mental illness in adolescents have increased in many countries1 (See “Powder of Sadness”). For example, American teenage polls found that symptoms of reporting depression increased from 16 % in 2010 to 21 % in 2015 – most of them due to girls ’increases – and that suicide rates rose from 5.4 to 7 per 100,000 in the period2. Researchers suspect that some of these trends can decline to increased awareness and report mental health concerns-but they also searched for other reasons.
Source: United States Centers to control diseases and prevent them
Hydet, who works at the University of New York University, notes in his book that the rise in mental illness coincides with the wide adoption by teenagers from smartphones (iPhone was launched in 2007) and argues that this comes out of the real social communication of the world, play and sleep. Then he depends on many studies on different types to build an argument that “restoring the great weapons of childhood … is the biggest cause of the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that started in early 2010.” Hydet particularly indicates that the use of heavy social media by girls before adolescence is linked to depression and anxiety. “The more anxiety and depression, you always find that the effects are larger,” he said. nature.
But other researchers criticized some of his views. Odgers post one of the most biting criticism in reviewing the Heidt Book (He sees nature 62829-30; 2024). His argument wrote that digital techniques lead the epidemic of mental illness “not supported by science”, which indicates that Haydt may make a mistake between using technology and mental diseases of causation.
At the heart of the conflict, there is a large collection of complex research and is often conflicting by different researchers in different ways.
Many scientists have searched for relationships between screen scales or the use of social media and mental health in transverse studies-which collect data in one moment of time-or longitudinal studies, which follow people over time. Although some studies have found benefits, others have been damaged. A large weakness in such analyzes is that they often depend on reporting the participants at the time they spend the screens. This is usually inaccurate, because people cannot remember them or feel embarrassed to answer frankly. “We all agree that it is terrible.”
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To try to understand the conflicting literature, the researchers made dozens of reviews that analyze many studies together, again with various results. Many have found relatively weak connections and small effects of these mental health techniques. One analysis 20203 More than 80 reviews concluded that there was, on average, “negative but very small” between teenagers’ use of digital technology, social media in particular, and psychological well -being. Literature Review 20244 By the national academies of science, engineering and medicine, “the conclusion has not supported that social media has caused changes in the health of adolescents at the population level.”
It is also unclear in some studies, says Odgers and some other researchers, which comes first: whether social media causes depression, for example, or whether young people who suffer from depression are more likely to spend time on social media. “We may have an arrow indicating the wrong direction,” says Odgers.
Evidence was one of the experiences in which people divide smartphones or social media for somewhat talisman. One methodology review5 Among the mostly 23 random experiences, some evidence found that refraining from social media may have improved depression measures, says Ruth Blacktit, a health researcher at College University London led the review. But other studies did not find any effect.
From all these evidence, the researchers reached different conclusions. ODGERS and others are concerned that focusing on phones risk the behavior of scientists and policy makers from other important, but they are difficult for them, contributing to the problems of mental health of adolescents, such as poverty, inequality, violence, discrimination and isolation. “We have young people in a crisis, and part of it may be technology,” says Amy Urbin, who studies digital mental health at Cambridge University. “But we also have other areas that we really know, really affecting mental health that does not come close to the time they need.”
Haidt takes a different view. He says that the type of small effects that scientists have found is not unusual in public health studies based on crude measures, such as the self -reported screen time. It argues that the effects are often hidden when researchers collect and analyze various results-such as data from boys and girls, or the standards of general well-being with those who suffer from depression. He says the links are more clear in analyzes that focus on depression and anxiety. “So this is very frustrating, because the evidence of the damage is.”
Data contrasting
Many scientists say that the effects of smartphones and social media depend on the individual, their families and other circumstances, and what they do online. For example, a study conducted in 2021 found about 400 teenagers, that 28 % of the participants felt the worst after using social media platforms (most of them were from WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram), and 26 % felt improved and 45 % felt that they were neither better nor worse nor worse6.
Ine Beyens, Telecom Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, who led the study, says these results may help explain the reason you find some other studies, which look at the averages, on a little effect. “When you put all these effects together, of course, in the end, you have a very small effect,” she says.
Some researchers have noticed possible benefits for certain groups. CoYNE is looking for a number of actresses, an incomplete representative, including transgender and non -bilateral youth, and says: “They use their phones in truly effective ways, often, to find belonging and society.”7.
On the contrary, a small percentage of young people use their smartphones or social media in problematic ways, as researchers and doctors say, and there is a discussion on how to determine and diagnose what constitutes pathological use. “Nothing does for eight or nine hours a day – except for sleep – should be seen as a healthy activity,” says Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and researcher at the Children’s Research Institute in Seattle in Washington.
Governments prohibit children from social media: Will it protect them from harm?
For some, the use of social media can lead to devastating consequences. In September 2022, for example, the investigation judge in London found that 14 -year -old Molly Russell “died of self -harm as he suffers from depression and negative effects of online content.” I heard the investigation that Russell had seen content on self -harm and suicide on Instagram and Pinterest before taking her private life in November 2017.
During the investigation, the Meta representative, who owns Instagram, defended the platform policies, and the Pinterest representative admitted that the site was not safe when Russell used it. In response to the results of the investigation, both companies referred to the ways their sites are good. Last year, Instagram launched “Teen”, which restricts the content that young users can display.
Queen says that such cases are horrific and tragic. But jumping from anecdotal cases to assuming that social media is a terrible danger for all teenagers a problem, as she and other scientists say. “This is a real fear,” Queen says, but “the probability of this is really small.”